I’ve had a lot of varied jobs. Silk screen printer, offset litho printer, GRP laminator, C-store manager, bakery manager, petrol station manager and more. Never really settled at one for more than ten years. No sense of career, really. They’ve all been of interest and usually agreeable. I once even did what I love for a living, two years self employed as a rock music researcher, and I loved it. My current employ… anything but.
I manage a bookmakers, and not by choice: before seeing the advert, I’d been unemployed for some eighteen months and the JobSeekers people were beginning to make “noises”, so in that respect it was most welcome. That may also be the only good thing about it. Basically, my job is to take money from people stupid enough to think they can win on horse & greyhound races, or the slot machines, and to be fair, sometimes they do, but in the main they lose, and lose heavily. Then they chase their losses, and lose even more heavily: the most I’ve ever seen is the young guy who put £5500 (on his debit card) into a slots machine in just under six hours, and walked away with £300.
But it’s just not the obscene sums of cash, it’s the punters themselves. To be fair, most are at worst inoffensive and some are very nice people, but there’s a hard core of – and there’s no other way to describe them – scum. People who sit on a slots machine for hours on end, spending their benefits (that is tax money, or mine and yours), people for whom personal hygiene is an alien concept, people who literally reek of stale sweat, unwashed clothes and worse, people who accuse you of fixing the slots so they don’t win. Call me a terrible person for saying this, but I rejoice in their losses, the bigger the better. Lockdown was, in this respect, utter bliss.
And then there’s the company: I signed on to be a bookie, not a social worker. If someone wants to spend all day in my shop, throwing away his hard-earned, then that’s down to him, not my problem. Sadly, Head Office think differently, hence we have to promote “responsible gambling”, all the while accepting their bets. To me responsible gambling is up there with responsible drink driving and responsible drug taking. No. Such. Thing. The company also try to promote the concept of work/life balance, while permitting – encouraging, even – an all-day shift of thirteen hours.
So, why do I still do it, tolerate it ? Well, for one thing I’m sixty-six and don’t drive, so there’s not a lot available in the way of alternate employment… and to be honest, for the bulk of the day we’re paid to do little more than sit there and play on our mobiles. That and the fact that the rest of the staff are, by and large, good to work with (current exception: a trainee who, in nearly six months, has barely learned how to use the keyboard properly and who seems oddly proud of this fact. Hopefully his days are numbered…). Oh, and we get seven weeks holiday a year: that’s it, really. Yes, it’s a job… and very little more than that.
