Vocation Vocation Vocation...

As a newly inaugarated member of the great unwashed - by virtue of somewhat unwisely resigning from my position as a corporate insolvency negotiator in the claims department of a large insurance firm in the midst of the greatest employment crisis since Gazza was sober (the irony of which is not entirely lost on me) - I thought it may be interesting to take a moment out between todays episode of Matthew Wright and filling in my benefit forms to reflect back through my long and varied curriculum vitae in the hope of being able to ascertain where precisely it all went a little wrong.

Let us begin by travelling back to an altogether more innocent time, when jeans were baggy, hair was undercut and pubs still smelled of smoke.


Job #1 - Youngsters Toys and Sports

As a fresh-faced sixteen year old with a unfortunate knack of attracting trouble and collecting black eyes like I had collected Panini stickers a couple of years previously, a small family-run toy emporium in the leafy London commuter belt seemed the natural place to begin my working life, and gave me the ideal opportunity to show off a variety of weekend war wounds to the neighbourhood nippers as they perused Playmobil.

My emloyer was a genial forty-something of Asian descent with a penchant for illicit Cafe Creme cigars (his wife had encouraged the transition from cigarettes in the belief that he would smoke less - he simply smoked twenty cigars a day instead) and a entirely commendable faith in the twin tenets of hard work and capitalism, manifested by his willingness to regularly spend several hours at a time in the yard attacking toys that had failed to sell with a club hammer in order to claim damaged goods and a refund from the manufacturer.

A suspicious man by nature, he was utterly convinced that the world was out to take his money, which meant that I was never to be left unsupervised with the till. This alone rendered my employment almost completely pointless, and I therefore spent most of my time discreetly tailing angelic four year olds around the aisles ("James, follow this one, he is a thief, he has naughty eyes...") and embarking on complex missions of subterfuge to the other toy retailer in the town centre with instructions to find out the price of their cricket bats and report back by eleven hundred hours. I never did tell him that the kindly old fellow at Chaplins Games was perfectly aware of his scheme, and that the loyalty of his spy could easily be bought with a can of Pepsi and a packet of Embassy #1.

Upstairs - in the sports section - was Carol's domain. An ancient, wizened, hump-backed old bird with yellowed razor sharp teeth and an angry look that could stop a thieving schoolboy in his tracks at a hundred yards, she presided over the somewhat sad selection of moth-bothered football gear and stacked boxes of boots deep with the dust of a generation. Any customer enquiries for said sportswear were met with a Medusa glare, and a curt "this is a toy shop...Allsports is next to Bejam", and an invitation to perhaps purchase one of the large range of Hornby model railway accessories, of which she had an encyclopaedic knowledge. She terrified me, but I rather liked her.

Great fun was had when it transpired that my nemesis at the time - a chap called Rupert (who admittedly does not sound especially menacing in retrospect) - had taken a position at the window place next door, and many Saturdays from then on until then end of my employ were spent muttering dark oaths and curses at each other whilst both pretending that we weren't wearing name badges. He would point to his head in reference to where he had recently hit me with a pint glass. I would retort by gesturing at my wrists, where he'd had to have corrective surgery after a second attempt to hit me with the pint glass went wrong and he'd inadvertently sliced through his own artery. Ah, them were the days.

Sadly, I think I knew that this little idyll could not last forever; career advancement was calling...