Life... With No Breaks (A laugh-out-loud comedy memoir)

by Spalding, Nick

  There are some blankets in the airing cupboard and you’re more than welcome to drape one across your legs if you like.

  I've refilled the coffee thermos, so there’s plenty of caffeine to keep the eyes open and brain awake. I’d hurry up and drink it though, it’ll be stone cold again in a few minutes. I own the world’s only anti-thermos. It keeps cold stuff hot and hot stuff cold.

  …can you hear those people outside?

  Noisy aren’t they?

  They must be coming home from a night’s heavy drinking - making the kind of commotion that annoys the brave and frightens the timid.

  Don’t worry, they’ll be past the window soon and well on their way home to bed, where they’ll sleep the sleep of the just.

  The just about to throw up that is…

  Then they’ll wake up tomorrow morning in the safe and secure knowledge it’s Sunday and the pain of getting up for work is still a day away.

  Nobody likes work. No-one.

  I don’t care if you’re Brad Pitt and you’re making a movie where you spend the entire running time having naked lap dancers caress your body.

  I don’t care if you’re Bill Gates and you spend five minutes a day looking at specs for a new hard drive and three hours playing tennis with the guys from Intel.

  No matter what job you do, there’s always a frisson of dread accompanying the sound of that infernal alarm going off at 6.30am on Monday morning.

  You may not feel the dread too much if you happen love your job, but it’s still there – deep down where the animal in you just wants to roll over and go back to sleep.

  The Chinese have a saying that goes:

  ‘Find a job you love and you’ll never work a day in your life.’

  Spalding has a saying that goes:

  ‘Find a job you love and the groan escaping your lips at the crack of dawn will be quieter.’

  For most of us, the groan is usually quite bloody loud, because we’re not movie stars or multi-millionaire business moguls.

  We’re ordinary working folk, who live by the clock and have to obey that hateful ritual of rising when the birds are delivering the morning chorus.

  We shuffle around like zombies until we’ve had our cup of tea and bowl of Cornflakes - or Bran Flakes if we’re not, you know, regular - which wake up the brain cells enough to negotiate the shower and the complicated business of getting dressed.

  The shower lasts for five minutes, but seems like five seconds and getting dressed is unnecessarily difficult because most of the clothes we’re wearing today were left turned inside out in a heap on the floor last night.

  …although that last problem could just be mine. I’m a messy sod, I admit.

  Then off we go!

  To our place of work, where we spend more hours a week than anywhere else and sometimes think we might as well bring a sleeping bag in and cut out the middle man.

  It’s not natural. None of it is.

  We’re supposed to be hunter-gathers.

  We’re supposed to rise when our body clocks tell us and spend the day in honest work, revolving around eating, fucking and raising our young.

  These things are important. These things keep the human race functioning.

  Spending your entire day thinking up new and exciting ways to sell expensive aftershave in funny shaped bottles to over-achieving twenty five year old men isn’t.

  The world isn’t going to fall apart if we’re not walking around smelling of African Musk or Cool Breeze, is it?

  Is your job important?

  Let’s work it out:

  In your line of work do you help to save the lives of others? Do you supply necessary and vital equipment or items? Do you help provide detailed and accurate information which aids your fellow man?

  No?

  Then your job isn’t important and is the kind robots will be doing soon.

  Please don’t let it get you down - not for a second. After all, you’re not the only one.

  I’m certainly the same as you and look forward to the day when the BRUCE 5 Marketing Copy Robot - serial Number 6575-111# - takes over and makes me obsolete.

  Then I can swan around Moroccan bazaars, chatting up the local girls and contemplate the nature of man’s existence with a bottle of Jack Daniels by my side.

  …I have a feeling the Hemingway references are doing me absolutely no favours.

  Never mind, give it ten years and most of the classics will have been re-written by the ERNEST 12 Literary Genius Robot - serial Number 6575-7774#.

  Does your job involve meetings? If so, I feel sorry for you and can whole-heartedly sympathise.

  My life is a constant stream of one meeting after another, with clients and portly company chief executives.

  They read everything you put in front of them with a look like they’re sucking a large and bitter lemon, and all think being rich and portly means they have something valuable to contribute to the writing of promotional copy.

  They're all dead wrong.

  The amount of arguments I’ve had with the egotistical money-bags - who feel the word smelltastic should replace aromatic in my description of a cooking sauce - is ever increasing and ever more annoying.

  I even have meetings about having meetings…

  There was one occasion where I was called in for a meeting to decide what we would say to an important client at a second meeting - at which we would be preparing the agenda for a further meeting with the client’s board of directors.

  In essence: a meeting about a meeting about a meeting.

  If I’m not having meetings, I’m attending conferences or workshops on how to run a business. You know, the type of thing that was invented in California twenty years ago and has insinuated itself on the rest of us in the intervening decades.

  It’s a miracle I ever get any work done.

  There’s one phrase that fills me with an irrational desire to twist the heads off human beings:

  ‘There’s no I in team!’

  The classic phrase - invented by Californians - to denote the concept that everyone is working together towards a glorious outcome. One that will make us all rich and universally adored.

  I hate it.

  I hate it. I hate it. I hate it.

  There’s no I in team, but I think you’ll find there are five A's in ‘you’re a Californian twat, pal’.

  It’s the most idiotic, shallow and above all untruthful phrase ever invented.

  It completely ignores human nature and the most fundamental aspects of our social personality.

  We’re not built to work in teams and forget our own needs for the greater good. We’re built to strive as individuals. It’s hard-wired into our brains and no amount of positive thinking blather will ever change that.

  It’s also an insidious piece of propaganda, designed to make the ordinary folk think they’re benefiting - when all they’re doing is stressing themselves out and lining the pockets of senior management.

  Every year, thousands of reticent workers are forced to engage in team building exercises meant to promote a feeling of fellowship.

  Never mind that Claire from Accounts hates Susan from Personnel with a passion that’s almost holy because she stole her boyfriend Carlos.

  Forget the fact that everyone in the office universally despises Colin, the rat-faced line manager, who only got the job because his father is on the board.

  No, let’s not worry about these things.

  Instead, let’s all go to a small Travel Inn in the Lake District for a weekend of exciting group activities and fun co-operative exercises.

  Oh jolly, jolly bullcrap.

  Nobody below senior management wants to go on these trips - and they only do because it gives them a chance to give the Jag a run up to the country.

  Everyone has to though, as not going would mean forfeiting those days in lieu you’ve built up for the two weeks in Tenerife you promised the other half.

  So you travel the three hours to the hotel with
a sinking heart and a stress headache forming above your right eye.

  …and you just know the person you’ll be in the same hotel room as - because the company is too stingy to spring for a room each - will be Colin the line manager and his bizarre bathroom habits.

  The weekend crawls by at roughly the speed of a stoned sloth.

  You play the games you’re required to and share some half-hearted jokes with the boss - who you know will fire you on sight if you don’t get that processing report to him by Wednesday morning.

  Everyone grins and bears the jobbing actors employed to be your Team Leaders! and you wind up getting totally bladdered in the hotel bar each night with the three or four people in your office you actually get along with.

  The night is capped off by returning to your hotel room to find Colin on the toilet, cleaning his teeth and ear holes - with the same brush.

  The weekend concludes and you gratefully return home to complain about the whole debacle to your spouse. They take it all in good grace for about half an hour, before screaming that they don’t want to hear anymore about the trust exercise, where you had to catch the three hundred pound elephant from the typing pool, giving yourself terrible backache.

  And you know what?

  The following morning back at work:

  Claire still hates Susan, everyone still hates Colin, the processing report still isn’t done and you’ve developed a nasty rash from the poison ivy you fell into during the Team Trek! round Lake Windermere.

  I genuinely feel sorry for the working folk who buy into this corporate brainwashing. They come back from the team weekend with a renewed sense of purpose and a positive attitude that anything can get done if we all work together and communicate!

  They’ll be the ones trying their hardest to haul the rest of us up to an acceptable standard and will spend vast swathes of time printing off well meaning motivational posters.

  They’ll also be the ones that stay late and work harder, only to discover in three months that their annual holiday has been cut by five days and the Christmas bonus has been cancelled so that Colin and his dad can go skiing in Colorado.

  Speaking from personal experience, I was forced to go to a paint-balling day in the New Forest about a year ago. I was not happy with this turn of events, as I'd planned to visit friend of mine in Ireland, where much drinking of Guinness was in store.

  As it was, I had to get up at 6.00am - on a bloody Saturday! - drive out to a cold and windy forest and strap on body armour that made me look like Arnold Schwarzenegger’s anaemic cousin.

  Then I was forced to run around holding a mean looking paint ball gun, trying my best to avoid the poison ivy while attempting to shoot that annoying prick from Deliveries in the testicles.

  Give a man a gun - any gun, real or fake - and at some point he’ll start to think he’s Jack Bauer.

  The red mist of battle will come down and he’ll run around in a strange bow-legged crouch, shouting out commands like Tom Hanks in Saving Private Ryan.

  This happened to me after about an hour of mincing around in my camouflage jacket and combat goggles.

  In the space of a few seconds, the bored expression on my face disappeared as I realised that I had a gun, protective armour and carte blanche to shoot other people in the head.

  Off I went, eyes narrowed to slits and heart pounding like a jack hammer.

  I was well and truly in the moment, barking out commands to junior members of staff and taking crafty pot shots at people from a handily placed bush.

  This all went supremely well - for a while.

  I felt I was bagging my limit and enacting small and petty acts of revenge on those who had dared to drink from my coffee cup or steal post-it notes from my desk.

  Then - as is inevitable in Spalding’s life - things took an unfortunate turn.

  At the event was our marketing team and sundry other individuals from the company’s lower echelons, along with four or five important clients, whose accounts we were managing at the time.

  Among these clients was a large, sweaty gentleman from a pharmaceutical company, who was paying us a six figure sum to write and design some promotional pamphlets for a new anti-flea pill for dogs his boffins had cooked up.

  It had been impressed on us in no uncertain terms that said gentleman must be accorded every courtesy, to ensure the account was retained.

  This extended to my direct superior telling all us grunts that if we saw our pill-pushing cash cow during the paint-ball event, we were to aim high and wide.

  So there I am, squatting behind my bush in cunning concealment, blasting anything that moves in sickly orange paint splats. I'm a poor shot, so more trees have developed a covering of orange than fellow combatants, it has to be said.

  Homing into view were four people, not obeying the laws of paint-ball in the slightest by walking out in the open and chatting like they were at a cocktail party.

  Two men and two women - with no idea there was a nutter in the bushes twenty feet away with a bead on them and the cold, red mist of war destroying any semblance of rationality.

  You should be a couple of steps ahead of me at this point and have already reached the conclusion that one of these innocent deer was the sweaty gentleman from Drugs ‘R Us.

  I cared nothing for this. My dander was up and my blood was at boiling point.

  Ah ah! I thought to myself. Easy pickings.

  I levelled the paint-ball gun at the wandering group and squeezed off a few shots. I think I shouted something along the lines of: ‘Die, you scum sucking mothers!’ as well, but I can’t remember clearly.

  Most of the paint balls mercifully missed their targets by miles, but three hit home with an accuracy that would have made Clint Eastwood hang up his poncho.

  One ball hit a woman on the thigh. She let out a yelp of surprise and pain and started to hop up and down like Zebedee at a pogo-stick competition. I later learned this was Matilda - fat sweaty gentleman’s German personal assistant.

  The other two balls slammed into fat sweaty gentleman on his considerable paunch and only slightly less chunky neck.

  He made an oofing noise when the gut shot went in and a high-pitched screech when the shot to the neck hammered home. Both were a delight to my battle-hardened ears.

  Partly in shock, partly in delight and partly with unholy rage, I leapt from my hiding place and ran over, wailing like a banshee and with every intention of finishing off the other two from point blank range.

  Hmmm.

  There’s a moment of absolute clarity sometimes that hits you like a metaphorical bucket of cold water.

  I got within five feet of my prey and looked at them properly for the first time.

  Fat sweaty man was bent double, hand clasped to rapidly reddening neck. Matilda the Hun was now sat in the mud, rubbing her leg vigorously and crying. The other two were fussing around and were the first to realise their insane attacker had pounced, intent on a crushing victory.

  I recognised mister fat and sweaty at once and the bucket of cold water got chucked over my head, extinguishing the battle rage instantaneously.

  He looked up at me with an expression I could only hope to copy by ramming a baseball bat up my arse.

  I started to babble apologies.

  The effect was diminished by the fact I was still waving the paintball gun around in wide arcs. Realising I was apologising and threatening them at the same time, I chucked the gun on the ground as if it was a red hot poker.

  The icing on the cake came when I tried to help fatso to his feet.

  I took his plump hands in mine and wrenched him upwards.

  I am eleven and a half stone. He exceeded this by about eight.

  The laws of physics took over and he fell back, now with the added bonus of me body slamming onto him as I toppled over.

  I disentangled myself from the mess still spouting apologies and retreated to a safe distance while my unfortunate victims sorted themselves out.

  Once everyon
e was back on their feet, the now orange spattered pharmaceutical giant began to laugh off the incident in that oh-so-very British way:

  ‘Ah ha ha. No harm done. Good shooting! It’s all just a bit of fun isn’t it?’

  And so on.

  I started laughing too. It was the kind of laugh insane people make in action movies before the hero blows them up.

  We walked back to the meeting station, with me pushing on ahead to remove any twigs or stones that might trip up the great and exulted client.

  Word eventually got back to my boss Calvin, who was at the time embroiled in a last ditch stand against the reprographics department in another part of the forest.

  It was a fairly still day, so the sound of ‘Oh fuck me, no!’ could be heard quite audibly as it drifted through the trees.

  He arrived at the station a few minutes later, puffing and sweating. It was obvious he’d sprinted the half mile back to begin the smoothing of ruffled feathers.

  Calvin started with the apologies and shot me a few dirty looks. I’m sure I heard him use the word moron at least once - and thought he probably wasn’t using it to describe himself.

  Discretion being the better part of valour, I removed myself from the general vicinity as quickly as possible.

  A few colleagues asked me where I was going and I made up some excuse about feeling ill, buggering off before they had a chance to question me further.

  I got changed out of the combat gear, surrendered my spare paint balls to the surly looking marshal and skirted the meeting station, making a bee line for the car park.

  I left the site, rooster tails of mud spraying up behind the BMW alloy wheels as I made my getaway.

  The groan that escaped my lips at 6.30am the following Monday morning was louder than usual. I knew full well that a chewing out of epic proportions was in the offing when I got into work.

  The fat, sweaty client - thankfully - didn't remove his account from our firm, despite my best attempts to murder him in the New Forest.

  He did however take to the hills as fast as his chubby feet would carry him once the job was over.