*
Unemployed for the first time in my life I hated the ambivalence in my friends’ response to my plight. While they said they sympathised with me, even admired me for my brave act, they themselves seemed determined to stay on good terms with my ‘persecutor’. Had they been lying to me when they said they detested him even more than I did? Disgusted by their ‘two-faced’ behaviour, I decided to withdraw to the flat and keep my own company for a while.
At that point it was pride, rather than earnings that seemed to be the issue. Brought up not having to give too much thought to money, certainly not with regard to where my next meal or the one after that was coming from, I had never learned to respect its power. And anyway I was sure for a while that a suitable new employer existed somewhere, anywhere.
Aware that I didn’t have a reference, I quickly set about writing one of my own to have it copied onto firm’s notepaper and signed by a friend. Not doing too well, I decided instead to make use of a ‘reference’ which had caught my attention whilst thumbing through one of these books – ‘I was absolutely trustworthy, upright and direct. My mental and bodily hygiene was excellent. My appearance indicated no wrong inclinations, no addictions. My intellectual and physical predispositions were excellent.’
As I read it back I, of course, began to have second thoughts. Although it gave quite an accurate picture of me it was a bit too glowing, and it seemed sort of old-fashioned, too. It was only when I decided to look more closely at the book I had taken it from that I found out on the next page what the person, being described in the ‘reference’ by his commanding officer, had done in his job as a camp physician at Auschwitz Extermination Camp. He had for example conducted gruesome experiments on any prisoner – man, woman or child – within his reach and had, as a matter of course, increased the number of hospital beds available by having the existing patients murdered. In the face of such barbarity I quickly decided to discard the infamous Nazi doctor, Josef Mengele’s reference and write another one which would make a good person seem better rather than an evil person sound good.
But if the employer I had in mind did indeed exist the fact that I couldn’t find him soon changed the nature of my problem. The amount in my deposit account kept for a rainy day disappeared after a few rainy months leaving me with arrears in my mortgage repayments and a headache in meeting most of my other commitments, too.
Unfortunately I found that letting my credit cards take the strain only increased it, and when I at last took stock, I discovered I owed about the equivalent of half a year’s salary to my various creditors, which seemed about right, since I had been living off their money for the best part of six months.
With mounting debts, and a growing anxiety about what might happen to my Aunt Grace in the Home if I fell into arrears there, too, I had no alternative but to review my approach to the job market. Working in the Sales Department of a Fire Protection Company would normally have been the furthest thing from my mind but, feeling not a little unnerved by my money worries, the occupation took on a new appeal. Surely helping people to put our fires was a good cause?
chapter three
In my new job at Barton Fire Protection, it wasn’t long before I had familiarised myself with the four main types of fire extinguisher, only stumbling over the existence, and the name, of a fifth type, the recently discontinued BCF, whose full name, Bromochloridefluoromethane, must speak for itself, since no-one can pronounce it.
Once considered the most versatile extinguisher on the market, capable of putting anything out, including the dog, the significance of this extinguisher now lay in the fact that it had to be replaced, because of the harmful effect its emissions were having on the ozone layer. That fire extinguisher salesman could unashamedly try to sell replacement extinguishers for the very ones that they had only fairly recently spoken so highly of, said something about their occupation.
As did the fact that it was standard practice among these salesmen to strike terror into the hearts of their sales prospects by painting a vivid picture of the perils faced by anyone not buying their product. They might be shut down by the Fire Department, or burned to death. These unfortunate beneficiaries also had to be persuaded that the discount they were being offered on the replacement extinguishers, was in effect a charitable gift that would ensure their survival.
It didn’t take me long to find out that in Bartons, profit-making rather than fire extinguishing, was the driving force, which was fair enough in today’s world, except for the fact that in my job I was expected to make it seem, to an absolutely ridiculous extent, that it was the other way round. Since this kind of subterfuge meant subordinating all the technical facts and figures to the demands of the hidden agenda I began to have anxious thoughts about the true nature of the work that lay ahead of me.
I was starting out all over again, at the bottom of the ladder. Not the fireman’s ladder, since you weren’t allowed to go up that one – portable extinguishers were only suitable for dealing with small fires.
The right ladder, however, had its limitations, too. I was beginning to fear that the ability to climb up it, hadn’t been embedded in my genes. All I seemed to have inherited was a sense of belonging to a class of people who hadn’t had to worry too much about money, and whose reasonable position on the social scale was their divine right rather than the result of past economic success. I could see that the contents of the letter from the Building Society were threatening not just my financial standing but my sense of identity.
It wasn’t that the sum asked for was all that much, amounting as it did to little more than what I might have earned in six months. But this would be a long time, particularly in Barton Fire, I could see, when evaluated in terms of taking all the abuse I was getting from the owner, Sears, and telling all those half-truths to potential customers.
Since I couldn’t save all my salary anyway, such a comparison only served to emphasise the hopelessness of the situation and I could see that my attainment level in this matter was approaching that of a financial imbecile. My comfortable, self-appointed place in life as a kind of self-educated intellectual, qualified for this by my disposition rather than by my state, was becoming untenable.
*
Although the sales office at Barton’s wasn’t actually dingy, like most of the people who worked in dingy offices I could find plenty of other reasons for not wanting to be there. It had one redeeming feature, however. There were some colourful pictures on the walls, one of which had been a great help to me.
It was a quiet country scene – a bridge, a shallow river with ducks on it, and some people from the eighteenth century, or thereabouts, strolling along the riverbank. I had often escaped into this silent world and walked along beside these people.
“Has Sears come in yet?” I asked Benny, as he settled at his desk.
“He has indeed,” Benny drawled. “Walked past me in the corridor as usual as if I didn’t exist.”
This was typical of Sears, I thought, as I evaluated Benny’s comment. My tormentor and boss always had a way of advertising his presence. Even when you, yourself, didn’t pass him in the corridor, some other invisible person usually did.
I noticed that Benny, just like our boss, seemed unconcerned about his image. What was he like? I asked myself, as I looked sluggishly over at him, with his mop of thick, black hair, always kept saturated in hair cream and neatly combed in place. He had to be colour blind – with his pink shirt, grey tie and blue suit. But there was something about Benny I liked. As a colleague I felt he was someone you could trust. He wouldn’t often try to take the credit for other people’s hard work, and if he was moody from time to time he would never act unpleasantly or unhelpfully towards you because of it. In fact I don’t think he had a spiteful bone in his body and I didn’t think it was his fault that he wasn’t very good at his job.
But there was also something about him I didn’t like, although I could u
nderstand it. He was always trying to please Sears, and would adopt an almost worshipful demeanour when talking to him. He reminded me of something one of the wives of Kim Philby, a senior British diplomat in one of these books, who had spied with outstanding success for Stalin, once said about her husband. Mrs Philby had observed in this particular book from the attic, that her husband had always been pathetically hungry for the approbation of his Russian masters, ‘Throw him a few crumbs of praise and his spirits would respond like the tail of Pavlov’s dog’. This was just like Benny, I observed, although there were fewer occasions like this in his life, with Sears rather than Stalin as his Master, than there were in Philby’s.
Benny was married with two children, two lovely children, recent photographs of whom he displayed on his desk and any even more recent photographs of whom he never tired of showing you. The fact that he was Jewish said more to me than the photographs did however, for he certainly belied the description given of Jews in another passage from one of these books where, in a summing up of what certain Europeans were said to have thought of them prior to the Second World War – Jews were avaricious liars, untrustworthy, opportunistic and money-worshipping. Could anyone really be as bad as this? I had thought at the time?
This definitely wasn’t Benny, I could plainly see. It seemed more like a description of Sears and it could also be any one of a number of Scotsmen I was descended from. But then weren’t the Scots, coming as some of them did from Scythia, once thought to be a lost tribe of Israel, and this by educated people who had actually written books on the subject. Maybe that explained it. But poor Benny!
Apart from this vague connection and our mutual need to sell fire extinguishers for Sears, I felt I didn’t have much in common with Benny but having the threat of repossession hanging over my head, of actually being put out of my house, had given rise to feelings that I supposed were not unlike what Benny’s fellow Jews in Europe had experienced when they were being hounded by the Nazis. Being thrown out on the street as they were, and as I might be too, if things didn’t look up, was only faintly suggestive of what had ultimately happened to them, and yet the very idea of eviction alone was almost more than I could take.
But regardless of all this I thought it a good thing that I bore Benny no ill will for hadn’t the Pastor pointed out that the Jews were still beloved of God and it simply wasn’t true, as some equally religious people kept saying, that they were totally disowned and rejected. In fact the principle ‘Anti-Semitism will be punished’ was very much in force and always had been, since the time of Abraham, the Pastor was often at pains to point out, too. I therefore relished the idea that Sears, in his treatment of Benny and of course myself, wasn’t, according to the application of this principle, going to escape unpunished.
But the Pastor went even further than this, as he did with a lot of things. According to him the whole Church, including his own, was like the branch of an olive tree, a wild branch at that, which had been grafted on to another olive tree, a cultivated one, whose natural branches were the Jews. So that, as far as my attitude to Benny was concerned, this meant that Benny was all right, a Jewish Scot and not a Scottish Jew. I still wasn’t sure what I was myself, as if it mattered, Celtic-Norse, Norse-Celtic or just a plain Viking, and that was only on my mother’s side.
I needed the picture on the wall this morning, to take my mind off the mess I was in. I felt like a prisoner more than ever, and knew I had to serve out my sentence in this place if I was to keep my creditors at bay. Joining the people in the picture, walking along at a respectable distance behind them, I began to feel better.
But not for long. My salary was only half what it had been at the Food Importers. So far, it had been earned sitting at my desk processing incoming telephone enquiries about servicing fire extinguishers and I craved the additional amount Sears had assured me I would be able to make on commission from sales. But it wasn’t easy to close a sale on the telephone and the lead often had to be passed to an outside sales rep. The ten percent commission Sears had promised became only 5% when I had to share it with the other person.
Even if I could, on occasion, close a sale on the telephone, to someone who had perhaps read our ad in the Trade Directory, I had no control over the frequency with which this might occur. So results depended more on luck than on skill and as long as I remained a mere appendage to the telephone they weren’t going to get any better.
And even if he did send me out ‘on the road’, I had no idea how I would get on. It seemed that my sales and my overall circumstances were being sucked into the same black hole.
I looked up at the picture again, my eyes coming to rest on the houses in the background. I wished I could take up residence in a room behind one of the little windows that faced out onto the river. I imagined the people strolling on the path were my neighbours and I peered at them intently, making out the familiar features of the pleasant-looking, elderly man and his young female companion. The girl looked like she was the man’s daughter, but I often imagined her to be Linda. The thought of Linda was pleasant, but unsettling, as it usually was.
Picking up the pile of sales leads from the tray and skimming through them I could see that most of them were worthless. They were really just the names and addresses of some of the bigger firms who had been customers in the past and might therefore, according to Sears’ ridiculous optimism, be expected to buy again. But they would buy again when it suited them, I knew, not when somebody like me phoned up from Bartons to put the idea into their heads. Phoning them up was about as likely to produce a sale as was waiting on them to phone you. Sears had set a target for calls like this and the usual anguish and torment was present in the process.
From my in-depth experience at the Food Importers, I could see that Sears was a fairly typical second generation owner, devoid of the true understanding that only experience brings and filled with enthusiasm for his stupid ideas. He didn’t have what it takes, personally, to make many good sales in a competitive market place. Other people had to do it for him. That they were experienced and knew more about the intricacies of the work then he did, never seemed to bother him.
The way he coped with this inadequacy, on a day to day basis, was quite simple. A drop in the figures, a failure to close a sale, were always caused by his staff, who didn’t work hard enough, or weren’t good enough at their job.
I noticed that Benny was looking at the sales leads tray too.
“They don’t look up to much,” he muttered as he lifted the phone.
When he had finished and the accuracy of his assessment had been confirmed, I diverted my eyes from the emptiness of the Sales Made tray and stared at the refreshment table.
“Me too,” said Benny.
I felt that things couldn’t get much worse at that point. But I was wrong. The door opened and I turned to see Sears, the very man himself, standing in the doorway and looking very much in our direction.
chapter four
Tall and thin with fair hair, watery eyes and large, uneven teeth, Sears wasn’t a man of flesh and blood. Having a huge pool of labour to draw on, he played with his employees, like a child with toy soldiers, disposing of them and replacing them at will, so I had been told, without any valid reason, and attributing the huge turnover in staff to anything other than his own involvement in it.
That something should be done about people like him was a thought that occurred to me daily. Like the new boss I had left behind at the Food Importers, Sears had only got where he was by an accident of birth, which had even helped him to win a seat on the local Council representing the very people he despised. He was a leader without leadership qualities, I felt, who didn’t know how to manage his employees without oppressing them. He seemed to assume that his superior position actually made him superior while what he really was he obviously managed to hide, from himself I felt, and from many people who should have known better.
“Morning,” cam
e his abrupt greeting. “Early with the coffee, aren’t you?”
‘Was I supposed to agree with this?’, I asked myself, aware that I was becoming allergic to this man, who always spoke in a tone of voice that suggested he disapproved of you, who always knew best, who never owned up to being wrong.
“How are the leads going?” he asked us.
“We’re getting through them, Mr Sears.” Benny told him weakly.
“That’s not what I asked you. Have you made any actual sales?” Sears blurted out in reply.
“No, but …”
“And you Grant?”
“No. We didn’t expect to …” I began to explain.
“You don’t put enough effort into it” he snapped, cutting me off.
Here it was, hard work, only hard work and, of course, your hard work, was the answer to everything.
“It’s the leads,” I felt I had to say. “They’re all for existing customers, Mr Sears.”
His watery eyes bulged and “What’s wrong with that?” he sneered. “It’s existing customers who have got us where we are.”
“But they don’t buy until they really need something,” I countered, almost in a whisper.
“Well that’s what I’m paying you for. Talk them into it.”
It was no use. The man just couldn’t grasp the fact that hard work and wasted effort could sometimes be the same thing.
“It’s time you got out of the office and canvassed some shops,” he said to me. There’s a lot of people out there. Why are so many of them taking their business elsewhere?”
The situation was absolutely hopeless, I felt, as the door closed behind him. His ability to misdirect and discourage your efforts was proving to be much better than my judgement had been, in coming to work here. But at least he was sending me ‘out on the road’, although ‘how many shopkeepers actually needed a fire extinguisher, anyway?’ I asked myself. If a bucket of water wouldn’t do it, surely the best and cheapest course of action for most of them would be to make for the door.
Am I Being Followed? Page 3