the consultant part 6

chapter 6 tipping

8:20, monday morning, I'm on the balcony having a rollie with one of the other guys before we go in to work, as I imagine sysyphus might have done before he started every day on his rock and that hill. looking out over the car park we see a ferrari pull in, brand spanking new, cherry red with the vents down the side. I'm not into cars but I have to admit this one is a beauty.

jon says

-tipping’s new car
-what? you’re joking
-no, he got it at the weekend. he was going on about it last night at the pub. look, he parks it right in the corner, near the intersection, so everyone can see it. tosser!
-fuck me. so now we know who’s earning in here, eh?
-too right. it’s not me!
-look at the board – not me either

this job is, officially, The Worst Job I Have Ever Had - and I’ve had some bad, tough jobs. I’ve done factory work, doing quality control on the electrical boards of range rovers in a factory, sat for 10 hours a day staring at wires and listening to what dave from scunthorpe would love to do to janice from macclesfield down the line on windscreen wipers (janice - the designated factory totty); i've washed dishes in a miniscule hotel kitchen within slapping distance of the most cantankerous, mean hearted son of a bitch of a chef you’d ever dare to come across, for a shameful wage; even worked in mcdonald’s – that one brings the most shame, I have to say. but for just being a thoroughly soul-eating job, absolutely nothing beats this -

being
a
recruitment
consultant.

try worming your way into the good books of the big recruiters for panasonic, toshiba, sony, sega every day, through various, shameless, degrading ploys that they see right straight through every time, and see when they do see through you, which is every time, see if you don’t feel like some crusty-mouthed crack addict offering blow-jobs for a fiver in a wind-bitten alleyway. in february. a particularly cold february. try calling up green-eared kids who’ve just graduated to tell them that yes, koga san! I‘ve just found your CV on the web and that you’re perfect for this great job, and before I send it in can you tell me who you’ve been interviewing with? oh really? hitachi huh? then you hang up and call personnel at hitachi and smarm and charm in the hope that they’ll let you source candidates for the job – and poor koga san, well, I never had a job for you in the first place as I was only calling you to try to get leads, to see who was hiring. and I’ll never call you back again.

we evolved from protiens, came up from hot sulphur spumes deep in the oceans (I saw it on discovery), formed skeletons, swam about a bit, crawled out of the oceans onto the mud, got hairy and jumped up into the trees, jumped out of the trees and got less hairy, then began a process of human evolution so wondrous and breath-taking, that, well, it takes the breath away, and for what? so I could become a recruitment consultant, working 10 hours a day for Maseda San and his sidekick Barrow Boy Darren? and when I'm not out of the office, which is almost always, I sit in a little booth that faces a slab of wall, painted beige, naturally, in a grimy office on the 12th floor of the towering ssc building. and in tokyo too - vibrant, exciting, pulsating, out-of-my-reach tokyo. something went wrong, and I'm the proof. I‘m going backwards. devolving. un-evolving. am i the everyman? no, I am, perhaps, the no-man.

an aside - I was reading last week about cattle. cattle that are used exclusively to produce milk – milk cattle. these cows, you have this idea of these big bellied bovine wandering sleepfully about on rolling meadows, chomping the greenest grass below weeping williows and magnificent oaks, spending hours simply chewing the cud before farmer clangs his bell and they all come a-wandering back below a velvety dusk sky. well, you’re wrong. those poor heffers almost exclusively stay tethered up in a cage too small for them to ever turn around in, attatched to computerised teet squeezers that periodically drain them of milk - like android cows – flesh and blood and veins and nervous systems they have, but what else is it? it’s a milk machine, hooked up, plugged in, spewing out frothy white units of production.

so, you want to know what my spiritual animal is? it’s a fucking milk cow. not a leopard. not an eagle. not a dolphin. no, a fucking mechanically teet-squeezed milk cow. that’s me. squeeze my teat. hear me roar.

I'm meandering. it’s monday, it’s to be expected. I’ve been doing this job for a year now. and I suck at it, to use the american vernacular. to pull you in they fill you with tales of ferraris and porsches, of record monthly figures and quick promotions, and none of it ever comes true – all bollocks. unless you're a proper dick, it seems, as all the bosses are, well, proper rich, and proper dicks. they pay me a basic of y200,000 a month, which sounds ok, but when you consider my rent is y100,000 a month, and I have made only one deal in a year, it’s not easy. combine this with the horrendous price of a night out on a saturday (and maybe friday too), and it’s really not easy. but what am I going to do? I got sick to the back teeth with teaching english and my japanese isn’t fluent, I can’t read kanji so well and I don’t want to go back to the uk. the rest of asia is cheap, but it’s so cheap that you get paid cheap too. debts are hard to pay off. and tokyo’s hard to leave. so when I got offered this job I took it, I was grateful, hopeful – expectant even. but it isn’t working out too good at all. maybe I should stop going out? I should, it’s draining me, of lots of things, of money, time, - essentially, though, draining me of me – but what else is there? I have to leave my head once or twice or week, or I’d go mad.

back to tipping - darren tipping – or to give him his full title, darren fucking tipping – everyone agrees it’s impossible to say his name without the ‚fucking‘ inserted. oblivious to this, he says 'call me TipTop! evwyone calls me TipTop!‘ - but the only person I’ve ever heard refer to him by that name, is TipTop himself. (giving yourself your own nickname! atrocious behaviour). I tell you - if this job is my tragedy, then tipping is my conductor, my director of operations. he pulls the strings, constructs the cacophony, takes out the sharpened stakes and drives them into my palms with his 40lb sledgehammer. but to give him his proper title; my manager. 48 years old, schooled the old way in the london recruiting jungle of the 80s, headhunted for this job in tokyo. god only knows why, the guy's a relic. a dinasour. albeit one with a ferrari.

he bounces into the office every day like pepe le peu with a hard-on. he’s got a smile that makes you wonder if his mother didn’t take some (a lot of?) bad acid when she was pregnant with him, it bares his upper gums and flashes more teeth than surely the average human head should be able to hold, and forces a look into his eyes that suggests he’s either going to ejaculate or have a nervous breakdown - or both – who knows in which order. he wears these suits that he has hand made in materials that must have been chosen by someone’s blind grandmother - shiny petrol blue, black with glittery stripes, white with pink flecks. he has a haircut that is indescribable – but I‘ll try; balding at the front in a dracula v, tufted at the sides like an emperor penguin, longer at the back, bleached at the tips, splayed out a la roman helmet, circa. 145BC. wherever he gets it cut, they must be laughing still. I’d bet a month’s wage there’s no photo of that cut in the barber’s window… I’d also bet a monyh’s wage that his favourite band is level 32, followed closely by mister mister, and that he considers the finest film ever made to be escape to victory.

not that any of this is cause for mockery (I try to be a nice person, really I do, I mean, you know, what you wear should mean nothing, right? look, I'm balding, and I'm certainly no oil painting. my shirts (all three of them) are falling to pieces, my shoes are in a right state, and my suit is beyond hope). but, the fact is, he’s such an arse, I can’t help myself.

so I'm sat there, it’s 11am now, I’ve managed somehow to almost get beyond midday without a) doing any work whatsoever or b) talking to darren, which to me counts as a very successful morning, when suddenly I see him on the move towards my desk. he doesn’t walk though – he bounces up on the balls of his feet, doesn’t turn a corner insomuch as he kind of ballroom dances it, a little swivel of his skinny hips, a squeak from the loafers, a dip of the shoulder, and a nod of that pencil head that has his little nicotine-yellow tufts all a-flutter. he’s holding a resume in his hand, between forefinger and thumb, held out before him as though to have it nearer would result in contamination. his thin lips are turned down in a gesture of disgust, his finnicky little wire rim specs perched atop his beaky nose like old mother hubbard.

-oi, uni boy

he calls me this, despite the fact that he also went to uni. maybe he studied prickonomics. my teeth clench.

-what?
-whatthefackisthis?

cockney, fired out like bullets, small hard rabbit turds

-it’s a cv, I think
-I know it’s a fackin‘ cv, you fackin‘ cant! but look at it!
-what’s wrong with it darren?
-look, I asked ya to source me 2 top notch pwoject managers for my client, seeing as you had fack all to do, and what do ya send me?
-ah, two top notch pwoject managers?
-did u say 'pwoject‘?
-ah, no. why?
-don’t play the woide boy wi‘ me, uni boy, I'm the owiginal woide boy, you wemember that. look at the name on this one! can’t even pwonounce it! ha! mulabangabanaji? from mulabaloo land? on the wiver onion bajhi? you’re 'avin‘ a laff inchya?!
-darren. he’s called malhotra. edward. molhatra. he’s got everything you need, 5 year’s management experience, he’s worked all over the place, he’s got the lot. and look – would you believe it, he’s english.
-now look. 'ow many times I told ya? we ain’t the united fackin‘ nations are we? if we send this boy over to this client 'e’s gonna get chucked in the bin. I don’t make the wules, I just play by 'em. this client wants white meat, my son. english speaking white meat. simple as. I mean come on, if you 'ad a good english boy and a good bwown boy in fwont of you, who’d you pick? the good english boy innit?
-he IS english. you telling me that this client specifically, actually said that they want a white boy?
-well, not in so many words…
-in any words?
-look, it’s unsaid because it don’t need to be said innit!
-fuck. you know darren, a lesser man than myself might call you a bigoted racist. a lesser man than myself might just go to see maseda san and report you, and get you sacked.
-or weally? a lesser man than you eh? well you listen to me son. maseda wants an office that bwings in the coin. I wun this ship.
-won?
-wun.
-won?
-fackoffsan!

more rabbit turds

- I'm the manager. what I say goes… in any case, uni boy, it ain’t me. I told ya. I love all our bwuvvas, innit. this policy, let’s just call it a weflection of the market. wealpolitik, as kissinjah might say. now. get to work.

he eyes a pad on my desk.

-wassat?
-it’s from panaflex. I have to call back at 1. they’re interested in this guy I sent over
-panaflex eh?
-yeah
-how’d you get onto panaflex?
-it just came in, I called, sent a cv.
-well, I think this one’s a little too big for you, wookie. I’ll take it from here.
-wookie?
-wookie!
-darren, they’re expecting a call from me, they like my guy. I did all the leg work. it’s worth 2 grand. it just might be my second deal all year.
-like I said. you just wemember who wuns this ship. you have to put your time in. just fink, one day you could be like me. ha! now. get back to work.

and he’s off, tiptoeing and sashaying off back to his office. I'm left to imagine how his face might look after I’ve propelled him through the double plate glass windows...