A Merry Retail Christmas

Every job has times when the employee thinks “am I really paid enough to handle this shit and not have a breakdown resulting in extreme pooping all over my work place and waving my junk around like a fleshy wind turbine?”

Luckily, a loose sense of shared social boundaries mean the second half of that sentence only happens very, very rarely but there comes times in every worker’s year/month/week/day/hour when the added stress of a job might just cause the line between normal and bat-shit crazy becomes a little hazy (there will be no more rhyming in this post).

For air stewardesses, it’s probably between the 78^th and 79^th time a drunken businessman has made a crude pass at her. For bin men, it could be when the students at Number 12 have left the bin bag unsealed, AGAIN. For bar staff at a Spanish holiday resort it’s after a long hard Summer of serving pints of lager to shaven-headed English men who call them “Jose” every five minutes with that hilarious exaggerated lisp.

And now to bring the personal experience.

As regular readers of this blog (all four of you that I haven’t sent Christmas cards to by the way, just in case you happened to be sitting eagerly outside your letterbox every morning for the last fortnight…weirdo), circumstances dictate that I currently work in retail at a well known supermarket and, as anyone who has undergone this experience before will tell you, Christmas is generally our breakdown breaking point (there will be no more alliteration in this post).

It’s an age old joke in retail that it would be the perfect job, if there were no customers. Christmas music being played for six weeks or so? That can be blocked out. Frequent heavy lifting? Long term damage to my body won’t be felt for ages, live for now dude. Being very low on the company’s food chain? Being sneeringly and depressingly contemporarily ironic will overcome this obstacle. Working your fingers to the bone and it never being quite enough to earn praise? Ah well, it’s only a job, it’s by quite a long distance not the most important thing in the world.

But customers will always be akin to Thomas Paine’s state; a necessary evil.

Whether it be repeatedly having a trolley driven in to you like you’re the crippled Irishman in one of Mr Burn’s flashbacks or being patronised when providing a service to someone (“I have a degree thanks” is what I’ll say every time this happens…after I hand in my notice and have another job lined up); there are just sometimes when it all gets a bit too much.

And then Christmas compounds this with the strange brand of abject misery it can create.  Stress and having to see way too many family members in way too short a space a time produces a situation where it’s fine to be more aggravating than usual. Add to this the usual, boring, stressful shopping experience, Hell might well be created on Earth in the relations between staff and customers. Yes, I’m well aware that you’re the most important person in the word and you cannot spend more than one minute here longer than you need to but it sure would be fantastic if you treated me like a person. And laughing at my small talk would be awesome too.

It probably doesn’t help us staff’s merriness levels either having to work extra days over the Christmas period. To be fair, it’s probably less customers not being able to handle the shops being closed for two days and more vice versa. Why not open up Boxing Day and squeeze a few more pennies out of pockets? It’s the kind of shrewd fiscal thinking (read institutionalised tightness and exploitation of needs) that our system is based on. If you don’t like it go to….China?

At least they don’t celebrate Christmas there.

Blast from the past- Nerdtastic TV

It is fair to say that the last five or six years have been good to the nerd. The world has come to us which is a relief because we damn well weren’t going to pluck up the courage to come to it.

All we had to do was keep doing what we always did and it eventually became cool. We played the waiting game with the law of averages and we were the lucky generation of nerds it paid off for. Video gaming, glasses, skinny jeans and faintly ironic T-shirts were in.

The fact that we became mainstream and hated it is another thought for another day because we’re here to examine an old TV show that just missed the point at which nerdism (totally a word) became acceptable. That show is the BBC's two series wonder, Time Commanders.

My generation of history and video game nerds was well served at the start of this century with the masterful Age of Empires series and the not very masterful but purely epic Total War series dominating our lives and guiding us on our first tentative steps into the world of online gaming. Yeah, thanks for that experience at the age of 12.

Essentially, Time Commanders took the Total War series and made it into a television show, thus instantly allowing thousands of people like me to do a primitive LOL at the contestants who failed show after show. Victory was a seldom seen outcome as the scales were tipped by getting contestants without experience of video gaming. Somewhat unrealistic perhaps as I don’t think the Romans ensured that their enemies’ armies were commanded by farmers but there we go.

Shot in an old warehouse reminiscent of any torture porn film set, Time Commanders allowed a team of four people, usually work colleagues (or, on one happy day, an all star celebrity team of Kate Silverton, Al Murray, Raji James and Ricky Flower), who took control of a virtual army in a battle from ancient history on a game engine similar to Rome; Total War.

Two of the team were “Generals” who ‘controlled’ (very loose term that) the battle from a raised platform in the centre of the warehouse, using a real-time overhead map and huge main screen in front of them. Much like real life Generals, these team members would pretend to have a plan whilst other team members would put in the hard yakka. Naturally, when things went wrong, it wasn’t their fault.

Said other two team members were “Lieutenants” who took incoherent or foolish orders from their Generals. The “Lieutenants” would then relay the orders in a further incoherent manner on to their own individual techie, resplendent in a black cap and seemingly without voices, who would control the units of the army for them. Chinese whispers clearly made battle a lot more confusing than the simple expedient of a phone.

Meanwhile, high on a balcony overlooking the team stood a pair of military historians judging the team and occasionally speaking to the camera. These men (they were always men because weapons and war and shit is manly stuff) were the real heroes of the show.

Ever-present Dr Aryeh Nusbacher was as excitable as a man who just found out his chat up line might be working. The other role was on rotation and was usually most fun when Mike Loades came in and played about in a faintly aggressive manner with some ancient weaponry. Other times, Saul David disappointingly didn’t wear a brown leather jacket and future Newsnight ‘Diplomacy Editor’ Mark Urban dreamt of more respectable TV appearances.

Completing the line up, initially at least, was the superb and currently dreadfully underused Eddie Mair with his funky earpiece thing that made me think he was deaf at first. After the first series, the decision was taken to begin the now customary task of finding a non-Top Gear role for Richard Hammond. The host’s role was to basically be very friendly and helpful whilst occasionally stating the obvious of what was happening on the big screen.

The fun of it all came when, inevitably, the team’s battle plan survived all of five seconds of contact with the enemy and then cue panicking and ultimate failure amongst much bickering, which was probably how battles worked in the ancient world although it’s fair to say there was almost certainly not a celebratory/commiseratory orgy at the end of the show.

Thankfully, if the team lost, the two historians would come down to them and say “Not to worry, you may have lost the battle but so did Alexander the Great in this particular conflict so, yeah, that’s fair enough.” This allowed everyone to go home happy with their day’s work. Apart from the thousands of dead or wounded CGI Celts who were less pleased with their day’s lot.

If you're sad like me, YouTube has plenty of clips to while away your time http://tinyurl.com/bv4nyoz

What do they know of our ways?

Way back in the middle of August, upon leaving my local pub after having a pint and waiting for it to all blow over, I pondered just how long it would be for the Government to sweep under the carpet the background reasons for the large scale rioting we saw. Today was finally the day that it happened.

For those who have yet to catch up with the news (and if I’m you’re primary source of news, God help you), Home Secretary Theresa May today attempted to distance the role the Government and the economic downturn had in the escalation of the riots that spread from an isolated incident in Tottenham to all over the country in the Summer.

Speaking at the Reading the Riots conference, May said (excuse the lengthy quotation); "What the LSE/Guardian report tells me more than anything is that the rioters still have not accepted responsibility for their actions. They are still blaming others – the police, the government, society. They are still making excuses, but I don't accept those excuses. The riots weren't about protests, unemployment, cuts. The riots were not about the future, about tomorrow. They were about today. They were about now. They were about instant gratification."

Whilst the theory that the Tories, and every Government since to be fair, are reaping what they sowed back in the 1980s with their “get rich and fuck everyone else” policy is interesting. In layman’s terms, if you encourage consumerism and link aspiration to buying nice things, poorer people resorting to looting when they can’t afford these things isn’t an implausible outcome. But I’m no socio-political expert so it would be foolish to look into that in any detail

Anyway, this blog post is about what I do know and can form a coherent and semi-conceivable opinion on, not what I can speculate on.

There probably is a certain element of truth in May’s statement today. I do not believe there was an element of protest to the rioting, the fact that there appeared to be no united political message quite clearly backs this up. And there probably was an element of instant gratification to it; stealing a TV to acquire a TV, smashing a window for the thrill of it, that sort of thing.

However, just because the actions themselves aren’t political, it does not mean politics cannot be associated with the reasons for the actions.

Let me give you an idea of what it’s like to be young in this country today; it’s difficult. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not “down t’pit at 12 and that’s your life” difficult but it sure as hell isn’t easy.

All of the major steps forward you can make in your life to better yourself or give you more of a chance of success are near as damn it out of your reach.

Want your own car to open up new job opportunities further afield? Good luck with paying the insurance on it. Want to get an education to degree level to open up more career doors? You better be prepared to have debt over your head for the rest of your life. Want to move out form your parent’s house? Direct all of your potential mortgage savings to some arsehole landlord in a rented property or you’re going to be in that bedroom of yours for a few more decades yet. Want a job that pays minimum wage but, hey, at least it’s a foot in the door? Get to the back of that million-long person queue buddy and good luck trying to further yourself without “relevant experience”. Have a previous conviction? That’s you fucked for life when it comes to many higher paid jobs Pentonville, no matter your qualities. Want to get the relevant experience by working for free? Have fun funding semi-essential things like eating whilst you do it.

I graduated in the Summer just gone and I currently work stacking shelves whilst I look for any employment related to my degree in a job market that, to say it’s an employer’s market would be the most tremendous understatement. For the time being, I’ve had to put moving out and building a life for myself on the back burner whilst I clamber on to the treadmill every morning to save up enough money to move up the ladder.  There are plenty of other people who graduated with me who are in the same situation or worse. The system has, arguably, failed us just as much as it failed so many of the rioters who had no access to employment or re-entering education.

The only thing stopping me from chucking it all in and claiming benefits is a (possibly stupid) sense of pride.

When you see bankers earning millions of pounds in bonuses, celebrities spending ridiculous amounts on cosmetic treatments and other examples of excess and greed, it’s no wonder why people get angry. Whether its anger directed at the excess itself and how disengaged these people are from reality or anger that one can’t perform these exercises in greed themselves is immaterial. The anger is there and nothing is being done to readdress the balance which then breeds apathy and laziness because what’s the point of contributing to the system when nothing will ever change? Combine the two and you get nihilism on the scale we saw across London and other metropolitan areas earlier this year.

When it comes down to it, the political classes just have no idea what life is like on the other side. You obviously need more intelligent people in charge of a country as that is how the system should work but when the big wigs of your three main political parties are from largely upper/upper-middle class backgrounds, you have a problem.

What does David Cameron know of the problems facing a working single mother? How can Nick Clegg understand the frustrations of the unemployed person who wants to get into work? What common ground does Ed Miliband share with the working class 18 year-old who is put off going to university due to £9,000 a year fees?

For May to take a nice, broad, sweeping generalisation and saying that the rioters blaming the Government or unemployment or the police as “excuses” just illustrates the point that her ilk have little idea what life is like in our cities and, worse than that, have little interest in bothering to find out either. Yes, instant gratification was a cause but to focus on one reason for the entire issue is simplistic and irresponsibility of the highest level from someone who is meant to help those she represents. A lack of social cohesion and homage to the social contract is an issue for all of us, regardless of our background.

The solutions to the problems of disillusionment, apathy and anger many people feel come from the political/economic sphere and for May to so crudely cut out the Government’s role in causing the riots, and in so doing, effectively severing its potential for preventing them happening again, is just even more irresponsible.

How the Internet suppresses me #153

John Lennon once sang that we’re kept “doped with religion and sex and TV”. If we take those three tools of suppression in chronological order, which makes a degree of sense to my mind, then the natural extension would be add to “the Internet” to this line in the song.

Naturally, this would involve re-writing a classic but I’m sure I wouldn’t do as bad a job at bastardising it as some of the cover versions have. Just check out some of the names on this list. The Academy Is…? Really?

Anyway, if I’ve managed to retain your attention, there is a point to the above digression and that is that the sheer amount of offerings on the Internet (or Internetz if you’re that way inclined. Or t’Internetz if you’re inclined that way) to take up your whole day that you won’t even have time to even put together some groundwork ideas on your plan to become a working class hero.

The focus of this blog post this evening is a concept that has existed for some fifty years (starting out bizarrely as an idea associated with golf)but has become more entrenched thanks to the user friendly element the Internet has given it.

It splits (mostly) male friends, family members, co-workers as they compete week in, week out against both each other and against the whole, entire world. The most popular site has over 2.5 million registered players on it this year. People spend hours tinkering and fine tuning their creations for optimum efficiency. It is a game but, like the real thing upon which it is based, it can be more important than that.

Yes, I am talking about Fantasy Football.

It’s like the British equivalent of the “fantasy draft” in the USA where, as I understand it, it’s an incredibly nerdy thing to do but totally socially acceptable for anyone to do it (if you are in ownership of a penis). Maybe because it involves sport; staying up all night playing FIFA is ok but do the same thing with a Legend of Zelda game and kiss goodbye to your hard earned social status, freak.

It might also be because deep, deep down, we’re already secretly thrilled that we can have an imaginary piece of control over some pixels and bytes and hyperlinks that represent millionaires. “Ha! Take that Rooney you rich bastard, I’m dropping you. Who’s the loser now, huh? Oh, oh right” *cries in the foetal position*

Anwho, it’s the simplicity which draws you in and the complexity which keeps you hooked as you spend hours thinking what is the best line up you can have for next weekend’s round of games. Endless permeations from who is injured or suspended to who is in form to what the fixtures are to the cost of potential signings.

Then you can bring in the cast iron ‘laws’ of football like a player going back to his old club will ALWAYS score or the sod’s law that if you drop a player that is underperforming, he’ll pick up points as soon as you get rid of him. All these factors and more must be considered before even attempting to alter your team.
For example, just today I've considered dropping Luis Suarez but I'm convinced he'll start scoring points as soon as I drop him. After pondering this for an hour or so, I take a look at my midfield quartet of Bale-Van der Vaart- Toure- Ramsey and wonder how I could improve this. Perhaps if I take out Doyle and Ramsey, I could tinker with a better striker? But what effect will that have on the midfield I ask myself. And on and on  and on.

Before you know it, you’ve spent your entire day in the office staring at one webpage and your chance for career advancement/ the opportunity of finally asking Emma from accounts out for a drink/ going to the water cooler to chat about the funny things the penguins did on Frozen Planet last night have all passed you by this day.

 But it doesn’t matter because you’ve put together the perfect team for this week’s round of fixtures. And then, you realise, it’s Man City Vs Chelsea this week and you’ve got Cech in goal and Aguero up front.

Bollocks.

Tomorrow on ways the Internet suppresses my urge to change the world and fight the man and whatnot; the effect of Wikipedia on the fact nerd.