Muck or Nettles? … On the day A Level results are announced, guest blogger Adelle Stripe (@ADELLESTRIPE) writes about the strange jobs she’s had to do and how education helped her escape crap job hell …
Kids today have it tough, I really feel for them. Imagine leaving school with hardly any qualifications, being told you’re not smart enough to go to university, you’re desperate to leave home and head to bright lights of the big city, but the only way you’ll ever do that is by taking unpaid internships, apprenticeships or the worst paying jobs in retail or call centres.
It’s a small price to pay for freedom, a room of one’s own, but it’s easy to get trapped into the slew of crap jobs that are on offer for young people without qualifications or ‘parents with connections’.
Back in the early 90s, I remember leaving Tadcaster Grammar School in the depths of a recession. For the star ‘A-Level’ students, the life that awaited them had potential. They could become a scientist, teacher, engineer, or stockbroker. Proper jobs. Jobs your parents could be proud of. Jobs that meant pensions, a big house, 2.4 children and Caribbean holidays. Jobs, that for people like me, were out of reach.
An example of this happened in Art Class one day. I had decided, after reading Valerie Solanas’ SCUM Manifesto that I wanted to be a film-maker, feminist artist and writer. My assault on the world would begin with an installation of painted tampons hung from a white box. And 700 photocopied Walker’s crisps packets mounted on MDF, sprayed yellow. With these great works I would conquer Art School, write polemics in the style of Julie Burchill and have my picture in all of the cool magazines. I had aspirations. I wanted to be anywhere but Tadcaster.
My Art Teacher had other ideas.
‘What the bloody hell’s that effort?’
‘I’m a feminist artist, Sir. And when I grow up I want to be bigger than Andy Warhol.’
‘Well, that’s all good and well Stripe, but you’ll never get anywhere with ideas like that.’
‘Why not? There’s no harm in dreaming. I don’t want to be like everyone else.’
‘Take my advice. The best thing that’ll ever happen to you is that you get married, and have children. That’s all you’re good for.’
Thankfully, I didn’t take my teacher’s ‘advice’, but work experience, organised by the school, hardly prepared me for the pressures of employment. My job, aged 14, for two weeks, was at the Jorvik Viking Centre in York. My role was to set off ‘time cars’ down the bottom of a dark tunnel and listen to Magnus Magnusson’s voice on repeat. The most exciting aspect of the job was to sit in a booth selling fossilised Viking turds in Perspex keyrings to Danish tourists. Thankfully, I was fired after a week for setting off time cars before the tourists were properly fastened in. They caught me on CCTV moving them backwards and forwards to the beat of Puppet on a String that pumped from the tannoy.
After leaving school, with 5 average O-Level passes, I enrolled on a course at York College of Art & Design. I worked in a petrol station and kept on dreaming of New York. In the summertime I worked in a carrot factory for £2 an hour, sorting wrinkly carrots into grades. This was an incentive to finish the college course. After that, I worked in a designer boutique as a shop assistant. The boss paid me £1.50 an hour. I sold coats for £700 to rich ladies. My shoes had holes in them and I lived on £20 a week in a bedsit hovel outside the city walls.
Nothing prepares you for the boredom of retail. And that’s why I feel for people who work on checkout tills, or stacking shelves. I spent two years working for a well known chain, on the fitting room, trying to stop shoplifters thieving. Sometimes they would burn the tags off garments, other times they’d let their children urinate in plastic bags and leave them for me to clear up. And they’d leave you presents, like used tampons or sanitary towels, which I’m sure I could have turned into a great work of art a few years previously.
But the crappest of all my 90s jobs was working on an adult chatline in Leeds. Sure, the pay wasn’t too bad, but £9 an hour wasn’t enough to keep your sanity. I had two ‘characters’ that I played on the line, at the same time, and at midnight, when the advert flashed on TV, with girls in cocktail bars laughing in the disco lights, drunk men would ring the chatline looking for love. My job was to keep them talking. And pretend that I had also rung the line ‘looking for love’. I left them messages and ‘got to know’ them. The callers paid £1 a minute. I shared an office with 40 bored housewives who chain-smoked at their desks and ate boxes of takeaways.
They say that dawn is the coldest time of day, and it was in those early hours, as the sun rose from behind the skyline of Leeds International Swimming Pool, that my dreams of Andy Warhol finally faded into nothingness.
It’s not all bad though. I believe that you have to experience the darkest of times to find the light. Something related to Taoist thinking, the ying and yang. Or Boethius’ Wheel of Fortune
O Fortune / like the Moon / changeable in state / always waxing / or waning; / detestable life / at one moment hard / and at the next cares for / the witty games of the mind / poverty, power / it dissolves like ice…
Doing those jobs made me resolute in my ambition to move to a better place. I eventually went to university, aged 30, and it was the best decision I ever made. Education gave me self belief, confidence, freedom of expression and a new outlook on life. All of a sudden I could control my future, education gave me access into a world I had previously only dreamed of. But this time, I didn’t have to dream of being somebody else, I could simply just be me.
Adelle Stripe is a founding member of the Brutalist Poets. She is the author of three poetry chapbooks and has been published widely in underground publications in Britain and America. Her second collection Cigarettes in Bed won ‘Poetry Book of the Year’ at the 3:AM Magazine Awards 2009.
Her new collection, Dark Corners of the Land, is published by Blackheath Books in September. She is a graduate from the University of Manchester’s Creative Writing MA Programme and has written for The Guardian, The Times, The Stool Pigeon, Brand, Succour and Chiron Review.
Thanks for making us all feel better about being stuck in crap jobs for a while – it’s not necessarily forever, is it! 🙂
This is a very inspirational piece for people who may be leaving school and stressing out, but what people also need to consider is that further education no longer leads to “pensions, a big house, 2.4 children and Caribbean holidays”. What it often leads to is a big pile of debt, being unable to fight past the other 3000 people going for every job you want, and being turned down for jobs you don’t want on account of being too well educated. My boyfriend has just finished his degree at the age of 33, and is still working in a pub.
Just something to think about 🙂
Thanks for sharing this Adelle. I really worry for people coming out of education now and what kind of prospects they’ll have. Having spent a lot of time at the job centre this summer, the career options seem pretty bleak in this part of the north.
I had a lot of self-confidence while I was at uni, and loved my time there, but I seem to have lost most of it while working in a less-than-ideal job for the last few years. I’ve done something that paid the bills and left enough to save up for a small career break, now I want to do something where I actually can use at least one of my degrees and am interested in.
Adelle Stripe, one of the finest young femme writers I’ve read in England–or America–writes with witty spunk savvy and a wise, world-aware brilliance that promises great literary endurance.
If you left school in the 1990s, you left with 5 average GCSE passes, not O Levels, as GCSEs came in in 1988.