In A world Gone Mad: Tuesday 28 April 2020

Tuesday: 28 April 2020

I was homeless and had 2 days to find somewhere to live.  Marty and I looked at some of the slum flats on The Island. I’ve never been suicidal, but they would have taken me there.

And then like a beacon of shining light, my salvation came in the form of a newspaper advert. I found my flat. It was way above my budget, which on that day was exactly zero. I’d been in the vicious circle of job first to pay for a home, or, home first to have somewhere to live while I found a job. The home came first.

My landlord was an absolute sweetheart and is my landlord today, though I’ve moved to a new house.  He loved me on sight. Here we go, the old gobby mare is going to come to the fore with her opinions. Barrow is split between a blue-collar town and a disgustingly filthy, hasn’t been washed in months, collar town of the down at heel. We have a high drug and alcohol problem and a high percentage of the property rentals are let to people with no self esteem or ambition.

Roy has thirty properties, some comprising townhouses made into flats, and not one of his properties has ever been occupied by a working person.  He shouts from the rooftops that we are his only tenants with a nice home and the only ones that have never once let him down with a rental payment. He was happy to take me on zero deposit and wait for my benefits to come through. I had no intention of signing on, and said I’d have a job in a week. To the day I began my job—it took two.

I loved my flat. It was advertised as three bedrooms, but I made it two-bed by turning the largest one into a dining room, office, music room and second sitting room –it was that big.  I say it again, I loved my flat, it was in a massive listed building, built in the 1800’s, slap bang in the centre of Barrow. I had all the top floor and it was enormous. I even loved the steep climb up to it of forty stairs. They were my best friends.

I went to Barrow after losing a good bit of weight and sitting at a nice size twelve to fourteen. Three years later and, sans stairs, I’m back to my default of sixteen on a good day and eighteen for the other three hundred and fifty.  Max is a feeder of the most heinous kind.

I had my dream flat: next was the job—but not any old job, I blagged my way into journalism, working for an independant multi-media company as their content writer.  I was so happy.  Best of all, after seven years, I had both of my sons and all my five –at the time, since grown to six—grandchildren around me.

I’m trying to get through the last three years with paraphrasing. I want to get to the point within the next couple of days where I’m not writing retrospectively.

The job was the business. My target was to write five articles a week and any current local news stories.  By the end of the first week I had thirty articles on the spike waiting to be approved by the manager and go to print.

The company was run by two managers, Ellie and Nat. We had three sales team members, an apprentice web designer and an IT bloke. Nat was a control freak; he wouldn’t let me get anything to print without him approving it—and the sales team were useless. By week two I’d run out of work and did the sales team’s job by ringing local companies to tout for articles. I sold them, wrote them and then my OCD went into overdrive as the articles that were bought, paid for and deadlined, sat on the spike unmoving. By week three there were over a hundred articles waiting for approval and people were ringing me to complain that they hadn’t had their stories.  I stayed for a year but the job I’d been hired for as a writer diminished and I took over head of sales, covered local news and only did the articles that I could get approved. I sold almost every advert for our print magazine and sold all the adverts and banners for several pantos, events and the Carnivals over three towns. That year, I sold thirty-two thousand pounds worth of advertising, banners, roadside advertising and stalls for one carnival alone. The closest person to me in sales sold eight thousand over the same time period. Elaine was weak, flighty and lazy. Nat was a twenty-five stone, two-year-old and when he threw a tantrum and stormed out—which happened twice a week, it was phenomenal.

I came up with a new scheme and way of doing things. It was a huge success. Working the old way, I’d ring every local company to sell them an advert for the carnival, then I’d ring them again to sell them a roadside banner, then again to advertise in a local concert or event. I was hounding them, and it was counterproductive.  I forced a meeting with the bosses –and the backer and proposed that we put every client on a contract.  They would set a budget be it twenty pounds a month, a hundred or ten thousand thousand—which I had one of. I suggested a credit system where one credit equalled fifty pounds. A banner was a hundred pounds, so that would take two of their credits to buy. They could plan their year’s spending and I’d book in what advertising they wanted. Or, I would then ring them once a month on a pre-arranged day if they preferred to book their following months credits that way.  It took off and made the company a fortune—but it slipped, banners weren’t designed, adverts weren’t designed, it was raining, and Nat refused to put the advertising trailers out in case he got cold. I was always fielding angry clients who hadn’t received what they’d paid for. I was on my basic ten pounds an hour with no commission.  I wanted more and left when I didn’t get it.

My next job was short lived. I secured another sales job selling domain names and lasted three weeks after reducing a potential client to tears. It was hard pressure selling on a three-hundred-pound basic wage and a massive fifty percent commission after five hundred. I work on building trust and must believe in the product I’m selling. There were only two ways to end a phone call—either by making a sale, or by them hanging up on me. On my final day before walking out almost in tears myself, I had a lady who made it clear that she wasn’t interested but was too polite to hang up on me. The boss was on a splitter listening in and telling me what to say.  After five minutes, I wanted to thank her for her time and end the call, but he wouldn’t let me. Forty-five minutes later I hung up after the lady burst into tears. That was the end of that.  But as a side note, When Andy, Max’s son moved in with us, I knew he’d be perfect for the job. He took my position and brings home over a thousand pounds most weeks.

I landed another good job and I went back to what I know. The same old care agency that I worked for, for fifteen years—but this time I went in on a challenge. They had recently expanded to open a new branch. They’d been too zealous and greedy in building the client base before getting quality staff in place and it was in trouble. The manager had quit, and I was taken on to run the business. I went into total bedlam.  I had 144 clients in one area and 82 covering another. It was an hour drive to my office in  every morning. My staff were the laziest, most complaining, uncaring bunch of reprobates I’ve ever seen. If I could have, I’d have sacked all but two of them and started again, but that wasn’t an option. I had over two hundred clients and some of them were on four calls a day. The weather is a wild and untamed beast but on the first snowflake cars refused to start. My carers were sicker than my clients. None of them had childcare for their ailing offspring. It was a nightmare. I relied heavily on agency staff who would sometimes be brought in an hour after the call was supposed to have been delivered—and on a premium rate.  It’s the same old story same old song. I didn’t have enough staff, to manage the needs of the clients. They were under paid and worked up to sixteen hours a day with no petrol allowance, pay peanuts and get monkeys. I had a shitload of monkeys. The complaints came thick and fast after call after call was missed or delivered late. I’d hire one person and six would quit. I was hiring, but it took so long to get them to the point of being able to go out alone that I couldn’t keep up with demand.  It’s why I left a good Job in one of the countries largest care agancies. Why I left a good job managing a care home, and why I left this job.  I’ve been giving thanks every day since the Covid Crisis began that I’m not in that horrendous job. I can only imagine how fast the clients are dropping and how low the standards are.

Now I have a job that I love. I am a government interviewer. Out of a hundred and forty-four thousand interviewers in the county, I made Interviewer of the Month in my second month with them. My prize was a cake the size of my little fingernail that came through the post.  I’m only on nine pounds an hour basic but earn good bonuses that can double my wage. I’m good at what I do and enjoy it. Mind, they wormed their way out of furloughing me. I’m out of work until they reopen on what the editing brings in. I can’t work my other job doing karaoke in a local pub several nights a week and I can’t wait to get back to work.

I define myself by the job I do. I don’t care if it’s cleaning toilets, serving in a takeaway or running a sex shop—guess which of the three I’ve really done? I must be able to do it well.  I must be better than most of my colleagues, which means that I’m not a team player. People, especially women, in the workplace don’t like me. I’m ridiculously competitive and driven and would sell my grandmother if I was in a sales-based environment. I can’t settle halfway down the employee stats; I have to be up near the top of the ratings if not the best and thrive in high pressure environments—until it all goes to rat crap and I quit.  It’s all part of my messed-up psyche

After getting Covid 19, I’m alive, well and grateful.