- Joined
- Jul 25, 2012
- Posts
- 12,445
I feel like I might have made this thread before, and I'm sure someone else definitely has, but search function is shit and it's taking an hour to navigate between pages so I can't easily check, and here we are.
I was 16, I think you're allowed a paper round before 16 but other than that the minimum working age for any real kind of job seems to be 16 in the UK, and that's when I started working in a fashion chain called USC. They sold mid range clothing and footwear to vile chavs, things like Rockport boots, Sprayway and Berghaus waterproof jackets, Lacoste jumpers, YSL shirts, that kind of thing.
They really did think they were something special, and one of us was placed on the door as a 'greeter' - saying hello and nice day to people as they entered and left. The scum that turned up at the store with their cans of stella in hand would flinch when you said good morning like you'd screeched at them in Norwegian, they just had no comprehension of being spoken to in public by someone who wasn't trying to arrest them, it didn't work at all.
Everyone who worked there, maybe 20 of us, were trained up on the till except for me, as it was a Saturday job and I turned up stinking of booze so they quickly decided they wanted to keep me out of the customers line of sight/breath. From that point on I sat around in the stock room playing cricket with a broom handle and a ball of tape with a guy who looked like angel from buffy whose name I can't remember now - I think he was kept out of the customers way too because he was obviously gay and got a lot of grief from the chavs, and we'd come up with amusing things to put in the shoe boxes that staff members came and asked for so they'd be embarrassed when they opened them up in front of customers, like a sandwich instead of a left shoe, that kind of thing.
Some of the staff members were cock achingly hot, but I wasn't, I was drunk and rake thin and pale, so that went nowhere. I even remember my salary - it was £1.19 an hour, I worked 4 hours a week and had to buy a shirt from the store to wear as uniform (at a decent discount tbf), but the plain blue YSL shirt with the little letters cost £40 or so on a wage of around £20 a month.
Other memories from that job:
One of the staff members was a guy called Kieran, who was, in retrospect, obviously a very good looking guy, and all of the women staff members from the other stores in the precinct when he was on the door would come over and chat to him and give him their numbers. This didn't happen when I was on the door.
I went for a night out with one of the guys there called Tim and we went raving, I took too many pills and had an actual fit, something that's never happened to me before or since. Very strange experience. Made it to work the following day.
The manager was a complete cunt, about 5 foot tall and training to be a copper. He asked a couple of us to tell him everything we knew about drugs then threatened to arrest us when he qualified.
We used to get shoplifters running into the shop and scooping up whole rails of clothes and running out, so we used to have to hang the clothes with the hangers over the rail the opposite way to each other all the way down the rail so they couldn't get arms full at once.
I was 16, I think you're allowed a paper round before 16 but other than that the minimum working age for any real kind of job seems to be 16 in the UK, and that's when I started working in a fashion chain called USC. They sold mid range clothing and footwear to vile chavs, things like Rockport boots, Sprayway and Berghaus waterproof jackets, Lacoste jumpers, YSL shirts, that kind of thing.
They really did think they were something special, and one of us was placed on the door as a 'greeter' - saying hello and nice day to people as they entered and left. The scum that turned up at the store with their cans of stella in hand would flinch when you said good morning like you'd screeched at them in Norwegian, they just had no comprehension of being spoken to in public by someone who wasn't trying to arrest them, it didn't work at all.
Everyone who worked there, maybe 20 of us, were trained up on the till except for me, as it was a Saturday job and I turned up stinking of booze so they quickly decided they wanted to keep me out of the customers line of sight/breath. From that point on I sat around in the stock room playing cricket with a broom handle and a ball of tape with a guy who looked like angel from buffy whose name I can't remember now - I think he was kept out of the customers way too because he was obviously gay and got a lot of grief from the chavs, and we'd come up with amusing things to put in the shoe boxes that staff members came and asked for so they'd be embarrassed when they opened them up in front of customers, like a sandwich instead of a left shoe, that kind of thing.
Some of the staff members were cock achingly hot, but I wasn't, I was drunk and rake thin and pale, so that went nowhere. I even remember my salary - it was £1.19 an hour, I worked 4 hours a week and had to buy a shirt from the store to wear as uniform (at a decent discount tbf), but the plain blue YSL shirt with the little letters cost £40 or so on a wage of around £20 a month.
Other memories from that job:
One of the staff members was a guy called Kieran, who was, in retrospect, obviously a very good looking guy, and all of the women staff members from the other stores in the precinct when he was on the door would come over and chat to him and give him their numbers. This didn't happen when I was on the door.
I went for a night out with one of the guys there called Tim and we went raving, I took too many pills and had an actual fit, something that's never happened to me before or since. Very strange experience. Made it to work the following day.
The manager was a complete cunt, about 5 foot tall and training to be a copper. He asked a couple of us to tell him everything we knew about drugs then threatened to arrest us when he qualified.
We used to get shoplifters running into the shop and scooping up whole rails of clothes and running out, so we used to have to hang the clothes with the hangers over the rail the opposite way to each other all the way down the rail so they couldn't get arms full at once.
)
