Work - Part 1 The Grumpy Guide To

I would hate to have to do a proper job, to have to put on a suit everyday, nightmare.

Work, work, work - it's the four-letter word that we all have to deal with.

There's got to be better things to do with my time than this.

And nothing exasperates our state of grumpiness like knowing

that we are a mere cog in someone else's machine.

I don't think it can be any more soul destroying.

Whether it's looking for it, commuting to it, actually doing it,

avoiding it, surviving your colleagues in it, or quitting it,

when it comes to work, every rung of the career ladder is rotten.

Droning on and just achieving nothing.

Work is the daily grind that takes over our very existence,

absorbs all our time and deprives us of the simple joys in life.

All that, so we can be paid a pittance to make some other bugger rich.

Cast your mind back, to those wonderfully naive pre-grumpy days.

We all had dreams and aspirations of greatness, where work would fulfil us

as a person, enriching our lives, making us healthy, wealthy and wise.

Until one depressing day, you wake up and realise that, instead,

you're trapped in a career cul-de-sac that's making you miserable, poor and brain dead.

When I was at school, I wanted to be a footballer first of all.

I was going to be a ballet dancer

and I was totally the wrong shape, the wrong height and the wrong...everything.

Train driver,

fireman, policeman, for a while, spaceman.

Then I wanted to be a tennis player.

I wanted to be an actress and a part-time vet.

That was a very realistic ambition at the age of seven.

No, I wanted to be a cricketer, really. I was brought up in a place with no facilities

and the school didn't really bother about it and I often think,

if I'd been brought up in a place where the school took it seriously

and I'd been coached properly and everything, I'd still have been shit.

According to my school reports

I was going to go into something medical,

I fancied myself as a bit of a doctor or something like that.

When I was very young, I did want to be a performer

and I was a dreadful show-off and I was desperate

to go to drama school and I even would sleepwalk about it

and I'd go into my parents' room saying, "Please, let me go to drama school."

I was brought up in a kids' home system as well, so I didn't want to... If you bragged about

wanting to be an actor, it wasn't good.

That's time to go and have a chat with the social worker because you've got to get real.

I knew I'd end up doing a turn, as Les Dawson said, you know,

I knew I'd end up being some sort of, you know, artiste.

I've got a blank spot about my career from sort of the ages of 12-18, really,

which roughly coincides with me being a fundamentalist Christian, but that's a whole other show.

I really wanted to be a ballet dancer, I wanted that to be my job,

I went to ballet classes and I really, really practised.

I thought I was quite good.

And I got an audition at the Royal Ballet School.

And my mum and dad drove me all the way to London for this audition

and when I got out of the car and opened the boot

I had forgotten my kit!

I'd left it at home.

So I had to borrow the kit of one of the ballet students who was 10 years older than me.

So the tights were all baggy, I didn't have a hair net,

just a hair band and baggy old leotard, huge great big ballet shoes that didn't fit me.

Big puffy, swollen eyes cos I had been crying,

big orange squash mark here because I'd been drinking orange squash all the way in the car.

Didn't get in. Can't imagine why(!)

I had two jobs I quite fancied, astronaut and poet.

There didn't seem to be a NASA recruitment office in Bolton.

They didn't have a branch office there,

so that made it tricky. I didn't quite know where to go.

I went on a school trip to Jodrell Bank and looked for possible recruitment opportunities there.

There didn't seem to be any, although I did buy a map of the surface of the moon.

My mum wanted me to be...

I never knew where this came from. I need to ask her, actually.

She wanted me to be a barrister,

like, she'd obviously just read it somewhere, but she'd got that word

so that's what I thought I wanted to be, was a barrister.

I mean, how unlikely? Brimsdown Avenue, Enfield,

"I'm not being funny, but I think I want to be a barrister and that."

I thought it was called barrister "and that" for about three years.

"You should become a barrister and that."

So I thought that was the name of the job. Barrister AND THAT.

But it wasn't, it was just bad diction.

My dream job is what I'm doing

because it takes me around the world

and I can be miserable in other countries.

That's all very well for some, but in reality the dread

of Monday morning looms over us from the moment we finish the Sunday roast,

downed the last soothing glass of red, and realise

that there's only a few hours left to the dreaded alarm clock.

OK, it's 5.00.

That means that I've got to be in bed for about 10.30

because I've got to get on a really packed train at 7.15,

with loads of smelly people, and then I've got to get off

that train and people are going to be bumping into me and not saying please and thank you and sorry,

and then I get to work and hate the bloke who I work with, hate all the people around me,

they're going to hate me, then I'm going to go to an overpriced place for lunch,

that'll cost me seven quid for a cup of coffee because the Colombian

beans have been rubbed between the testicles of a forest squirrel from Bolivia or somewhere like that.

ALARM RINGS

Oh, no, here we go again.

Do we work to live, or live to work? That's the question.

And the answer is, don't ask such stupid questions.

Work is a means to an end, whether you're in the boardroom, or just bored.

Hours turn into days, days turn into weeks, all spent

dreaming of doing something else, anything else, if only you could earn enough money to live the dream.

Which you can't.

And therein lies the nightmare.

I don't know how people can do office jobs.

It's hard enough sitting in an office anyway, sometimes

when I have to, for various meetings, work and that kind of stuff.

I don't understand the protocols that go with offices either or how they work.

Everyone tries to make them happy, lovely, wonderful places to be,

you know, but basically it's pushing a pen and answering a phone, isn't it?

I don't think it could be any more soul destroying.

Do you know what I don't like about offices?

The people you spend the day working with, some of them don't even look up to say good morning to you.

You'd go in "Hi", what kind of weirdo says hello in the morning?

I have got to quite like mixing with people a bit,

for a long time I tried to shut myself away in a little room on my own.

You know, I mean, open-plan environment, I viewed

with the greatest of suspicion, really

and I was right because it became

the call centre, you know, which has got to be about the most terrifying prospect, hasn't it?

Good morning, Grattan speaking. Do you wish to place an order?

Sell, sell, sell, push, push, push.

Being hassled by hustlers is a horror we can't seem to escape.

You want to talk to your bank manager in Manchester.

Hello, I'd like to speak to the bank manager, please.

But are redirected to dispute with a man in Mumbai.

No, can I speak to the manager, please?

Your mobile rings, and some spotty kid wants

to upgrade it for you even though you've only just learned how it works.

Can you put me through? I'm not interested in that service.

Or you're dragged out of the bath by a computerised voice that wants to consolidate

-the debts that buying the new gadgets caused in the first place.

-Hello?

Hello?

Leave us alone, if we haven't asked for it, we don't want it.

No, no, right. Do not put me on hold again.

And even if we did, we can't bloody afford it.

-Not that they care.

-Please, hang up and try again.

The one job I hated the most was telesales

because it was the '80s and it was the new age of greed,

and you were rewarded for as many rubbish things you could sell on the telephone.

Hello, sir, how are you today? Can I interest you in a free mobile phone?

Well, if I did shove it up there, it would still get excellent reception.

And it would be hugely competitive to get to the top of the list.

I was talking to a bloke who worked in a call centre and he said

the manager would get up every sort of five or ten minutes and go, "Calls!

"Come on, there are calls!"

I mean, that's no different from someone who might have written

200 years ago about, I don't know, a stocking weavers' factory, "Come on!

"There's stockings to be weaved!" How is that any different?

And you get these poor old people that pick up the phone and say "I might have just a little

"bit of money left in my pension.

"Let me go and get my pension book," and you'd be like that,

"I don't think I can do this, but it's my commission,"

and then you carry on trying to sell them these blooming fluorescent lights

that they're never going to use

and don't need, they've only got £2.70 in their Post Office accounts.

So I did that for about three weeks and I felt so awful about myself that I had to leave.

Come along, we're not here to slack! Get weaving, get weaving! Come on!

'I had one of yous fellas on the phone the other day.'

I'm sorry?

'I was telling Irene "That bloke's been calling back again." '

I can't understand a word you are saying. Does anyone there speak English?

This telesales firm insisted that when you had sold something

because you would call them back to do the transaction, you have to stand up

in the room and go "Qualification, Alistair".

And everyone was supposed to applaud in the middle of their phone calls

and then if you completed the sale you stand up and go, "Verification, Alistair", and they go "Right".

Pretending to be American, it's the most embarrassing thing I have ever had to do.

Nothing produces grumpiness faster than the dawning realisation that work will never get any better.

This mundane, moronic, monotonous existence is all there is.

Everything is the same, the same commute, the same tasks, the same old faces,

and the fact is you've got about 11,000 days until you retire.

It's a 40-year sentence.

Morning.

And you don't even get time off for good behaviour.

I mean, an eight-hour working day ought, really, if you are coming in about 9.30.

you kind of crank up and get started about 10.

Afternoon.

Bit of a coffee break at 11.15, then 12.00, you start thinking about lunch.

So you probably put a good steady couple of hours in in the morning.

If you've got an hour for lunch you probably stretch that by quarter of an hour either side.

Then in the afternoon, you might get up to speed again about two.

About 4.00, you're thinking, "Mmm, that'll do it."

So four hours of an eight-hour day,

I think that's a very fair shift.

The marvellous trick that they play in lots and lots of office jobs is they convince you

that you are doing something important and you know deep down it's pointless.

On the first day, they take you around and go,

"Now, this is very, very important, this job that you've got.

"Now, what we want you to do is every morning, you see, Jim comes in with the newspapers

"and you have to collect all of the newspapers off him,

"and lay them out in front of you here and then, very, very important,

"what we want you to do is to colour in the Os.

"Don't do the noughts on the sports page obviously, that's ridiculous, just the Os and have them done

"as quickly as you can and do that every day."

And there'll be some old bloke who has been there 30 years doing this, "Ooh, it's like a madhouse in here,

"you know. We were in here until half past eight one night."

"Why was that?" "There was a big article about Yoko Ono going to Orinoco."

I remember saying "What's that lady's name?" and this bloke goes, "I don't know."

Your desk is two away from her desk, how can you not know this other human being's name?

That's what I find really difficult about offices, but I would walk in and they wouldn't say good morning.

Or, like, I'd say leave and say goodbye, and they would be,

"I'm not your mum, I don't care if you're leaving."

Spending every working minute with the same idiots and psychopaths

inevitably leads to resentment, annoyance and fevered frustration.

Small release, however, can be found in office relations

whether it be just banter or, for your more cantankerous colleagues, a bit of full-on ridicule.

He put my stapler inside a jelly again.

It's the third time he's done it, and it wasn't even funny the first time.

I was sent by the gorgeous Sister O'Neill, she was a fantastic nurse, she was the ward sister.

She sent me down to another ward to go and get some fallopian tubes.

But it was better than that, because the woman who she had sent me down to get the fallopian tubes

had actually had hers removed and she was in on the joke.

So when I went down, I said Sister O'Neill has sent me down

for some fallopian tubes she just said, "Sorry, I haven't got any."

I went back and I said... Sister Blossom, that was actually her surname, isn't that beautiful?

"Sister Blossom doesn't have any fallopian tubes,"

and she just went, "I know" and she carried on drinking her tea.

The two of them must have had such a great laugh.

Soon comes a time when us grumpies realise that work

would be a hell of a lot easier

if we dragged ourselves up the greasy pole and escaped the plebs that surround us.

After all being boss is far more fun.

Sitting back in your comfy chair, in your own private office, enjoying the fact

that when it comes to barking out orders, it's always better to give than to receive.

Always!

I am getting really pissed off here.

That's the problem with this country.

You give someone a hat or a jacket and all of a sudden, they're Hitler.

If you've got one, I'm bloody having one!

Well, we've seen the prime example of Ricky Gervais's style, his take on The Office,

it was absolutely brilliant, because it can be painful, really painful, being in those places.

"Thank you, David, for the opportunity and continued support

"in the work-related arena, but I've done that,

"I want to better myself, I want to move on"

then I can make that dream come true to AKA for you.

Yeah, I've had my fair share of David Brents, definitely.

Sammy, you old slag, it's the Brentmeister General.

That sort of thing of wanting to be your friend, but also

not being quite sure HOW to be your friend, and then wanting to pull rank at the last minute.

I mean, I've probably been guilty of that several times.

The very first job I had in a factory was packing sausage rolls

on a line and all you were doing is this.

I thought "I don't want to do that all night." It was a night shift.

So you make it interesting for yourself, see how fast you can go.

So I was thinking "I can do this quite quickly."

I can do it one handed, I can do this.

And then I got pulled aside by one of the foremen, and he said,

"Can you not work so quickly?" I said, "What?"

He said "If you work as fast as that, we've all got to work as fast as that, and if they know

"we can work as fast as that, they'll make us work as fast as that,

"and we don't want to work as fast as that.

"So don't work as fast as that."

KNOCK AT DOOR

One, two, three, four, make them sweat outside the door.

Five, six, seven, eight, always pays to make them wait.

Nine, ten, 11, 12... Come!

I didn't really like being told what to do by someone I thought was a bit stupid, really.

-CJ. I wanted to see you.

-I'll come straight to the point. I didn't get to where I am today by waffling.

We all got gathered around for a bit of a powwow.

"Powwow" was the word he used, OK, not me, don't judge me.

He said, "We need to have a bit of a powwow.

"This mug...

"with Simon written on it..."

I've changed the name, his name was really Paul.

"This mug has got my name on it...why?

"Because it's MY MUG, that's right.

"It's not rocket science. It's my mug.

"So when you are making yourself a cup of tea or coffee

"and you see this mug, with my name on it,

"don't use it.

"Understood?" He should have been locked up.

He should have been taken away from other people.

We all had to take our cup in, our own cup and this boss thought he was being funny.

He had this little joke.

Every time he went down to wash his coffee cup in the sink,

he'd say, "I'm just going over to wash my thing."

And I used to sit there

and just think, "I'd love one day to get up and go,

"Just going down to wash my thing," and then walk over and get my knob out and scrub it with a brillo pad.

"There you are."

I have worked for people who I disagreed with strongly

and I've worked with people who weren't great fans of mine,

but funnily enough I never really had a problem with that.

There are many days when I'm not a great fan of mine anyway.

It's really interesting as an actor you have different kinds of bosses,

you have directors, you have producers,

it depends where you work and how you work.

Yeah, I've had a variety of interesting male bosses

throughout the years, one whose name I won't mention

wondered whether I'd like to go for a drive in his Bentley.

Ever since women tied themselves to railings and got the vote,

there's been no stopping them.

In the good old days, the ladies sat in the typing pool

and took dictation,

or occasionally took on the more important jobs, like making the tea.

But these days they're taking over everywhere,

from the bedroom to the boardroom.

I'm not stupid.

I think the best boss is the closest you can get to a female personality.

Ideally an actual woman.

They are just better to work for and have running a place,

because, when they need to, and I've seen it all the time.

The times I've been dumped in a relationship,

and had strings of snot hanging down to my shoes and been begging,

"Please, I love you, just touch it one last time before you go."

We've all been there, but the women I have worked for,

if they have to, and you do need it, can just go, ping!

And switch it off and be totally focused.

Whereas I think most men when it comes to it can be sort of

manipulated into weakness, most of us. Not all of us.

But at the same time, especially in a creative profession you are better off working for a woman as well.

I've found women better to work for.

Also, I get turned on by being ordered about as well.

"Please, tell me what I'm supposed to do next.

"Please, can I take my lunch?

"You cruel bitch."

So, if you have to sit trapped at your desk

for hours on end, bored by your job, annoyed by your colleagues

and infuriated by the boss, at least there's always the perks.

Wherever I've worked the stationery cupboard is a free for all.

Particularly if you work somewhere with a well-known name.

Oh, my God! I used to steal BBC headed paper,

if someone had annoyed me, you know, like a TV rental company

or something like that.

I would pretend I was writing from Watchdog

and I'd fire off a letter on BBC headed paper.

We had this scheme whereby there was a company

that had a whole fleet of lorries and they used to come in

to get petrol from the garage me and me mate worked in.

So we put 30 gallons of diesel in the lorry,

but they had an account, you just wrote down how much they had.

So they would say, "Stick us down for 32 gallons."

And their company would be charged at the end of the month for whatever we had written down.

So if we put down 32 gallons when they had only had 30,

the garage was obviously two gallons in credit.

So we would take that out of the till, whatever the monetary equivalent of two gallons was,

and we'd share it between me, my mate the and driver.

But of course, it went they way of all fiddles,

which is that people get greedy,

so you'd get lorry drivers come in and say, "Stick 10 in, put us down for 50"

and things like that, you know?

People get greedy. We used to say, "One of them will bring in a mate

"soon, with an aeroplane, put half a gallon in, stick us down for 700."

The only perk of the job, if you can call it that, are the hours spent silently suppressing your attraction

to someone else in the office.

-Hello.

-Hello, how are you?

If you are going to do a job that you don't particularly like,

what gets you through the day is your office crush, your work crush.

-Can I help at all?

-That would be nice.

You have to have that one person that kind of brightens up your day

when you have a little chat with them

or walks into a room, and that turns into mild obsession,

and then perhaps extra marital affairs.

Is every man horny at work?

Team drinks on Friday?

That would be nice.

Shagging in the office is a risky strategy. Normally you have to wait.

A good time is if you were banging the office secretary.

Obviously, you've have last lock up at the Christmas party.

You could do her in the stock cupboard. Or him.

But other people bravely try to sneak in a bit of shagging when the office is up and running.

Obviously it's much more thrilling.

However, the one mistake I did make was...

You know when you kind of think you are going to get away with it

and you have the office to yourself.

We'd started, things had got out of hand

in one room, but where the passion had taken over, we'd ended up,

we'd gone through to another room.

Naked, now. Not thinking we are separate from our clothes.

Of course, they'd walked into the room where the clothes are and now we are in a room with nothing.

No cushions. You start doing the space invader where you are both nude.

Just going, "Ahhhh, we've got nothing!"

All you've got, in the end, when the door opens and you are caught,

is what I call the white arse get out.

Where you can just put your arse to the door,

and say, "Get out, give us a minute, get out!"

Ben, is there any chance you can give me a hand please?

Yes, yes, certainly.

There was actually a bit of scientific research done on rats.

And apparently a right will have sex with his rat female and then he will roll over and go to sleep.

But if you put another rat in there,

he'll attempt to have sex again

and if you change that female again, he'd have sex again.

He actually have sex with every change of rat female until he was all shagged out and dead.

Sometimes in my head, having known this scientifically,

I think of that kind of thing that gerbils run on.

You know, that's an office for me.

I've got the folder for you there.

Smooth.

It's horrible. Especially the men,

they are like those aphids that try and do it before the mayfly.

All the agency men, when the new girl starts in the copywriting department.

You seem them, all doing that.

The next morning, the ones who didn't mate, just like that, with their wings broken like that.

"I had to finish the night with a hand shandy."

You may only want to get up close and personal with Sally from accounts,

but those jargon-spouting bozos upstairs

want to bond all of you as a team.

Resulting in large amounts of money being spent forcing you

to play childish games with people you've seen quite enough of in the actual work place.

Now there's all these bonding schemes, isn't there?

And these management consultancy people that put out this stuff,

we're all going away for the weekend and doing paintballing and that.

You'd see a different side of me away from work.

Just you wait till the paintball.

And they think, "Jolly good, and everyone's coming together

"and I think it's really helped to create a camaraderie."

They even have a meeting at the end of it and go,

"Well, what did we learn from this?"

I've heard it can be quite dangerous.

I've heard that your testicles, if you have them,

can become quite inflamed.

If they, you know, get caught in the crossfire.

Everyone has to put up their hand and go, "Well, I learnt that

"if you fire a paintball and your mate warns you

"that someone's over there, yes, that all helps."

Of course they don't realise that as soon as they've gone everyone goes,

"Wanker, wasted my whole weekend.

"I was going to go to the football but I had to come to this shit.

"Never again, I'm just going to make out I've got a kidney illness or something next time."

# Working nine to five

# What a way to make a living

# Barely getting by

# It's all taking and no giving

# They just use your mind and you never get the credit

# It's enough to drive you crazy if you let it

# Nine to five What a way to make a living

# Barely getting by It's all taking and no giving

# They just use your mind and you never get the credit

# It's enough to drive you crazy if you let it. #