You know you need a new job when… Your blind boss insists on driving you home, while you sit in the passenger seat telling her whether there is any oncoming traffic heading your way.
For those who have met Madame Bowes, an introduction is just not needed- you won’t easily forget the encounter. In her sixties with the poise of a first class ballerina, this woman's elocution rivalled the Queen's, holding an air of old-school glamour and elegance in a ‘Street Car Named Desire’ kind of way. Eccentric, demanding and not quite belonging to the 21st first century, Madame Bowes had been a show girl in her day, travelling around the world appearing on BBC television when it was only on at teatime in black and white. She had never married (although I have a theory about a long term affair with a married man) and lived with her sister, also unmarried, in a big house with a never-ending garden. She ran a dance school (and perhaps still does despite her cataracts which got worse and worse with the years) that I had attended as a kid for elocution lessons in an attempt to rid me of my Essex twang, (epic fail) and she asked me years later (Essex twang still intact) to help her with her drama classes at the Saturday school. Somehow along the way I had unwittingly been convinced into teaching the tap class to the under 6s.
I hadn’t done tap since I was 8. She was blind. It was a good arrangement.
Every week she dropped me home afterwards in her royal blue Ford escort that wasn’t old enough to be classic, but old enough to be a piece of junk- me sitting in the passenger seat telling her when a car was coming in our direction. She may as well have been wearing a blindfold. She was very proud, and hid her problem with her sight rather well as we pranced round the dance floor, but being in a driver’s seat gave the game away slightly as she’d ask me, “Ok are we coming to the end of the road?”
In more ways than one Madame.
You know you need a new job when…. your boss yells at you for not selling drugs.
The first time I met Miguel, the owner of Mister Jules Discotec, was about an hour into my first night of the job. I had convinced the assistant manager with my best smile and broken Spanish to give me some work- it was November and I was new to Malaga and the big bad world in general at eighteen years old. I had been outside serving drinks when one of the side windows opened and smacked me in the back of the head. Miguel was leaning out of it, waving his arms and shouting at me, I presume for being in the way, perhaps for making a dent in the wood of the window frame with my skull.
He pointed to the table of two girls and a boy sat on the far end of the terrace.
“Que bebiendo?”
“No, not drinking anything,” I replied, “Quieren drugas.” They had asked me for drugs, what did I sell? When I said I sold nothing they had laughed.
“Well? What did you tell them?”
“Nada.”
He swore at me in Spanish, “Go ask what they want Stupido, make sure they order drinks too.”
He muttered and slammed the window. So now I was a drug dealer. He hadn’t asked me my name.
The discotec’s lisence was till 2am, and when they shut the doors I was sat on a bar stool outside on my own in the cold and was told to watch for police. If they drove by I had to knock on the window, this being the signal for Miguel to turn the music down and tidy the drugs away.
It was a lock-in every night where I was always locked outside.
Out on my barstool I thought of the restaurants I worked in as a teenager, the presentable English waitresses ‘front of house’ making the tips and the ever-changing number of immigrant and foreign chefs, cleaners and pot wash boys out in the back. Now I was the one that didn’t understand, that earned less money, the one they laughed at. It’s a strange experience being the foreigner. Miguel had muddy brown eyes that simmered with whatever emotion was overcoming him at the time, when I think of him, I think of a kettle on the boil shaking with heat as steam pours from every orifice.
When the club was full, I used to hide in the toilets for as long as I could until Miguel noticed I was missing, perching on the toilet seat surrounded by an explosion of toilet paper, water, broken glass and sick. Shovelling it all out at the end of the night, I’d find enough drugs to stock a small pharmacy.
Malaga was a law unto its own; exhilarating, but mostly exhausting when you end up on the wrong side of it. I felt culturally challenged to the point of stupidity. Not because I struggled with the language; I learnt fast. I felt stupid for being so naïve; I had thought I was so grown up being out there, but realised I knew nothing about the world and what actually went on when the sun went down.
You know you need a new job when… There are more cockroaches behind the bar than there are euros in your pay check.
Oh yeh, Miguel was a dirty fucker too.
You know you need a new job when… You get to your office and the place is stripped bare, consequently finding out your boss was using a fake name and he’s disappeared back to Canada. With your wages.
Escaping from that crack den of a job, I ended up in an office in Fuengirola selling some sort of fake time-shares to corporate companies. I wasn’t technically told this at the beginning, but worked it out from the fact that the two Canadian brothers running the joint had no clue about investments but a lot about bouncing money in offshore accounts, different phones were answered with different company names and they shoved a lot of white powder up their noses all day long. There was a phase where we were ringing China for a while, although god knows what they were selling those guys because I’m sure it wasn’t two weeks in a villa in Marbella.
The receptionist was a lively American woman who had been brought up in a weird cult in the southern states of the U.S, been forced into an arranged marriage and consequently fled to the Costa del Sol. Oh, and she had a thing for sex clubs in Germany.
The morning I stood outside the office looking through the window to an empty room, I was over 300 euros short and jobless; the two Canadians having disappeared off into the sunset. To this day I don’t even know what their real names were. (The receptionist went back to Germany.)
You know you need a new job when… you've prentended you're a chef, then forgotten to put sherry in the sherry trifle.
When the Hercules Carvery asked me whether I had any chef experience, I said yes, yes of course!
Which may have been a slight fib.
Next thing I know I’m in chef whites being given a recipe sheet for all the desserts they required. Homemade desserts. An array of bailey’s cheese cakes, Victoria sponges and shortbreads were hence produced by moi, on top of the fact my official title was ‘starters and desserts chef’ so I was whipping up battered tiger prawns and salads caramelized onion jam too. This, let me tell you, should be marked as near miracle considering that the most you’ll usually get out of me is a toasted sandwich or cereal when I’m in the kitchen.
I was starting to get the knack of the cheffing shizzle when I came head to head with the most important dessert of all- the sherry trifle. This was a carvery- built to cater for ex-pats, retired golf players and all those owning a set of false teeth; Sherry trifle was intrinsic to their culture of denture-dating over a roast dinner.
And I forgot to put the sherry in it.
I stared at my master piece sadly; It had taken bloody hours- layering up the sponge fingers, the fruit, the custard made from SCRATCH, the cream whipped up BY HAND smothered on top. The owner was a bit of a battleaxe who blatantly saw through the exaggerated kitchen experience on my ever-colourful C.V so I decided to do some damage control before she sniffed me out; digging a hole in one side with a serving spoon and pouring half a bottle of sherry in. I then tipped the bowl almost vertical, propping it up out of sight for twenty minutes, hoping the sherry would soak through to the sponge fingers on the other side.
That night we had a few pissed OAPs on one side of the restaurant, the other half looking suspiciously sober.
-You know you need a new job when… the customers have jumped out of a Martina Cole paperback.
This guy was the real deal, looked like a relative of Scarface and was built like a bull- a brick shithouse of a bloke who would sit at the end of the bar for 36 hours stretches (the place was open 24/7) on a cocktail of vodka redbull and coacaine. Unfortunately for us, Mr Gangster took a disliking to my boyfriend after he was told to refuse to serve him when his antics got too much for the management, (delegation is a piss-take). His cronies jumped in front of his car on the way home, Mr Ganstger leaning in the passenger window and grabbing him. Firmly. His exact words were- (I didn’t forget them in a hurry) “If you ever fuck with me again I’ll put you in the boot of my car and take you somewhere where no one will find you.”
You know you need a new job when… you work with the French.
Crazy French lady of the ‘Havana beach café’ drove me nuts.
This woman looked like she was always one vallium away from a nervous breakdown, frazzled as if she had spent the day sticking her fingers in plug sockets while her French artist husband sat in the kitchen, so laid back from years of smoking weed, that not much got cooked at all really. I ran the bar and watched the circus unfold.
The place was technically run by the only other waitress- a Chinese girl that walked and talked at a hundred miles per hour but she was so nice, and the customers loved her. It made me laugh that she didn’t know any of their names- even the regulars had been taking their morning breakfast their everyday for the four years she had worked there.
“I am good with names,” she explained exasperatedly. “They just all look the same to me!”
You know you need a new job when… there are no customers.
This boss was the nicest guy I’ve ever met, one of those guys that never catches a break but is always still gentle and generous with everyone he comes across. A guy who taught me so much about business and families and life. And crosswords- we did a lot of those, and I spent a lot of time making us cups of coffee and writing poetry. All very picturesque, but I served maybe two customers a day and spend all my money in the fruit machine that he didn’t have a key for. Not very profitable.
You know you need a new job when… your ex-boyfriend is the manager.
Damn it. That was the best job I ever had- I earnt more money in that restaurant working part-time whilst at uni than I ever have since graduating. Windsor was full of tourists, lovely Americans tipping ten percent from 11am-11pm, and I worked long hours, ran round like a nutter and got paid well for it. But he got the restaurant in the ‘divorce’ with the matching set of friends, I got uni and that set of friends. End of dollar.
You know you need a new job when… you get paid 750 euros per month for 6 days per week 12 hours per day in the Spanish heat.
The novelty of being in a foreign country all by myself back then seemed to feed me instead, and I think that particular boss was a sharp woman, savvy enough to pick up on that fact.
That works out at 2.60 EUROS an hour. What a div. All I could see was the sunshine. (And the free alcahol).
The funny thing was, I was as happy as Larry.
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vontrap where did u go??! bb 25d97a8
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