I've been framed

Last week I was wrenched from my slumber by a mad figure careering around my room shouting obscenities. I sat up in bed with a start and realised that I was in my room at my parents' house and the figure was my mother.

Mummy Dearest: ...want to know what the fuck you've done to my fucking laptop...
Our Glamorous Heroine: Wuh? Laptop?
MD: I can't fucking turn it on and I don't know how to wake your brother to deal with it!

And it dawned on me. I'd used my mother's laptop the previous evening as I hadn't brought mine from Cambridge. I searched my still sleep-addled brain for any clues as to what I could possibly have done to it.

Now, my mother is a writer and so her laptop is understandably extremely important to her. That is why, once I'd finished on it, I asked her how it should be shut down. Just how you normally shut down a computer? I asked and she said yes. So I went to the start menu and pressed the familiar red button. Mistake.

MD: You've shut it down wrong and I can't fucking get into it. I need to do my fucking work.
OGH: I'm sorry, I didn't mean to do anything to it, I just...
MD: The only fucking constant I need in my life is being able to get into my fucking laptop...

Information swam back to me as I regained consciousness. She had an imminent deadline with her agent. I probably wasn't as clear as I could have been when asking how I should shut it down. Nothing makes a writer more angry than not being able to write. That scene in The Shining when Jack Nicholson has a go at his wife for interrupting him when he's working at the type writer ("Whenever l'm in here. . . and you hear me typing. . . or whatever the fuck you hear me doing in here. . . when l'm in here, that means l am working. That means don't come in. Do you think you can handle that? Fine. Why don't you start right now and get the fuck out of here?") could be documentary fact as far as my experience with writers goes. I'd fucked up big time. I decided to duck and cover and weather out the storm.

My mother finally left my room with a slam of the door and a shout of, "And don't ever go near my laptop ever again!" No fear of that, thought I, and very definitely remembered to bring my laptop down with me when I came back at the weekend. So, when this morning I heard a scream that Grendel's mother would have been proud of emanating from my mother's room I ignored it. Nothing to do with me, I thought. Mistake. I've written before about how technology has conspired against me and it appears that it has happened again. As my mother was leaving the house she gave me a steely glare.

MD: You've fucked up my laptop up again.
OGH: I haven't been anywhere near it.
MD: Well it wouldn't turn on, exactly the same way as last time, and then it said that you were logged on.
OGH: I don't know why that is because I really haven't been on it. I've got my laptop so why would I want to use yours?
MD: Well it says Elizabeth is logged on and I don't know any other Elizabeths who would be on it.
OGH: I promise I haven't been on it, seriously.
MD: Well you were on it last week and that's started all this. Just don't fucking break other peoples' stuff. You obviously left bad seeds on it.
OGH:...

I didn't ask if that was a technical term or if Nick Cave had been there with the 'bad seeds'. I just resigned myself to the fact that the laptop had planted my finger prints all over a crime I didn't commit and so I must endure another dose of writers' wrath. I bloody hate technology.

Coda

Something worrying happened this morning. I found myself getting nostalgic about work. I miss my cinema friends, it was always the fantastic people that made the job bearable and I probably laughed as much as I seethed with rage. However certain things bear remembering.

Just before I left, Mamma Mia came out. I thought Sex & The City was bad for rude harridans with entitlement compexes ("I have to queue? But I've booked tickets and paid for a babysitter!" "Why can't you tell me exactly how much fat there is in the low fat natural yoghurt?") but Mamma Mia brought them all flooding back in with the added bonus of a song they could sing endlessly and off-key. It was always the small things that made working at the cinema that bit more difficult. When new members of staff join they have to undergo training. One of the training modules is entitled "Tools of the Trade" in which new Guest Assistants are informed that the tools of their trade are the wheelie bin, the pick up, and the slop bucket. Inspiring stuff.

So Mamma Mia had just come out meaning that several screens were sold out and there was more mess than a reception classroom after an "art" lesson. The ushering team reach for the tools of their trade, only what the training didn't tell us was that we'd run out of bin bags on every busy weekend and there would only ever be three pickups between five. Three pick ups: one with the stick attatched to the bucket broken in half, one with the stick attatched to the brush broken in half, and one where the minute the bucket became full it flew off the stick disgorging its contents all over the floor. But we did our best stooping and periodically swearing only to realise that we were being subjected to yet another cruel and unusual punishment.

In order to celebrate the release of Mamma fucking Mia [cinema] was sent a tape by head office to be played in all the screens between showings. This involved the same seven Abba songs being played over and over again with some "advertising" in between songs. Said "advertising" was obviously being read out by Dave from accounts whose uncle had once done a brief turn on hospital radio and was therefore the best man for the job. The terrible American accent was embarrassing enough but the puns were unspeakable. As "Take A Chance On Me" faded out we hear, "But don't take a chance on seeing the sold out sign and book tickets from a member of staff". Pretty cringe-worthy. But it was after "Voulez-Vous" when Dave-from-accounts intoned, "And don't forget to view les Vue listings at myvue.com," that I seriously considered committing suicide with the sharp end of a broken pick up.

Truth be told, I was getting pretty intolerant by the end. Woe betide the customer that annoyed me. For example the woman who ran up to me in the box office shouting, "I need a student ticket for this girl for Kung Fu Panda now!"
Our Glamourous Heroine: Does she have a student card?
Posh Harpy: No! She's an international student. She's staying with me over the summer!
OGH: I'm afraid it's company policy that I can't sell a student ticket without a valid student card.
PH: Well you either believe me or you don't.
OGH: I'm afraid I...
PH: [banging the counter with her hand] Could you just hurry up! The film's about to start! Just give me a ticket!
OGH: Right, here's an adult ticket and some manners wouldn't go amiss. That'll be £7.10 please.
PH: Oh, er, thank you.
I suspect it was best for everyone that I left before there was a murder.

An amusing post script to my time at the cinema is that there was a visit by a mystery shopper on my last shift. "Guess who got 100% at box office? Gave a voucher, was helpful, and smiled?" asked my best work mate Stephen over a drink recently. That's right bitches, it was me. I have some really good suggestions as to what management can do with that information.

Getting over it

It's a typical British summer holiday. I'm trying to eat a fish cake with one of those wooden forks before the seagulls notice what I've got, and watching the grey sky blend seamlessly into the grey sea. People are huddled on the beach wrapped in multi-coloured towels and ponies trudge up and down the sand. It's nearly 20 years since my family came here for the first time and there are memories everywhere. Up the sea front is the Sea Life Centre where Middle Brother would stare at the seals for hours and we'd eat jelly snakes. To my right is the funfair with the wiggly slides which we used to visit for a treat in the evening. I remember fondly the first time I publicly humiliated myself, going down them in a dress which I was convinced made me look very grown up, only for my skirt to blow up exposing my underwear to all and causing the man taking the money to exclaim loudly in case anyone had failed to notice, "Look, she's showing her frillies!" I remember the game my father used to set for us, to see who could spot the most tattoos on people walking along the front. One point for an inked arm, five for a neck. I have my own now and god knows how many points that's lost me in his eyes. And I can see Littlest Brother, now 19 and six foot, standing on the beach aged four trying to get his mouth round a gobstopper bigger than his head.

I'm losing myself in these memories, digging deeper and deeper. The first meal I ever had here was fish shapes, chips, and beans. The first grumpy pony I rode along the beach was called Minnie. The first time we came we made a scrapbook, my mother painstakingly helping me to stick shells into it every evening before we ate, Middle Brother doing detailed scribbles on the blank pages. I'm losing myself on purpose so I won't have to think about the most recent time I've visited. The time in freezing, windy January when the fish and chip stands were boarded up and the front was empty save for a few birdwatchers huddled in the only tea room open out of season. The time when I was so desperate that I packed up and ran away fom Cambridge on the spur of the moment. I was stuck in a labyrinth of unfinished work, depression, failed potential, and panic. Some psychiatrists say that 'home' is reliving your childhood and so perhaps unconsciously I sought safety in the place of my childhood holidays. At a time in my life when I could have felt so utterly alone he came with me.

I don't know how long you're allowed to feel heartbroken for before it becomes horribly self-indulgent. I suspect at nearly a year since he dropped his bombshell I'm pushing the bounds of sympathy when I get maudlin like this. It's not the searing pain of the first weeks, pain that I was too terrified to look straight at in case I couldn't take it. It's just an ache that nags me occasionally. He came with me and we ate chips in the cold and he was sober then but he sat patiently and watched me drink it all away and we giggled in the prissy guest house and stared at penguins in the Sea Life Centre. And even though the sun almost came out earlier and I'm on my way to getting my life back on track, it hurts that I'll never have that with him again.

We went to a film the other day, I say we, he brought his new partner with him, and as I was saying goodbye, he dropped another bombshell. He's going away for six weeks and by the time he gets back I'll be in London starting college. As I walked home I wondered if this wasn't for the best. Detach yourself! I mentally yelled. Later, at the goth night I organised a goodbye coffee for the next day. An old song came on and I walked to the dance floor and danced alone, hair in my face, balanced on my 6" heels. I saw him across the floor and lifted my head to sing the chorus. "I take back my trust in you." I wanted it to be an exorcism, I spat the words trying to forget the times we danced together to songs he now pulls his boyfriend onto the dance floor for. And the next day I was calm. We talked about nothing and politely caught up on each other's lives. We hugged goodbye and he said he'd come to visit in London and I nodded knowing that if he did it wouldn't be for me and nor should it be, I suppose. And then we went our separate ways and that was it. Not with a bang but a whimper, I thought. And just maybe I'm slowly getting over it.

Only three more shifts to go...

By now you've probably seen these slightly vomitous offerings: Discovery Channel and XKCD. All I can say is I'm very sorry, my brain is obviously turning on me due to prolonged inactivity.

I hate the popcorn,
I hate the Fanta Freeze,
I hate the nachos,
I hate the nacho cheese,
I hate the hotdogs, shrivelled on the grill for hours.
Boom de yada etc.

I hate the weekends,
I hate the lengthy queues,
I hate the mess made,
I hate mopping the loos,
I hate the children's noise and stupidity.

I hate the public,
I hate being polite,
I hate the rudeness,
The customer's not always right,
I hate the nutjobs with all their mad complaints.

I hate the wages,
I hate the sick kits,
I hate the Big Boss,
I hate cleaning up shit,
I hate the whole goddamn fucking company.

Why I Don't Do Exercise Or "Look at the state of that!"

I don't like the summer much. The sun serves only to make me pink through sun burn or eczema and, being the self-absorbed person that I am, the sight of pretty young things gallavanting about in next to nothing leaves me beset with a pathetic self-loathing. The other day at work a tanned and long-legged, scantily clad goddess walked into the foyer, causing an awed silence to fall across every male present. I bitterly muttered something to Female Colleague about forgetting to put any clothes on that morning, or something equally hackneyed, whilst inside wishing desperately that I had slim, toned thighs of polished mahogany rather than hideous limbs with the appearance of a poorly-set blancmange. It's at times like these that I start to have dangerous thoughts. Thoughts about exercise. Thoughts that need quashing immediately. I don't do exercise and it's for very good reasons.

GPs have often suggested to me that a bit of "gentle exercise" will help with depression. I've always dismissed it as a completely ludicrous idea. To me, there's no such thing as "gentle exercise". Being fat and rubbish at sport taught me that physical exercise is nothing but brutal torment. Games at school was ritual humiliation for me and as soon as I had the werewithall I bunked off, hiding smoking in the junior school changing rooms, like every other sensible person.

However, I did entertain the idea while at university that perhaps not all physical exercise had to be quite as traumatic as what I'd experienced at school. Surely in the Real World there weren't games teachers who hit you on the arse with a hockey stick if you didn't run fast enough or people who howled, "fucking fat idiot" when you failed to do something as trivial as catching a rounders ball?

I went through a phase in my second year where I was very fond of having the sort of fun that makes you dance a lot and eat nothing. I stopped this due to the realisation that it may not actually be all that good for my, precarious at best, mental state. Having laid off the appetite suppressants, I realised I was putting weight on and decided to do something about it. I considered my options and immediately ruled out jogging. If I was going to embarrass myself I was at least going to do it somewhere where everyone else was in the same boat as me. I still have no idea why people would choose to huff and puff around in hideous sports wear in broad daylight where it's perfectly possible that you'll bump into an ex or an enemy looking perfectly dressed and cool as a cucumber. You may as well park an exercise bike in the middle of the supermarket as far as I'm concerned.

So, having never been into public humiliation, jogging was out. I didn't even give a minute's thought to the gym, convinced that if there were the types in the Real World to hit bums with hockey sticks and yell insults, it was there that they would lurk. That left me with one viable option: swimming. So I rallied some friends to come with me for my first foray into the world of exercise since school. I was even looking forward to it a bit. There wouldn't be teachers, I wouldn't have to do anything I didn't want to. Surely it couldn't be that bad?

When optimistically planning my swimming trip there were several factors that I failed to take into account. The first of which conspired to humiliate me before I'd even left the changing rooms. Without the aid of glasses or contact lenses I'm really quite blind and unfortunately swimming pretty much precludes both. So, having wrestled my way into my swimming costume, I groped my way towards the lockers where I saw a girl whom I took to be my friend. It was only after I'd rushed up to her, grabbed her arm and asked, "Can we go in together?" that I realised she was in fact a complete stranger. A stranger who now thinks I'm some form of sex pest who's escaped her carer. Embarrassment number one.

The second factor was that the fitness pool is at the opposite side of the building from the changing rooms, and to get to it involves walking past the baby pool and the leisure pool. This in itself isn't that bad, I'm not quite self-absorbed enough to believe that everyone in the entire leisure centre will simultaneously stop what they're doing and stare at me, like in that horrible Boots suncream ad. And even if they did, if you go out looking like me you know that a swimming costume is hardly the worst thing you could be wearing for a walk of shame. Try having to ask a cab driver where you are at seven in the morning while wearing a corset, ripped stockings, one false eyelash and carrying a pair of six inch heels in your hand. No, it was only when combined with factor number three that this became a problem.

The third thing I'd failed to take into consideration was that it would be horribly busy on a Sunday morning. The so-called leisure pool was teeming with the type of adolescents usually found skulking around shopping centres in baseball caps. They'd managed to turn the entire pool into a warzone and were engaged in divebombing and spitting pool water at each other. By now I'd found my friends and was walking arm in arm with a girl who was well endowed, to put it mildly. Unfortunately this got the attention of the ASBO kids and they stopped fighting, coming together in a momentary truce to shout, "Look at the tits on that!" Friend and I sped up, ignoring them, hoping that was it but before the echo of the last comment had finished bouncing off the water, came another shout, "But look at the state of her friend!" Keeping my eyes fixed firmly forward I carried on to the fitness pool with the jeer ringing in my ears. Embarrassment number two.

By the time I got into the water, I didn't care that my friends hadn't really meant it when they'd said they were really unfit and had gone straight into the middle lane, leaving me in the remedial lane. After the previous incidents, I was swimming with a grim determination and was almost considering moving up a lane and attempting to swim faster through sheer bloody-mindedness when I was barged into by a man over taking me. He managed to kick me in the side, causing my head to go under and me to flounder about spluttering in an utterly undignified manner. When I got to the side he apologised to me and I realised that, third and final embarrassment, he only had one arm. I had been over taken by someone with one arm.

It was then that I decided that nothing really changes and I vowed never to do any form of sport or training ever again, blancmange thighs be damned.

This paint by numbers life is fucking with my head

Big Boss has taken to telling me to "Smile!" every time he sees me at work, whilst gesticulating and pulling a face in the manner of a childless uncle attempting to get a toddler to look happy in a birthday photo. It's almost enough to make me wish he was refusing to speak to me again. But I have to admit, I may well be walking around with a bit of a face on. When it comes to [cinema], I have of late, wherefore I know exactly, lost all my mirth. To be honest, I think this job is sending me loopy.

Case in point, at [cinema] whenever someone buys a ticket they get given a voucher which gets them an amount of money off the next time they come to see a film. When we are handed these vouchers we have to void them, tear off half of the customer's ticket and staple that to them. I must fold the vouchers a certain way and staple the ticket vertically on the left side. If by some appalling oversight I manage to do this the wrong way, I have been known to unpick the staple and do it again. And if someone offers to do my stapling for me while they have custody of the company stapler I refuse in no uncertain terms to let them. After all, they might do it wrong and I just couldn't live with that. See, loopy.

Worse is the ridiculous situation I've got myself into with the straws. If someone orders a fanta I can only give them a yellow or a red straw. With coke, coke zero, and diet coke, it can be a blue or a red straw. I prefer a red for coke and a blue for diet coke, coke zero is still a bit of an unknown quantity. Sprite is the easiest as it can have a blue, green, or yellow straw. Even more ludicrously, if a customer annoys me I give them the wrong colour straw for their drink, green for coke for example, as if that would affect their mental equilibrium in the same way it does mine. Fucking nuts.

I'm not entirely surprised that this job is sending me a few jelly sweets short of a kids' combo. Through the gossip mill I've found out that a couple of people on management consider me to have an attitude problem. Fair enough, I'm not a mindless retail drone and I am a bit (read very) mouthy. Plus when it comes to Big Boss, it's all a bit attitude problem/personality, tomayto/tomahto. However, despite appearances, I don't actually enjoy being hated and this has lead to me doing some things in the name of getting on at work that are more insane than my popcorn-addled brain could conjure on its own.

Last week the dreaded call came over the radio, "Usher on the radio, someone's had a very nasty accident in t'downstairs disabled toilet. Needs someone with a good gut to clear that up immediately". And what did I do? I volunteered to deal with it. To be fair, the other Guest Assistant turned white at the mere thought of it, and I do possess a strong stomach. Plus I'm hoping to work in social care and need to get used to dealing with this sort of shit. So, yes, shit. I found myself cleaning up a sizeable amount of it armed only with a sick kit. I'll leave that to your imaginations. What never ceases to amaze me about [cinema], though, is that there is always something worse. As Nice Manager thanked me he told me about the time he opened the cinema in the morning to find that the drains had backed up and flooded the entirety of the bottom floor with liquid human waste. Head office helpfully had him wading about in it trying to stem the flow with blue roll.

The final indignity was thrust upon me at the weekend in the form of a woolly hat and some sun glasses. "Just put your Hancock stuff on", said Team Leader, "it's in the office". There sat Big Boss surrounded by the instruments of my humiliation and there was no way I could refuse. I'm loathe to admit that I've almost got used to my baseball cap but this was something else. The combination of an oversized beanie hat and sunglasses on my round head left me looking like someone whose carer had let them get dressed by themselves for the first time. Add to this that it was a very warm day and our tills are directly in front of the hotdog grill and you have an itchy, hot and definitely cruel and unusual punishment. Give me excrement but not this.

So I'm handing in my notice. I have well and truly had enough and need to leave before I find myself up to my neck in raw sewage. Literally and metaphorically.

In which our glamorous heroine goes for a quiet pint after work and ends up in the police station

It was half term last week and work kindly scheduled me seven shifts in a row, most of them lasting 10 hours. As I crawled into work for midday on Saturday, having finished at midnight the previous night, I saw Big Boss waiting for me and realised I was a couple of minutes late. Again. Big Boss has an extremely thinly veiled contempt for me at the best of times and is a real stickler for rules. As far as he's concerned, two minutes late may as well be two hours. It's all a jolly good excuse for him to throw his (not inconsiderable) weight around.

"I'm sorry I'm late, I..." "Lizzie, I don't want to hear it. You're always late and you always have a story. I'm not saying I don't believe you but you must lead a very eventful life." This was said with the sort of half-smirk, half-sneer on his face that meant I couldn't answer back as he was being 'funny' rather than rude, 'joshing' rather than having a go, so I stood there trying to keep the sort of insolent look off my face that used to get me into trouble at school. Not only do I actually lead an eventful life, but I wasn't about to be offended by such an accusation from a man who appears to spend all his time when not in work making photo manipulations of himself in various famous films to put on his Facebook page. Hurray for having no need to recourse to photoshop to make myself seem intertesting. I'll take my eventful life over yours any day, you pathetic cunt! However, such smug internal crowings were to have proved foolish by the end of the day.

When it comes to my life, 'eventful' is one way of putting it. I often say that I 'just get myself' into situations. Situations like finding myself locked out of my college and having to ask my famous-academic-ex-director-of-studies to let me in whilst paralytic to the point of incoherence. Or like finding myself by some cruel trick of fate seeing two men at the same time who turn out to be housemates. The thing about these situations is there's usually no 'just get' about it, it's all entirely my fault. And I'm now starting to wonder if what happened on Saturday night might be exactly the same.

Saturday's shift contained the usual mixture of grinding menial tasks and abject stupidity, with added hysterical, idiotic women thronging in for Sex & The City. Come the end of my shift, I'd planned to go straight home and get some well-earned sleep however some how, as is the way of things with me, I ended up going for a 'quick pint' after work with colleagues that turned into me staggering out of WT's Snooker Club at 3.30 am, pretty fucking drunk. This, perhaps, was error number one.

Error number two occurred when I decided to go with a work friend to get some food from the kebab shop next door. On entering the shop I noticed two men sitting at a table in the corner. They were drunk and rowdy and as I was comitting the crimes of being female and fat, I was an ideal target for their drunken arseholishness. This isn't an unusual situation for me. If I had a penny for every time some man decided to inform me that I was fat I could buy another packet of biscuits. Usually I ignore it but drink had been taken and I was generally at the end of my tether due to work. So I gave the guy who insulted me (Skinny Rat Face) a mouthful in return. Words were exchanged and I could tell that Skinny Rat Face was a bit taken aback that I was standing up for myself. He got up from the table and squared up to me against the counter, "You're a gobby bitch. You wanna shut up, you fat cow. You wanna be careful, I've got people waiting outside." I informed him that if he was threatening me I would call the police. I might have given him a few choice words as to what I thought of men that threatened women, too.

Skinny Rat Face sat back down at this point but continued to shout abuse. Enter Stocky Skin 'Ed, drawn to the aggro like a really thick, football-shirt-wearing moth to a flame. Stocky Skin 'Ed assessed the situation, realised it was only a girl that his mate was engaged with and decided to attempt to change the subject by opining to Skinny Rat Face, and the kebab shop at large, that he was going to "Stab those fucking pakis" whilst motioning next door to WT's. Here comes error number three. Riled up from the previous confrontation I asked Stocky Skin 'Ed not to use racist language and threats. He didn't exactly see my point of view and yelled at me before going back to threatening to "stab up the pakis". At this point I phoned the police to report racist and threatening behaviour.

The owner of the shop got the men out but they stood outside shouting yet more extremely original and funny abuse about my weight into the shop and threatening to 'have us' (me and my colleague) when we left. Eventually my work friend snapped ad shouted something back at them in my defence. This caused four of them (Skinny Rat Face and his Lackeys) to pile back into the shop, corner him, hit him in the face and hold him by the neck up against the wall. I called the police again, causing Stocky Skin 'Ed, who must have been at least 45, to come in and attempt to intimidate me, a young girl, by squaring up to me and shouting in my face that I was a stupid gobby bitch and calling the police wasn't going to do anything as he'd dealt with them before and could wrap them around his little finger. I'm afraid I let him know what sort of person I thought he was with his racist threats and picking on girls. I don't think this helped calm down the situation.

Eventually the police turned up and arrested the men, not before I heard Stocky Skin 'Ed say to the shop owner that he was going to "burn his fucking shop down". What a charmer. I made sure I told the police immediately. The shop owner thanked me for calling the police. He said the men had been causing trouble all night and had been racially abusing some asian gentlemen earlier and being generally intimidating. I went to the station to give a statement and the men were kept in over night. Hopefully this will count against them next time they choose to spend their Saturday night being racist oiks. But I can't quite shake the feeling that I bring drama like this upon myself.

It was when I was leaving the police station at 7am with work mere hours away that I realised that perhaps 'eventful' wasn't always the best way of life. WHilst trudging home through the grey dawn, carrying my now stone cold chips I decided that for the next couple of weeks I'd try for positively boring. I might even attempt to 'keep my fucking fat gob shut'. Except when it comes to challenging racist threats and giving good excuses as to why I'm late for work. I have principles after all.