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Some years ago, during one of my disturbingly frequent periods of being jobless between writing projects, I worked for a chap who owned a language school.
I never ascertained his proper age, but I'd guess at about 65-70. His family also worked in the business, and each day was like a running soap opera.
His son was the most timid man I've ever known, who'd be nearly reduced to tears whenever his father shouted at him (which was frequently). His wife was a shrew of a woman, and his daughter tried to find as many jobs as possible which would result in her being away from Brighton during the weekdays.
This fellow would often wander into the office, muttering to himself about his horrific life and asking himself why he didn't just give everything up. He'd routinely grab telephones from his staff, mid-call, in an effort to take over, and only end up confusing the caller.
He'd wander in during the dead of night and rearrange paperwork, presumably in an effort to feel as though he was doing something, meaning any work carefully filed the night before was at risk of being found to be lost somewhere in a mountain of paper the next morning, random document stapled to random document like a Frankenstein's monster of filing.
He didn't trust computers to "tell me[him] the truth", and used to use the mouse upside down (queerly, I discovered that was the way he'd started, so his brain had adapted accordingly and he was actually able to navigate the OS at a reasonable speed).
Half my time there was spent writing complaint letters which he'd dictate whilst working himself into paroxysms of rage, pretty much at anything and everything. Letters to the post office, to taxi companies, to the council (he'd tripped on a paving slab that morning).
The job came to an end when he tried to extend the insecure bullying of his family to the rest of his staff, which included me. In a way, I'm glad I had the job for a while. As a writer, I managed to extract more character study from that one man in a few weeks than I've seen in years. |
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