OK, Let's Do Your Stupid Idea by Patrick Freyne

Author:Patrick Freyne [Freyne, Patrick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780241988190
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2020-09-17T00:00:00+00:00

Workplace Culture in the Early Nineties

(A series of case studies for a future MBA)

My first experience of workplace culture was at the petrol station where my friend Corncrake worked when we were in our late teens. This was when you could just go and hang around with your friend when he was at work.

The owner of this particular petrol station was never there. He was an absentee owner, a non-interventionist deity whose creation ticked on without him. There was no manager, and the employees were all teenagers. Apart from Corncrake, there were two young stoners who I have decided to call, because they could well be barristers now, Calum and Clarence. Corncrake, Calum and Clarence dressed in grey overalls, much like the ones worn by Billy Joel and his dancing chums in the video for ‘Uptown Girl’. However, this petrol station did not have a cameo appearance by Christie Brinkley. It had, instead, cameo appearances from me, a teenager so bored he would go and sit with his friend in a tiny booth while he worked on a Sunday.

The petrol was downwind of a shopping centre and across the green from a small, respectable-looking housing estate. Every Sunday, Corncrake would go down there, open up the garage, move some bales of briquettes around the place and then sit in the little cabin by the petrol pumps listening to the Pixies and waiting for people who needed petrol. By this time, humanity had figured out that people were capable of pumping their own petrol into their own cars. But the memo had apparently not reached this particular filling station, and so there was still a job for a sullen teenager in overalls.

The petrol station had a car-repair garage which usually wasn’t operating when Corncrake was working there, but it doubled as a store for the peat briquettes that people often bought with their petrol. In the garage there was a little van thing (I remember it as being an electric van, but it probably wasn’t an electric van because that sounds anachronistic), which was used to move briquettes around the place. Calum or Clarence, when they were there, enjoyed zipping around the petrol station on this little van, stoned off their gourds.

Occasionally, they would careen into the cabin in which Corncrake and I sat. Once, Corncrake told me, they had driven the little van into one of the petrol pumps. Another time, a car drove off, pulling a chunk of the petrol pump with it. Corncrake had fallen to his knees and thrown his hands over his head in anticipation of the ball of flame he felt sure was coming to claim him. A ball of flame did not claim him. Consequently, Corncrake felt immortal, and said it was OK for me to smoke in the booth.

Very few people came to the petrol station on a Sunday. Corncrake’s main job, as it turned out, was to be on the lookout for his nemesis – a little blond-haired eight-year-old with milk-bottle-thick glasses who lived across the green.

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