You are in:
Arkwright - The Independent Voice
Help! I'm being taken over by free long life light bulbs and have worked out that if I'm to get full use out of the quantity now in my possession I will only need to live to be 120 years old. With careful use I think I might be able to make them last till I'm even older than that which is a reassuring thought and a real saving.
Filling in a couple of vouchers started the ball rolling but somewhere in the system my registration must have multiplied and I'm now receiving a package of another two or three bulbs almost daily. The postman's witty "Guess what I've got for you today?" has really started to wear thin and his persistent jibes about "Seeing the light" and "Being switched on" have pushed the boundaries of my humour in the season of goodwill.
Each year at this time I am reminded of my six days as a Christmas postie, the first paid employment I ever had. What an eye opener that week proved to be. I bounded into the sorting office at 6am on my first morning full of enthusiasm. In those days no thought was given to inductions or health and safety, I was simply assigned to a full-time postman who told me under no circumstances was I to take "Christmas boxes" from grateful householders and not to bother delivering mail if I heard a dog barking. That said, he told me I could start sorting letters into little pigeonholes. Yes it really was that long ago, before technology took hold, but not quite so long ago as the Penny Black. After a couple of hours I was entrusted with a postman's sack and away I went to do my round which went without mishap so I returned to base imagining I'd be given some more post to deliver. You'd have thought I'd walked back in with two heads the looks I got; I sidled back to the pigeonholes. My minder clearly wasn't happy and hissed at me that I'd done the round quicker than he did the rest of the year so that over the coming days if I was finished as quickly again to go and sit in a coffee bar for a couple of hours, certainly don't come back and offer to do other work. Those heady days of demarcation! So disgusted was I by his approach to work I felt no guilt when I accepted and pocketed any of "his" Christmas boxes during the remaining period of my employment. Any further illuminating taunts from my current postman and he could find his Christmas box redirected too.
Much of my time in the early part of December was diverted to price adjustments thanks to Mr Darling's reduction in VAT. One can imagine that attending Cabinet meetings at the moment is probably like sitting at the Mad Hatter's tea party but not as funny. My customers - who'd been debating on whether to invest in a noseclip but held off pending pre Budget announcements - came rushing through the door when they saw the price tumble by 7p, others were quite overwhelmed when they could save almost 20p on a football. I was ill-prepared for the stampede in business created by Alistair's tinkering with the tax rates! I have been even less prepared for the intrusive questions some members of the public think it's OK to ask about my business under the guise of today's financial turmoil that go way beyond just making conversation. Decorum obviously went out when the credit crunch came in but I soon shut them up with retorts like "How much do you owe on your credit cards?" or "Are those badly behaved children yours?"
Saturday Boy and I are reduced to communicating through a third person. He's never really listened to me and now no longer speaks to me. My attempts at sign language are ignored. Its all a silly misunderstanding, he feels his reputation is permanently damaged but worse than that there's an issue about Father Christmas. After he (Saturday Boy not Father Christmas) finished cleaning the windows last week I asked him to clear off some graffiti that had appeared overnight. As he worked on the offending scrawl a mother and child were passing. The small boy asked, "What's that boy doing?" Mum glanced over, wrongly assessed the situation, and said "If someone does something bad, like writing on the wall, then they have to put it right. It's called community service and he's an offender. Father Christmas won't be bringing him anything this Christmas because he's been naughty". Usually when he's doing the windows Saturday Boy has his ipod plugged in and is oblivious to what's said around him, unfortunately this was not so on that day and his hearing was unimpaired. He burst back into the shop ranting at what he had just overheard. "Stop making such a fuss, anybody would think Father Christmas was real the way you're going on," I said. I might just as well have tied a Newcastle scarf round his neck he looked so shocked. "Of course he's real. I won't speak to you again until you write to him and tell him I haven't been naughty". I bet somewhere in Employment Law it says I have to!
