A Job for Joe by Joe Paris Lee

Author:Joe Paris Lee
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: BookBaby
Published: 2013-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

God Save Dry Cleaners

I forgot one: dry cleaning. And no, that’s not what I had to do with my suit to get the job; that was the job.

This one would slot in somewhere between the Kids and Cars and Beer and Yoghurt ... I think.

Anyway, back to the dry cleaning. This was one of my shorter gigs, only because I was relieving someone who went on holidays, and what a pleasant little month it was too. I got the job through a mate of my flatmate, whose uncle ran a combined drycleaning/sports clothing manufacturing business.

My role was “front-of-house”, serving at the counter and picking up drycleaning from agencies in the area. And that was all. No way were they going to let me near the drycleaning equipment, let alone out the back with all those expensive industrial sewing machines. They must have heard from my flatmate about my manual skills. (My brother-in-law once described me as being “as handy as a third nostril”.)

So now that’s sorted, back to the present, or maybe that should be past present. And back we go, once again, to the good old newspaper business that I loved and knew so well that I could do it with my eyes closed, and regularly did.

It was a local rag and the editor ran it like a cross between the Washington Post and A Current Affair, with damning exposes of corrupt local drycleaners and heartbreaking photos of broken footpaths. And we in the sales team felt like Saatchi & Saatchi as we raked in the dollars from honest drycleaners and footpath menders.

Exciting times? We even had a visit from Malcolm Turnbull, who was touting his “Make-me-President” republican wares to anyone who’d listen. My loyalist monarchist heart turned to cold steel when I walked into the tea-room for my fourth coffee of the day—well, it was nearly morning-tea time—to see Malcolm sitting at a table with our ace reporter, Woodward Bernstein II. As I stirred my coffee I hummed God Save The Queen under my breath.

And that was enough excitement for this excitable boy. It was time to go backwards in another direction to where it still looked and felt like a job for Joe.

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