I’m worked with some strange characters over the years, but this guy took the biscuit. It started on Tuesday. Two of the regulars had called in sick, one with a toothache, the other with “swollen feet”. One of the replacements was Keith. He seemed nice enough, if a little chatty, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Because he was so chatty we got his life story, and here it is.
About 18 months ago Keith met a Romanian girl. I’m not sure how, but he did. They fell in love and she moved over here with him. Thing is, she was a girl of expensive tastes, always wanting jewelrey and the like and demanding to stay in expensive hotels. She also had a family back home – her brother and mother – who needed money because they were poor. A new bath to replace the tin they washed in, that sort of thing. Keith, because he was in love, obliged. A few months later he went over to Romania and was greeted by a lovely house with a luxury bathroom. Other things didn’t quite add up and he went to the police. They showed him mugshots of the girlfriend, brother and mother and told him he’d been had. The brother was her pimp. They were sucking him dry.
And they had. He was over £100,000 in debt and on his current salary wouldn’t be able to pay it off ever. He filed for bankruptcy which was lifted a few months back. Now he’s in the process of getting back on his feet (I assume he lost his job at some point but that wasn’t disclosed – actually there are a lot of gaps now I come to write it up) temping while looking for a new home and job. He’s in a pretty bad way financially.
So far, so sympathy inducing. You hear such stories from time to time and here’s someone who actually went through it. Poor guy.
Here’s the twist. He’s got a new girlfriend. She’s Romanian. He’s (somehow) paid for her to come over here just recently. When he phoned her in Romania she kept cutting him off to talk to someone in the background, as if she’s getting instructions on what to say. She says this is her “brother”. She always phones him on payday asking for money. He’s pretty sure he’s being taken for a ride again but does he break it off? No. He doesn’t. Why? Fuck knows.
Here’s the next twist. He doesn’t stop talking. At all. And he’s not talking to people, he’s talking at them. At speed. Loudly. Non stop. His internal monologue is pouring over anyone in the vicinity. It’s very annoying.
By the second day he’s starting to get on people’s tits a bit, especially as he’s not actually pulling his weight work wise. We have a tacit arrangement with Maureen, the boss, that we can take more breaks than usual because of the tedium and eyestrain of the job, but we don’t take the piss. Quick fag breaks are one thing, half an hour is another. Usually I don’t care if another temp is slacking off. That’s their lookout and as long as we’re not on task-and-finish (where you get paid for 8 hours no matter when you complete the job) it doesn’t affect me. Here, though, it’s starting to bug me.
On the third day it starts to come to a head. Keith turns up quite late and within ten minutes goes for a coffee. Maureen notices and goes to get him. She says I’m to say when the breaks are and for how often. I raise an eyebrow. Since when was I management? Soon after we finish checking a pallet and as I’m preparing it to take back to the warehouse I tell the others to start their break. I do this partly so I don’t have to sit in the canteen with him. Everyone’s scheduling their breaks around him as much possible. Having gotten a new pallet and made a cup of tea with the slow kettle, I go into the smoking room where Keith is addressing the room with his sob story for the nth time. I roll a cigarette and suffer his bombardment for five minutes, trying to shut him out and look out of the window as he talks right at me. He then goes to light another fag, at least his third, and I explode. He’s had his break. Time to go back. We had a nice setup here and he’s been taking the piss, ruining it for everyone. To top it all Maureen’s told me to keep and eye on him, and I’m not getting paid to do management so I’m pissed off. “How long is a break?” he asks, all wounded like. 15-20 minutes seems to be standard in most places I’ve worked. Since he’s been here I’ve fetched a pallet, made a cuppa and smoked a fag. He wanders back to work muttering about how it would be nice if someone actually laid out how things worked, as if he’s noticed for the first time how utterly wrong he’s been.
After he’s gone the young lads who work for the other quality checking company talk to me for the first time ever. We actually have a conversation about him. This guy is so annoying he’s united everyone against him.
For the rest of the day we all have our walkmen on full volume and try to ignore him, but it doesn’t help. He’ll just keep talking, non bloody stop. When he’s on one of his breaks I mention to one of the guys that I think he needs help, that he’s psychotic or suffering from trauma or something. He says he needs a kick in the head, which while not particularly constructive does have its merits.
Thankfully he’s only covering for toothache guy and Thursday is his last day. With any luck I’ll never see him again. In fact I’m tempted to ask the agency never to put me on the same job as him. I’ve never felt the need to do that before.
With the benefit of a couple of days away I’m not as wound up as I was, but it’s kinda interesting how working class industrial places deal with this sort of behaviour. There’s no sympathy. He’s a twat. Get rid of him. I’m wondering whether he was a twat before the whole Romanian thing happened or if this bizarre behaviour is part of his fall out. Given the degrees of insanity he’s displaying I really hope not. In which case he does need help. He need counseling and some sort of anti-psychotic medication or else he’s just going to get worse, especially if he’s working in environments where people really don’t care and just want him to fuck off. Some day someone really is going to kick him in the head, and the frightening thing is he won’t have a clue as to why.
It’s funny how much you trust the stories people tell you. Me, see, I would have assumed he’d made the whole thing up; that he was one of those people who say any old thing all the time, because all they’re really after is a reaction. I’d also be giving him a wide berth because someone that obviously annoying will have been in a few fights already … but that’s me. Suspicious of everything.
Hmm, do I trust his story? Not sure if it even matters. To be honest I think he was telling the truth – he did have long aggressive phone calls with the current girlfriend and there was a high degree of consistency in his story, but at the end of the day it’s almost irrelevant. You get told stories all the time and never know if they’re true. They’re just stories that pass the time and since this is temping you’re not relying on them in any important way.
It’s worth mentioning that this wasn’t the only thing he banged on about. The bankruptcy and his money woes made for most of the ranting. In short, it wasn’t what he was saying so much as how he said it. And he was more pathetic than aggressive. I’ve felt threatened by people who just want to talk before and he wasn’t like that. He was like nothing I’d seen before. Really odd.
This is the second job you reported that has you saying “when did I become management”. Why do you think that is?
Because I’ve been management in bookselling which is something of a rite of passage that you never quite lose, I’m relatively competent, and I have a nice educated Southern accent. It’s actually not at all surprising that when there’s a gang of temps the managers instinctively lean towards putting me in charge, no matter how much I resist it.
I don’t really mind managing people – at Waterstone’s it was actually fun and you get to drink lots of tea. Plus there are little tricks you can use to get people to do stuff for you, like being nice to them and saying thank you. They really don’t expect that. The problem I have with managing temps is it can be like herding cats when you’re one of the cats. I have enough trouble motivating myself to do the job properly let alone anyone else.
It’s also just a nice phrase. Shrug your shoulders, hold your palms out and say in an exasperated Jewish New Yorker voice “when did I become management?” Blogging is all about nice phrases I find. Forgive me if I re-use them.
…and only *now* do I learn the phrase :^(…if only I’d known it a couple of mounths ago when all this shit was dumped on my lap :^)…ah well, who cares – I’m outta here :^)…
Yep. Rings a bell. Sharing a house with a guy who’s going through the ‘being sucked dry’ process. He can’t see it, I’d love to give him some advice, but my wife forbids me to tell him.
What a rum character, Pete. And what a thought-provoking story. I can quite see how in today’s increasingly casual, non-unionised working environment vulnerable people like this could well go from bad to worse mentally, as there is clearly no mechanism for appropriate intervention. And if even someone as apparently mild-mannered as you can see the merits of a kick in the head being administered, then you have to say the prognosis doesn’t look good for this fellow.
This is my first time here in a while, btw. For some reason my work computer refuses to allow access to your site nowadays. The ‘firewall’ thing says something about ‘explicit sexual content’. Perhaps to do with something you’ve linked to? Anyway it’s a shame, as you were one of the first blogs I ever discovered, and remain one of the best reads about, in my book. Just so you know!
Hmm – not had the firewall issue for a while now. Could be due to my liberal swearing. If you could find out which service they use to screen stuff (usually on the page that tells you you’re accessing something naughty) I can try and contact them. In the meanwhile you could see if Bloglines gets through and subscribe to it there. Or at least use this page to read it. Let me know how you get on.
Just catching up with your reply Pete- due to the issues I told you about! Will follow your instructions and let you know how I get on.