Work - Part 2 The Grumpy Guide To

Work - it's a life sentence with no reprieve.

I know some people who work all day and all night,

don't take a break at all and die at the age of 33.

They're absolutely having a marvellous life.

A minimum of 40 years spent with our nose to the grindstone

whilst breaking our backs with the daily drudgery.

Companies, they're all in profit. It all seems to be working.

There's no reason why you should pull your tripe out if you don't have to.

We're expected to give 110%,

sacrificing time with friends and family,

all so that we can be paid a pittance making some faceless company's profits soar.

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

I am not a number. I am a free man.

Well, I would be if I could just escape the maximum security prison of work.

At work, it's like school. You've got your mates to keep you sane.

Imagine doing a job in an office and you had no mates.

Einstein said that space and time were relative, which is how you know that he once worked the 9 to 5.

At work, time becomes elastic, stretching out to infinity as another crushingly dull day wears on,

leaving you staring into space.

One of the jobs I was given was standing next to a bottle-washing machine.

It was under a skylight, it was very hot, it was very noisy because it was very echoey.

The bottles came round and as they came round, me and this other guy

took the bottles off and put them in crates, that was our job.

The guy who I was doing it alongside wore a toupee.

I remember being distracted by that for a while,

and he'd been doing this job for 23 years.

23 years. I said, "I don't understand how you do it."

He said, "it's a great job, you don't have to think."

And that seemed to me a very unattractive

thing about a job to me, but to him it was absolutely marvellous that you didn't have to think.

As it turned out, I later became a disc jockey, and it turned out you didn't have to think there anyway.

What's the time? Oh, no, I must not look at the clock,

I'll go to the toilet, that'll kill a minute or two perhaps.

I've only just been, I think.

Oh, no, I'm going to look at the clock.

Oh, no, I bet it's...

I bet it's only 12:30, I've got half an hour till lunch, I'll die of boredom, I know I will,

probably survive till one minute to one and then I'll die of boredom, that's what'll happen.

Maybe it's five to one.

Oh, if it's five to one, I've only got five minutes.

I can just about survive that.

Right, here we go, let's look at the clock.

Oh, ten past nine.

You know you're in for three hours of just

slow-burning doom when somebody says "OK, I've got the minutes of

"the last meeting, this is the agenda for this meeting,

"if anybody thinks they have any issues or matters

"they'd like to add to the agenda, please could we do that now."

And then they just go through piecemeal, piecemeal,

just droning on and just achieving nothing.

One of life's most important lessons to learn is the art of skiving.

How to pass those endless hours whilst looking

like you're busily and efficiently fulfilling your work obligations.

Such as carrying piles of folders down long corridors,

printing off pieces of paper and hurriedly leaving the office

or disappearing down to the archive library

to find a document that simply doesn't exist.

Surely anyone who works for a company, the rule of thumb

has got to be to get away with the least work possible, hasn't it?

It's sort of like social security, it's kind of welfare state writ large really.

You know, companies, they're all in profit, it all seems to be working,

there's really no reason why you should pull your tripe out if you don't have to.

Everybody accepts that air traffic controllers work for... I don't know how it is, what do they do?

35 seconds on and then two-and-a-half days off.

I don't know. And I'm reassured by that, I don't want to be coming back

from my holidays and it being landed by someone on work experience

who's fried, who's been on the last 18 hours,

because Dennis hasn't turned up cos his wife's got a bit of waterworks troubles.

I don't want it, I want people who are right on it.

"Here I go, my 35 seconds, I'll land this one."

Bonk, done, great. "I'm off, lads."

I'm perfectly happy with that, I feel safer knowing that.

I liked finding places to escape, kind of little nooks and crannies

where you could tuck yourself in and not be found for a bit,

all of that sort of stuff.

I was just quite good at covering my tracks

when I would award myself a break.

The smartest thing to do when you're given a task

that takes you away your desk, is to do it immediately,

very quickly, to run to the place where you have to drop off the whatever.

Drop it off and then award yourself 20 minutes,

roughly what it would have taken to go off and do something else.

You have to do that otherwise you just become a number, otherwise,

you just become somebody who gets told what to do by somebody else.

You absolutely have to keep a sense of your own autonomy in an office like that, otherwise you go mad.

You have to break the rules.

I'd get so bored in the end that I had a little cylindrical

pencil sharpener, and if you rolled it, it would go in a curve.

So I used to put two paperclips at the end of my desk

just wide enough for the little pencil sharpener thing to roll though it.

And I would roll it from the desk there, and I got so good

at this with all the practice, I could get like 20 out of 20,

and it would roll and roll and roll and roll and go right through it.

If it had been an Olympic sport, I'd have had a gold medal.

NEWS REPORTER: '20 years ago, most adults in Britain smoked. It was fashionable.

'Today that balance has shifted.

'Two-thirds of adults don't smoke, yet in offices and workplaces

'up and down the country,

'it's still the non-smokers who are on the defensive.'

The biggest skivers, I have to say, are smokers

and I used to really, really resent working anywhere,

particularly on a production line, where they'd say "I'm just going outside for five minutes,.

"Can you cover me?" So suddenly you're doing this because someone's having a fag outside.

And they come back, and you say,

"Right, ready to get back to normal now?" "Yeah."

Then someone on your left says, "I'm just going outside for five minutes."

"What?! You're going for a cigarette as well?"

You're covering for the bloody smokers and they come back in stinking of smoke,

thinking they're great cos they skived off. Aren't they clever? No.

I love cigarette breaks.

I hated it when they banned cigarette smoking from all places of enjoyment

because we're not allowed to have fun in England.

This is another one, for those that work at home, you're not allowed to have a cigarette in your own house

any more, because it's a workspace, and that's illegal.

Just as a bit of a sideline.

Smokers are real zealots, they absolutely believe it's their right,

"You can't stop me", but we should all have the same time.

They expect you to be working and picking up their phone while they've gone out smoking a fag.

Well, I'm sorry, it's got to work two ways.

What you should do, if you work with someone who smokes,

is if they have ten minutes, you should add it all up.

And say, "That's like two days this month that you've had, that I haven't.

"Therefore next Monday and Tuesday, I'm having it

"and you've got to cover my phones, and then we are all square."

And they don't like it. They can't see it.

They say "I need to go and get a nicotine fix..."

..they think it's almost like their religion.

"I can't work Wednesday because, you know, I have to sit at home

"with a pork chop on my head",

or whatever their religious belief dictates.

Smokers are a bit like that.

You're at your most informal in a smoking break because you feel that you're not in the office,

so you can stand there with fag in hand, going,

"Well, actually, this is what we should be doing."

I think a lot of decisions are made at that point.

So perhaps smoking should be made compulsory.

So when office life just gets too much,

or you simply can't be bothered to get up

and face the journey into work,

the classic response is to pull the sickie,

simply the best skive tactic of all.

Hello, it's me.

I'm really sick today. I don't think I'm going to be able to make it in.

-Right.

-I don't know what it is. I'm really sorry. (COUGHS)

'OK, thanks.' (COUGHS)

Weasel's not coming in today.

The reason people throw sickies is basic resentment because we don't get enough holidays.

Europe gets far more holidays, they have siestas, for God's sake.

People over here just try and sleep at their desks for an hour

and hope that no-one will notice.

People often say to me when they know what I do, they say,

"I can't do voices, I don't know how you do it, I can't do voices."

and I think, "You can actually."

And there's one voice that everyone can do and it's the off-sick voice.

It's the making the phone call and going,

"I can't come in today, I've got this terrible thing, and I can't make it.

"I'm really sorry, but maybe tomorrow, OK, sorry."

And I think, "You can all do that voice!"

If you are going to throw one, a bit of advice from an expert.

Use complicated words.

Like, for example, if you're feeling sick, just call it bilious.

That's a great word for sick.

And make sure when you phone the office you get hold

of the most stupid person in the office, who's not going to know what bilious is.

The kind of person who doesn't know what obese is, but knows what fat is.

I was a method skiver,

so I used to do this thing where I'd spin round and round and round,

make myself really dizzy and then phone.

But you have to invent some sort of

biologically valid reason.

You have to sort of creatively find

a language that makes your hangover sound like a proper disease.

So you get hold of Darren, in paper clips,

and go, "Darren, tell the boss I'm feeling bilious."

Or something like "Darren, I've got UDI."

And they'll think that sounds a bit complicated, whereas in fact it's just unidentified drinking injury.

I have to confess, I'm not proud of this,

my grandfather has died about...

..17 times.

And I don't feel too guilty about it because the grandfather

that's died 17 times is a grandfather I've never met before.

He died way before I was born.

If you fake a death in the family to get off work,

the problem is that you have to follow that through.

So I had a job where the next day after the funeral, I had to,

because I have to take two days off, one because of the initial shock and secondly for the funeral.

Then I wore black the next day after I rang as a mark of respect

and then everyone was consoling me.

That, that's not nice.

That made me feel like I had to leave that job

just on principle of being a charlatan.

When you are off sick as well, you wish you hadn't done it,

if you ever do do it, because you think, "What do I do now?"

You have your five minutes extra in bed and think, "Oh, I feel better now."

And then you think, "I can't go into work cos I said I was ill.

"I can't go out in case someone sees me and, well, I'm stuck now."

And you think, "What do I do?" And anybody who rings up,

you have to remember to do the sick voice,

just in case it's work, it never is.

Just go, "Hello, no, I'm not very well.

"Oh, hi, yeah, yeah.

"Squash? I'm not sure, tomorrow?

"I'll probably be off tomorrow, but I'll be feeling better, yeah, OK."

The greatest art form is pulling a sickie while you're at work.

There have been times where I've thought I cannot live

through another moment of this.

I can't live through another moment of this.

And so I would wander around trying to look a bit peaky, hoping someone

would go, "Oh, what's wrong, Shappi?"

"Ooh, I'm feeling a bit faint."

"You don't look very well, why don't you go home." Of course, they never do.

So you end up going, "Hi-i-i-i"

to these robots who wouldn't care if you lived or died anyway.

Worse than the sickie is the sanctimonious bellius endiuses.

Who come into work as ill as possible and display it to others.

"I'm so sick, but I've dragged myself in.

"Look at these itchy lesions, oh, my T-cells are so low, but I'm not even going to take lunch."

Or just coming in with a bandana and no eyebrows, going, "Right, let's do some overtime.

"Whoo! Let's get into it! Oh, my pancreas is hanging out. Good, it improves me."

I think men are skivers.

Just imagine if men had sport and periods.

Listen, nothing would happen in the world.

There was a time when the office was filled with typewriters,

memos would be written and hand-delivered by a mail boy.

Then computers arrived and supposedly revolutionised

the way we work, increasing office productivity and efficiency.

Computers are meant to make life easy. Wrong.

They were absolutely invented to improve, speed up the work process

with communication, etc.

Like it said, with documents spreadsheets all of that... No.

And now that computers are so portable that they fit into your briefcase,

there is literally no escape and you can never log off from work.

What management have managed to do

is they've managed to make computers

and mobile phones and laptops and all the new technology

as a device to get people to work harder.

So you sit on a train in the morning and people are already having

to do work, and they're on their mobiles and they're all sorting out stuff,

whatever it is, on the way to work.

At least in the 1820s people didn't have to drag their power loom

home with them and keep weaving as they went up the street, did they?

I sometimes ring up one of the people at my agency and she almost doesn't know how to speak.

It's extraordinary, she's young, 24, and she's obviously been brought up

with the e-mail thing, and it just takes longer.

You sit there, and especially if you're not a natural typist like me, you know.

I wasn't schooled in that way. I don't type very well, it takes me ages.

Like having a speech impediment, you just think, "I can't communicate as quickly as you can do that."

So I ring her up and she'll say, "Yes, I think so, yep.

"I'll send you an e-mail." And you think, "Just talk to me!"

Some work e-mails are so boring and banal you could fit them in the subject line, can't you?

"Fancy lunch at 1?"

That's it, I don't even need to spend time opening the thing.

I hate the dot, dot, dot reveal system.

"Can I borrow your...?"

Please, please make this worthwhile, there better be something in there.

Open it. "..a stapler, ta-dah!"

There's huge amounts of misunderstanding.

My ex-girlfriend and I used to e-mail each other a lot.

And we could tell from the position of a comma,

or whether it was two dots or three dots at the end, what we meant.

We had a code. We never said what it meant, but you could just tell.

She'd say, "You all right?" You'd think, "Yes, why?" She'd say, "You didn't put three dots at the end."

Nowadays it's all, like, Facetube and, like, MySpace and all of dem types o' fings.

Apparently I'm on Face...

Facelook, or -book, or whatever, the inter...web. Apparently I'm there.

My auntie phoned me up the other day and said, "Are you really going to such-and-such?"

I said, "I don't know what you're talking about, Auntie." She said, "We had a chat on FB."

Yeah, Facebook. "We had a chat on FB last night."

I went, "No. I am not on it. I don't even know how to switch the thing on.

"I'm not on it, it's not me, someone is being me."

So there's people...

being me, out there.

There was no internet in my day.

When I worked in offices there wasn't Twitter, there wasn't Facebook.

It's bad enough now. I mean, I write.

I write stuff. I write books, I write...stuff.

And you know that I have a deadline if my Twitter page is really active.

If I'm on Twitter all day, you know I have a massive deadline.

And I'm tearing myself apart with panic,

but really needing to tell people that, "I miss rolling down hills. I used to do it loads as a kid."

It fits perfectly into our British psyche though, sadly. "I don't want to disturb you.

"So I'll text you. Can I text you?" This is the one I have now.

People say, "I'll text you what might be a good time to speak. Then text me back when I can ring you."

You think, "Why don't you just ring me and see if I can talk to you now? Cos I probably can, in all honesty."

I'm not a massive Philistine about these things, or even a Luddite particularly,

but I get more pain from the computer world than I consider I would get pleasure,

er, so to speak.

Come on! Come on!

A hero of mine, Mr Paul Weller, calls the internet "the devil's window".

And I quite like that. I can sort of see what he means about that.

For all we hate about work, for all we gripe about work,

for all it oppresses us into a dark pit of frustration and tedium,

there's one thing we dread about it more than any other.

And that is the day when suddenly it's taken from us.

-It's our way or the

-BLEEP

-highway, that's what I'm telling you.

And if you want to do anything different, go and do it for another firm.

And before you know it you've got the DCM -

Don't Come Monday.

I don't think at the moment we can sort of accept you continuing as Sales Manager.

I've been sacked from lots of jobs,

mostly for minor things like not turning up, ever.

I think you've got the potential, don't get me wrong with that,

but I do think that the time isn't right at the moment.

I've never been sacked. I've been axed! Is that the same as sacking?

-You're sacked!

-Thank you, CJ.

The best job I got sacked from was the sandwich shop

and they were so lovely that they had a little goodbye party for me.

Everyone was going, "Oh, why are you leaving?" "I was sacked."

My boss was going, "Oh, we love her but she never turned up."

And the reason I stopped turning up to that job was that the boy I really fancied left.

You know it's happening because it becomes more formal.

You go in, "Mr Maloney, we need to discuss your...

"your future with us."

And at this point you think, "I haven't got a future, have I?"

I re-employ this idiot here, Morrissey. YOU'RE sacked.

I got fired from that job because there was

this miserable sort of chap, who probably originated from Middle Earth.

He was having a drink out this particular evening

and I took his glass and I collected it and put it into me little basket and he snatched it back out again.

And he said, "Hey, hey, hey!"

And he pointed to the half centimetre of beer still left in it

and said, "Still tuppenceworth left in there, son. Hey?!"

And I think he grassed me up.

-You're sacked.

-That does seem rather unfair.

Oh, it is unfair.

Life is unfair.

I am unfair.

-You're both sacked.

-Thank you, CJ.

I've never been fired, but I've never been

in a job long enough to be fired, I don't think.

I'm usually on to the next one before they get a chance to sniff me out,

and go, "Hang on a minute, you're rubbish. Get out, get out!"

Technically every time you're booed off stage doing comedy you're being fired, I would argue.

And that's happened a few times.

Once I was in a pub doing a gig at the back, under a marquee.

Still 50, 100 people there, enough to get the old Imodium gland going

if you're scared of public speaking, like me, which is ridiculous, but I am.

And the gig was already going badly and the talking was starting,

and I wasn't far away from the booing and the, "Off!"

I'm about to be essentially sacked, even though I'm self-employed.

And this is a completely true story.

A Great Dane, which obviously lived at the pub,

has come in right at the moment when I'm trying to hold the gig together, run on stage,

and anyone who's been approached by a Great Dane knows it's terrible,

and stuck it's nose straight into my crutch, the way dogs do, and sniffed my balls

right at the moment when I was trying to hang onto this gig.

That was it. Because that was the funniest thing that had happened.

So I was sacked then by the audience.

I think that counts, right? I did not complete my job for the wage.

I was fired by Clapham.

"Heckle him with hummus, heckle him with a quail's egg. Get off, you'll never entertain Clapham.

"What do you know about us, mon?

"Take that. I've been to Sudan, you don't know jack."

I've been fired from the Radio 1 Breakfast Show.

I mean, fired is an emotive word cos I was halfway through a contract and they gave us an afternoon show,

but I signed a contract to do the Breakfast Show for two years and was fired after seven months,

but I wasn't on the dole, so I know "fired" is an emotive word.

I think there are bosses out there who love sacking people in a kind of sado-masochistic way.

You know the kid, at the age of 11, first day at school, wet themselves.

They know that from the age of 11 to 18 they're always going to

be known as the kid in that school who wet themselves on the first day.

They're the ones who become bosses and they're the people who take out

that little puddle of pee on everyone personally for the next 40 years.

"I'm sacking you because, at the age of 11,

"I peed my pants.

"It's personal."

We were absolutely overjoyed, once we knew that we had another job.

We regarded it as a mercy killing.

It was. It was the radio equivalent of being taken to the Dignitas clinic.

You don't see it any more, when people had had a dog for ages

and its back legs had gone and they'd had wheels put on.

# Rollin', rollin', rollin', rollin'

# Keep rollin', rollin', rollin', rollin'... #

Old women dragging this poor thing with wheels round the market.

It's like, "Listen, I know you love your dog, but it's over.

"This thing is finished,

"you might as well...

"There are other dogs, let it go."

The dog has got wheels for legs.

Our Breakfast Show had wheels for legs after the first fortnight.

# Rollin', rollin', rollin', rollin'

# Keep rollin', rollin', rollin', rollin'... #

The only time I've been sacked was as a warm-up man...

(AS ROSS) ..for Jonathan Ross's programme in about 1992,

Fascinating Facts, or Fantastic Facts, it was called, for ITV.

Jonathan wasn't doing much at the time, a comeback thing after The Last Resort had finished.

We did the first one and it didn't go very well. And I was booked to do eight, and I was sacked.

I take great delight in telling Jonathan, yeah, you might like my impression of you,

and you might say, "You do a really good impression of Stewart Lee"...

(AS LEE) ..but don't forget, Jonathan, for all those compliments, you were the one who sacked me.

And you're the only person, ever, to have done that.

And that's what I call a fascinating fact.

I got sacked without knowing it once. I walked on...

It was one of these jobs,

I was a young actor and I had to get myself out to

somewhere like Maidenhead. I don't know where Maidenhead is.

So I get all the maps and things, and I find my way.

Bus, train, Tube, train. I get out there and you're in the middle of nowhere

and someone then comes and picks you up.

And it was a job...Ray Winstone was on it, A Very Secret Army, something like that.

Geoffrey Palmer as well, some really big actors in this thing.

Oh, God. He does go on, doesn't he?

It was called Fairly Secret Army, Morrissey. Shut up.

So I arrive and I'm met by someone and they send me to a room, the green room,

where the actors hang out while they're waiting to go and work.

And all the other actors come in and I recognise them,

I recognise Ray Winstone and Geoffrey Palmer and I'm so thrilled.

I'm not long out of drama school and I'm thinking,

"This is the big time. I'm going to work with some really top acts and I'm so excited."

Someone's brought me a cup of tea and the actors have come in and they nod at me, they don't know who I am.

I can hear them talking when they're making tea, going, "Have you heard, they've brought some poor actor

"all the way out from London and he hasn't got a part.

"They've just cut it, they've just cut his part."

And I'm sitting there...

..listening, like this, and I have a sip of my tea.

And they say, "It's so terrible.

"I hope they pay him. He should have a word with his Equity member," and all this is going on.

This chitter-chatter, Ray going, "Yeah, it's terrible, innit?"

All of a sudden, someone comes in and goes, "Neil Morrissey?"

as if there's a bunch of strangers in the room.

"Can we have a word?"

And they're all going, "Oh, my God, it was him, it must have been him, it was him."

So they take me out and tell me, "We're terribly sorry, the director thinks you're a lovely actor

"and he really wants to work with you again, but unfortunately your part's been cut.

"Sorry.

"Here's the bus fare to the train station. Ta-ra."

Bastards!

Oh, Morrissey.

As CJ would've said, I didn't get where I am today by making excuses. Hard graft, man, is what it takes.

Something this colony knows little about.

Nine to five was an anathema to me, it could never have been done.

Work is a pain in the arse. And at the end of it you only get a quid.

More than anything, that job taught me that one of the worst smells you can ever encounter in your life

is the smell of a potato peeling machine.

All I know now is there's no guaranteed career path

that will keep you away from management stupidity.

I was like the contestant on The Generation Game who did the job very badly in an endearingly rubbish way.

If you wake up in the morning and you don't need to be somewhere, that is a step into the abyss.

Cleaning toilets in the factory in Oldham, it taught me never to have

a man piss in your house, that's what it taught me.

# 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, yeah, they've got you where they want you

# There's a better life and you think about it, don't you?

# It's a rich man's game, no matter what they call it

# And you spend your life putting money in his wallet... #