When the end comes, they say, it comes with a whimper not a bang. Well it didn’t quite happen like that. It was a long time coming, but there was bang after bang after bang.
The underground is the Venus Flytrap of jobs. There you are, contentedly buzzing about, poor but happy, when you sniff an aromatic scent wafting through the dole office. It is the smell of regular wages, cups of tea and hideously early starts. Over you tot, just to have a look and . . . there you are, stuck. Everyone, and I mean everyone, I ever met on the underground, from the managers to the cleaners, will tell you that they only ever meant to stay for six months and here they are twenty-five years later, fat and dull with a semi-detached house near Borehamwood.
The job is an object lesson in wishing you life away. The minutes go slow, but the years go quick. With nothing much to achieve it is frighteningly easy to watch your life shrivel away. Those few that escape, normally through sackings, rarely report much good news from the outside world.
The best entertainment was in being rude and surly to a rude and surly public. But I was too good at it, and slowly began standing out even from this crowd. After a few years all the best stories were about me. I felt like a man on a football terrace who continues chanting after everyone else has stopped.
Even my mentor, who had taught me everything I’d ever needed to know about being obnoxious, and provided some of my greatest stories, had disavowed me. “I’ve created a monster,” he told people. He in fact pulled off the greatest escape of the lot – medically retired at forty-one. With an almost full pension, he got married and emigrated to Australia, the only happy ending I ever heard of. Cursed with a robust constitution, I couldn’t foresee that for myself.
I went to a leaving-do for an guy retiring at sixty-five. The group manager got up to say a few words. “I’ve known Peter many years,” he told us, “and he has always been . . . reliable.” Even Peter looked disheartened.
My relationship with the public, never good, began to deteriorate. A woman came to the window and told me that her husband had put £4 into the machine and it had closed. This was not so rare and the first thing I needed was a print-out from the printer at the back of the office. So I asked her to wait a second while I got it.
“What?” she asked and I repeated it.
“How can you be so rude!” she exclaimed, appalled.
I began to feel disorientated. My eyes flitted from hers to the man standing behind her in the queue. Often in these circumstances you implore bystanders with your eyes, like a drunk groping a banister, in order that retain your sense of normality. Because when you meet enough of the public you begin to wonder if you’re mad or them.
When the lady had stormed off, the man came to the window. I asked him, a little sadly, “excuse me, but can I just ask your opinion of that?”
“No,” he said, “I’m in a hurry.”
I started to get a little deranged. I would sometimes leave the ticket office after a particularly bad day feeling genuinely ashamed at how I had behaved. I got to reckon that on a good day, that would be one for instance fresh back from annual leave, with a rest day in a couple of days and an not-too-bad supervisor, on a day like that I could sell tickets for maybe half-an-hour before a black pall would descend over me and I’d start getting arsey with people.
I had long considered the ability to put up with a job to be one of my strong points. Religious teachings are full of advice that life is a misery and the sooner you get used to it the better. So I thought I was at least doing something right. The parade of punters eager to inform me that ‘you are in the wrong job mate’ got short shrift. Even the more insightful lady who explained to me ‘you do have choices you know’ didn’t get much for her trouble. ‘Choices to what?’ I asked her, ‘pay my rent?’
Only when I read in some enlightenment manual or other that in actual fact merely working in a job you hate is not necessarily a prerequisite for happiness, that it is in fact a hindrance to work in a job you are ill-suited to – and how obvious it sounds now – did I have pause for thought. But it is not only religions that tell us we must stay in whichever job we can manage to get hold of – the government has an opinion as well. Knowing that I could not get any dole money for at least six months if I resigned, knowing that my reference from the underground would be the very model of a curate’s egg, but more especially not knowing where I was going to get another job or what I was going to do, all of this kept me in situ. All I was wondering was how bad it would have to get for something to happen. And I was soon to find out.
I had been in a meeting with my manager over two separate complaints that I had told customers to ‘fuck off’. Despite denying the first, I was slightly on the defensive when he produced the second and my modus operandi was revealed to his satisfaction. I protested, pointing out that prior to this I had not had a complaint for 18 months. My manager did not seem to notice that I had spent ten of those months off sick and was suitably impressed by the improvement in my conduct. Nevertheless, he warned me, any repeat of this kind of thing and I would be kissing goodbye to any chance of promotion to supervisor, the only way, I had ascertained, that I could possibly survive the underground much longer.
So just seven days later, just seven days later, I am serving – for the hundredth time – a customer at the excess fare window who has strayed out of the zone of her travelcard. Since the beginning of the week the ticket gates have all been working and lots of people who are used to getting away with a small saving on their fares are getting caught. I tell her, as I have most people that week, that she is supposed to pay for any extension to her travelcard before she travels, and ask her for the excess, which is £1.10. She is too busy berating me.
“Just how fucking much is it?” she says to me.
I try to choose my words carefully. “Its one pound ten,” I tell her, “but I’m not going to serve you now, you can fuck off back to zone two.” That’s my right, you see, once they swear at you, you don’t have to serve them.
She goes apeshit, as any idiot could have predicted, and starts raving that she wants to make a written complaint. I see my supervisor hopes going up in smoke. I also go apeshit. I will spare you the details, but if you have ever seen chimpanzees leaping about in their glass cage at London Zoo, you will have the rough idea.
She leaves. Half-an-hour later a man appears at my window. He wants to know if I am the man who swore at his wife. My supervisor, well aware that I am on a tinderbox level of agitation, is desperately trying to persuade the man to deal with him and not me. For my part, I have no idea what the man actually wants, unless it is a punch up. A queue is forming behind him. I tell him to go away. He starts to imply that I wanted to slap his wife. I tell him to ‘fuck off’. He says something about ‘the level of service on the underground’. I tell him, ‘look mate, you’ve got your witnesses – fuck off!’ He remains. ‘Do you want it in writing?’ I ask him. He finally fucks off – to the supervisor’s office to make a complaint.
I serve the queue, all of whom look at me as though I am a child killer. Later, when I get a moment, I reflect that this could be my last day on the underground.
In fact, to my astonishment, when I meet with my manager the next day - ostensibly for him to give me an award for some previous good work, though he tactfully neglects to bring it - I find out that I will not be sacked. A rumour suggests the reason is that the man has demanded my sacking, which has offended my manager’s principles. It is only much later that I realise how much he has stuck his neck out for me. But I am a marked man. With my temperament, and no chance of getting out of the ticket office, I am on my last legs.
They send me to anger management counselling. At first sight this appears to be an enlightened approach to dealing with my problems. The counsellor takes a shine to me, and we agree that my main problem is that I need to leave the ticket office. Everyone agrees on that. In an organisation the size of Transport for London, she says, it must be possible for there to be more opportunities than just becoming a supervisor (now closed) or a driver (two year waiting list and a hideous life choice). I try to meet with my managers to discuss her recommendations. They ignore my requests. I begin to suspect that sending me there is just a sop for when they finally throw the disciplinary book at me. One manager tells me privately that promotions, secondments and transfers are usually a reward for good behaviour, not to prevent further poor conduct.
Things go on much as before. I keep my nose clean for a few months, but then it all goes wrong. Two complaints within a couple of days. A month later one more, followed by a huge row with a supervisor. I go sick in protest. A manager phones me up in a personal capacity to tell me that I am fucked. They suspend me. My union rep gets hold of the disciplinary panel submission. He tells me I am fucked.
I have already been to one disciplinary panel meeting some years before, a small room in Kensington with two ‘centurion’ managers and my union rep. The fact that they don’t keep their young in pouches on their fronts doesn’t make it any less of a kangaroo court. I agree to resign. My manager says he will bung me a few weeks extra money to help me out. He tells me, ‘you’re a nice guy, but you are in the wrong job.’ This time there is no argument from me. The next day, after I have signed on the dotted line, he tells me that actually he can’t pay me any extra money.
So I kiss goodbye to a job for life, good holidays, great pension, 5am starts, surly punters, disloyal colleagues, mendacious management. Where do I go from here? The private sector is apparently out of bounds. Maybe I’ll try the post office.