Down and Out in England and Italy by Alberto Prunetti

Author:Alberto Prunetti
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BIO026000, FIC041000, FIC019000
Publisher: Scribe Publications Pty Ltd
Published: 2021-11-02T00:00:00+00:00

Aside from issuing orders, the only sanctioned form of interaction between management and staff was the Staff Meeting. We’d all stand in a big circle, each team recognisable by its colours: yellow checked shirts for the food court workers; dark-blue shirts for the toilet cleaners; green polo shirts for the maintenance team; red sweaters and dirty high-vis jackets for the basement workers. Only team supervisors were allowed to speak, mostly to say everything was running smoothly, and at any rate only after the manager or the deputy manager were done with their little speech.

Charlene, the deputy manager, came across as easy-going and casual even by Italian standards, while the manager, Clive, was in his mid-forties, slim and elegantly dressed, with a floppy fringe. Renato would have instantly dismissed both as ‘wet’. ‘Bunch of drips, the lot of them,’ he used to say: liquid people. People you couldn’t trust. And Clive and Charlene were indeed wet through and through. Moist. Positively diluted.

For all their affable manner and informal style, they always spoke first and no one ever dared contradict them. The staff, of course, had no say in anything — let alone ‘agency people’ like myself. If you complained — the cheek! — you’d get fired on the spot: ‘It appears the gentleman here needs some time off.’ And as the Rule goes, if they call you sir, stick your arse to the wall and watch out: there’ll be a letter in the post soon telling you not to even bother picking up your things, as the uniforms are the property of the shopping centre anyway. I’d seen it happen many times. Workplace bullying was really bad there — all it took was for Annabelle to drop a hint that someone was about to get the sack, maybe because they took too many breaks, or they were caught skiving. Everyone would immediately start bad-mouthing the person in question — suddenly they weren’t a ‘team player’, they were selfish, they didn’t take pride in wiping tables or ensuring the smooth running of drainage pipes. They didn’t care about Our Brand. After a while, the beleaguered worker would get a one-way ticket for the magical world of unemployment, without so much as a peep from their former colleagues.

The bog grapevine was where you’d usually hear if someone was headed for the chop. All manner of stories — real, fake, unverifiable — would originate in the cleaning-staff storage room, circulate through the extractor fans or the plumbing system, or perhaps the sewage pipes themselves, and slowly spread across the shopping centre. The most alarming news doing the rounds lately concerned Brian: according to our colleagues he was utterly miserable. He still smiled and said ‘enjoy!’ — especially when he plunged the fetid rubber pipe or his own arm into a clogged toilet — but his eyes had lost that sparkle, and you could tell he wasn’t actually enjoying himself. I heard that he was lonely and had heart problems, that he subsisted on fish and chips and watched unfunny 1950s comedies every night.

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