Sunday 22 April 2012

Confessions of a Sales Assistant: The Battle Against Automatism

Although it pains me to say it, I have been working in the retail industry for long enough now that I am no longer quite as incredulous at the level of contempt that the British public holds for sales assistants. There was a time, for instance, when the blatant discourtesy displayed by certain customers induced amazement as much as it did irritation - is she really discussing her private parts over the phone whilst handing me money for her daughter's birthday card? As time passed, this amazement gradually subsided and the irritation came to the fore - believe me, lady, I'd rather spend as little time taking your money from you as you'd like to take giving it to me, but I can only do so as fast as the cash register allows me to. Bitch. Nevertheless, as even more time passed, I found that I had become so accustomed to the occasional rude or disdainful customer that I could no longer even muster the energy to feel irritated by their behaviour. Meh. Now that I think about it, I suppose I had become institutionalised, for want of a better word. I had become the mindless automaton that those customers believed that I was all along. And yet today, in one fell swoop, one such customer changed everything.

Friday 20 April 2012

The Perils of the Light Sleeper

Much to my annoyance, I am generally a rather light sleeper. It is to my even greater annoyance, therefore, that my partner is the complete opposite. Indeed, I am quite convinced that she could sleep through an earthquake without so much as a stir. And yet, not only is she a heavy sleeper, but she also possesses the uncanny ability to sleep at any time and place seemingly at whim; a concept that is completely foreign to me. Without wishing to state the obvious (but knowing full well that that is precisely what I am about to do), I find that I can only fall asleep when I can no longer stay awake. And, likewise, once I have woken up I feel awake, which makes attempting to fall back to sleep a difficult task. With this in mind, it is somewhat ironic that although Kat sets an alarm every night, it is not so much for her as it is for me; after all, it is only through me waking at the sound of her alarm going off, and thereby having to wake her in order to make her turn it off, that she gets up each morning. Nevertheless, it is not as though she has to be up at some ungodly hour, so I don't particularly mind. However, you can probably imagine my annoyance at being woken up in the small hours of this particular morning by the quiet but unmistakable sound of a cat. Vomiting.

Thursday 12 April 2012

On Ackroyd, Cities and the Unknown

Although I currently live in a city, I would not describe myself as a natural city-dweller. I am sure that this is due, in no small part, to the fact that one would be forgiven for thinking that this particular city is simply a large town. Forgiven, that is, by all but the local inhabitants who are fiercely proud of the status of their home. For instance, I will never forget arriving in the city for my first year at university and being sternly warned never to ask a bus driver for a ticket in to "town". Whilst I highly doubt that anyone would actually be refused travel for such an assertion, the fact that a warning was deemed necessary, even if only in jest, is a testament to the pride that people attach to the designation of city status. Nevertheless, regardless of size and population, I simply don't share the same affinities with city-living as friends who have been raised in, or enthusiastically adopted, a city as home. That is not to suggest that I am some kind of "ruralite". On the contrary, I spent my entire childhood and the majority of my adolescence growing up in a suburban neighborhood ten minutes from the centre of a wealthy East Anglian town. However, it seems to me that the difference lies in the escalation of anonymity; it is simply easier to "know" a town as opposed to a city. And it is for this reason that I find Peter Ackroyd's London Under such an oddly compelling read, for although he manages to shed a wealth of information about the very specific history of London as revealed under the ground, the book still manages to end with an unnerving sense of the unknown.