A Saturday job that sucked
I'm feeling whiny and sorry for myself, as I've been laid up for nearly a fortnight with a very grotty violence that has left me feeling like a woolly mammoth is sitting on my head and digging its tusks in . . .
And any smart-alec who says "oh, you must have caught up on soooo much reading" will need to side-step a jab in the ribs. I must be ill – I haven't wanted to read at all.
So I've been keeping in contact with the outside world via online and Teletext. And I spotted this story that made me very faintly nostalgic – if only for the memory of their pick and mix, which we always had as kids when we went to the cinema.
My first Saturday job when I was at school was in Woolworth's. I did my stint on the tills, including a ghastly Christmas Eve when the whole of town seemed to want to do their festive shopping at 5pm, but the cold meat and cheese counter and the staff canteen were the placements from hell. The former undoubtedly helped along my becoming a vegetarian, and I soon discovered with the latter that Woolies' staff were far more obnoxious that any of the customers. I never went as far as spitting in the food, but I kept schtum when I grated part of my fingernail into the cheese for the lunchtime salad . . .
The positively Victorian hierarchy between the mainly male management and mostly female shop floor staff was immensely depressing, so you couldn't see me for dust when I was offered a Saturday job in the town library.
I acquired so many useful skills through that library job. I now know where to look for information. I can break up fights (and that was just between two eccentric members of staff, although getting between battling OAPs and the new Catherine Cookson book should have involved danger money). I can prick the pomposity of any celebrity (we had one particular 1970s TV personality who wasn't in fact the avuncular old cove he seemed on the small screen and had a tendency to use the "don't you know who I am?" line to which the response was "no, and your book's overdue, so that'll be 25p please.") And I can arrange books just so on a shelf so that they come raining down on people's heads when they remove one.
The biggest perk of all, of course, was being able to take out as many books as we wanted. And we could convince ourselves that we were doing the librarian a favour, as the place was so over-crowded that you couldn't fit all the books onto the shelves. Mind you, I'll never forget the look on her face when half a dozen of the Saturday girls all returned about 30 books each the weekend after our A Level exams had ended. Sadly she got her revenge when we had to shelve them all …
