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[Hazzy]

Tonight is mine and Illy's first day at work in our new careers as a cleaner. We hope one day we'll be promoted maybe to Head Cleaner and win awards for our cleaning.

We're gunna get trained today apparently, like how to use the buffer and which bucket you use to clean the toilets. Illy's mum keeps saying how hard it is, and when we went to get the jobs the other day, the boss lady was like "it's hard work, hope you're ready for it" or something. But then you look at her and she's like hobbling on one leg and the 2nd boss lady was like a hunchback. It was kinda creepy. So how hard it really is I don't know. I'm willing to do the hard work anyway.

We get paid something like £7.50 an hour, for two and a half hours a night, plus any overtime we do which there's apparently a lot of. I dunno if that's good or bad, but its enough for us.

We don't have the full time jobs yet though, we're gunna start out as 'relief' so they'll call when they need us, but from the standard of the workers they have right now, that should be often. They're always taking days off, one has just had a visa denied so has to leave the country, another two got fired the other night. The annoying thing is I'm going to England this weekend for my niece's birthday party, so today, the first day, I'm going to have to tell them I won't be available for 3 days next week. 

Any tips for us? Or stories of your own first days at certain jobs that will fill us with hope and optimism?

[The Headliner]

They probably looked like you when they started.

I mean exactly like you.

Well done though for getting stuck in. My only advice is not to quit after the first day if it does appear hard/scary, because your first impression of any job (and the people in it) will not be representative of what it's actually like. I wanted to quit my first full time job on day one and ended up staying there nearly four years - it was just panic and inexperience that made me overreact.

[The Gopher]

Here you guys go, learn from my mistakes:

Right after I graduated high school, barely 18 years old, I got a job working for a large grocery store in the area. I was so excited about the money that I'd be making that I never once stopped to think about what the job would actually be. I imagined long days of smiling at customers while scanning their groceries and stuff like that... never once was I prepared for any other aspect of the job.

I had three days of in-office training - taking tests on computers and shit like that. It wasn't hard by any stretch of the imagination, but it wasn't fun either. So I suffered through those days with the growing anticipation of working on the main floor, interacting with customers.

My first day on the floor would be my last... in the staff room we had a schedule for shopping cart returns. It was a magnificently hot summer day and I thought to myself, "How lucky!" My name wasn't on the board at all... but poor Stephan with a "PH" - that miserable bastard was going to have to go out there every half hour to fetch carts...

So I'm standing at my checkout line and I'm learning how to bag groceries... a few hours go by and I realize that I'd like to take a break. Knowing that I should have had a break after two hours, I made my first mistake: I approach the manager - a bald dude by the name of Moe.

"Moe, I was wondering if I could take my break?"

"I TELL YOU WHEN YOU TAKE YOUR BREAK!" he replied in frustration. "WE DONT ASK FOR BREAKS HERE! I TELL YOU!"

I wanted to cry... I mean, surely I didn't do anything that terrible, right? Well, I must have, because this fat bald man wanted to eat my soul.

So, soulless, I went back to my checkout line and bagged groceries, all while desperately craving the chance to go to my car and sit down. My feet were NOT use to standing, that's for sure. Finally, Moe comes to me and he says, "Go ahead and go out!"

...I misunderstood him, apparently. See, based on our previous interaction, I took his comment as "Go ahead and take your break." In real life, what he meant was "Go ahead and go get the carts!!!"

So I come back in and get yelled at for taking my break... I explain to him that I misunderstood him and that I'm confused because my name isn't on the cart return list - it isn't me, it's Stephan with a PH!

"WELL, FOR THE REST OF THE DAY, YOU'RE STEVEN WITH A PH! NOW GO GET THOSE CARTS!"

So pushing the carts back in, I whack my head on a brick. It's like a million degrees Celsius and I'm just pissed off by everything, mostly the way in which he talked to me. I mean, giving me a whole new name? I don't think his power extends that far!

So I'm pissed, go out to my car and get a different shirt, and return to the store. I walk up to Moe and told him he was disrespectful and rude, and that I'd no longer be working there. I handed him my shirt and walked out the store, never to be seen again!

...

So yeah, don't quit just because you're pissed, as I later learned from friends at the store that Moe was never like that to anyone, and that he was having a rough day because of his ex-wife. 

[Illusion]

Ok they're all one legged hunchbacks.

And one had a hook for a hand.

[Hazzy]

Damn... I'm glad I didn't read that before we went to work Gopher.

It was really easy. We got split up, each with one of the more experienced cleaners. I went to some 'tech' building and basically just hoovered the rooms. I was doing it all thoroughly cause I didn't want to do a bad job, and my cleaner lady came over after my second room like "I'll give you a tip, just hoover up bits you can see - if the boss sees you taking this long, she won't congratulate you, she'll think you're a slow worker". And there were a few different shortcuts like that she told me about, so I guess I learnt from a good cleaner. As in, I don't have to come up with my own shortcuts now.

But generally, it was fine. Little hoovering, little mopping. Didn't see anything I would struggle with, all my cleaner lady did was wipe the tables and stuff, and wiped the surfaces, and at the end I stood and watched her buffer a few rooms with polish. She said I'd be trained to do that eventually, it looked as easy as using a hoover but she said if I wasn't trained it'd fling me out of the room when I turned it on.

The only thing I'll struggle with if I was say, left on my own next time I'm back, is getting the right sprays and stuff. It's just a matter of doing it enough so I can get the routine and not have to stand and think about everything I do. So as long as I've got someone to help me for a few runs through, I'll pick it up easy enough.

Annoyingly we don't have to go back until next week now. It's good because I can go back to England with no real problems (Illy is going in next Monday with all his paperwork, I'm going in Tuesday). I wish we could have gone in tomorrow or even stayed and done overtime tonight.

(click to show/hide)

There were no hook hands. But there were a lot of haggered, worn looking people limping around like "I can't wait to get this over with, I'm sweating". So I think me and Illy will be fine. It wasn't exactly easy, but the most tiring part for me was walking home because it was like 20 minutes up hills.

[Illusion]

There was a hook for a hand, it was the same guy I saw down the market.

What I like is that down the market my mum and her little ball shaped friend are like "WAIT 'TIL YOU'RE DOWN THE COLLEGE, IT'S EVEN HARDER THERE!" because we're sitting there bored to death because nobody is even looking at us.  They're assuming just because we hate sitting there for 3 hours doing fuck all it's impossible for us to be capable of cleaning for 2 and a half hours.

It flew by way faster than any day down the market.

[Ethan]

In your life you'll work some thankless jobs. My very first job was working for a video rental shop called Blockbuster.  I thought cool stocking videos and all that. No it was being yelled at about late fees for about 90% of the time. Going from school to work and settling down for bed at 2am to get up at 6am for school. Then doing all that again, what I can advise you is to have the outlook and professionalism for the job you want.

If you dress and act like a janitor that is what you will always be.

[gungrave17]

hey ethan, isnt blockbuster dead or something

[Fan]

I work at a grocery store and love it. Everybody is pretty cool.

[Hazzy]

We're just doing this to make enough money to pay rent and live on. And the hours are good because we don't go out drinking or have some kind of night social life, so for us, or me at least, it's better to have the whole day free and then just work in the evenings. That way we can work on what we really want to do, which is scriptwriting.

[Advocate]

I would like to buy the rights to this reality show.

[The Headliner]

If not for the potential confusion, I'd have suggested calling it Scrubbers.

[Illusion]

It's funnier when you know my mum, cousin, next door neighbour, her son who lives with us, and a bunch of other people who live in this area are all down there.  The only slots we don't have are the ones taken by the weird cripples and the boss jobs.

[The Headliner]

Both can be achieved in time.

[Ethan]

hey ethan, isnt blockbuster dead or something

I think they have an online business very much like Netflix now. I dont know I haven't worked for them since 2002