The Temp Pest

By Richard Batchelor

This is the first introduction I've ever written for a friend's book or ebook in this case and after having read it I'd like to say it's an honour and a privilege indeed to have my name associated with such literary style, talent and flair. Perhaps I'm just being narcissistic here but I see so much of myself at work in Rich's character and I think that's what really makes it easy to read. The narrator in 'The Temp Pest' is a lovable if somewhat indecisive and at times misguided soul but one with a good heart, great sense of humour and generally good intentions. Rich brings him to life with the same colourful, vibrant strokes that Van Gogh would use to illuminate his famous sunflowers or perhaps Monet would use on an outdoor piece.
The settings are at times dull and colourless but then deliberately so as it's about giving the reader a feel for what it's like to be stuck in a temp job. As opposed to my own work in 'Confessions of a Gaming Attendant' whereby 'I Am Legend' is a constant reference as every day often feels the same at work, here 'The Temp Pest' is a bumpy roller coaster ride for our hapless protagonist who goes from one bizarre and different situation to the next. Often he finds himself in situations that are testing beyond any normal person's endurance, with his senses assaulted at his various workplaces and the way he manages to keep himself sane and even entertained in such situations forms the basis for much of the book's comedy and great wit.
Rich's England is a breath of fresh air and a great contrast to all the books coming out nowadays set in the States and he brings his characters to life at once dumping them into funny and memorable situations. For me the highlight of 'The Temp Pest' was Rich's soccer (sorry football) match that he describes at work as I can't remember ever laughing so much while reading and his references to the Greek myths interwoven with this modern day tale that could best be compared to the tale of woe suffered by Job himself. And being somewhat musically inclined myself it was great to see the way Rich talks about music and the kinds of horrible music his protagonist suffers while at work. If only there were a punishment severe enough for the bastards who inflict such crimes against humanity as Bryan Adams, Phil Collins and others upon us while we suffer at work the world could potentially be a much better place.
In closing, I can't recommend this book highly enough as the tale of Rich is the tale of every man who toils for another and yet has lofty ambitions of being so much more (sigh, don't we all?) I am in a state of eager anticipation for Rich's upcoming exposé on the world of 'Teaching English as a Foreign Lackey.' Well, that's about all from me reader, I hope you enjoy The Temp Pest as much as I did and I'm sure Rich has a long and wonderful journey in front of him as far as writing goes because if this is any indication then he still has a great many interesting tales to tell. Enjoy!

Sincerely,
Mikey Lee Ray

• Language: English
• Publisher: Richard Batchelor
• Release date: Mar 2, 2013
• ISBN: 9780987331793

Richard Batchelor

The Pelican School of Bird and Other Stories is Richard Batchelor’s second book and first work of fiction. His first book, The Temp Pest, a largely autobiographical half-comedy mostly set in warehouses and packing factories, is also available to download on Smashwords. Batchelor is also a musician and the front man in the longstanding rock and roll indie group, Ricky Spontane. The group have released three studio albums; Spontane Time, Hit the Town and Spontane 3, as well as a clutch of singles. A new EP, The Seeds of Doom, will hopefully be available to download by the time you’ve read this book. Batchelor has also released a solo album, Richard I. Batchelor, who currently lives in Chartres, France, is a hypochondriac, a Fats Domino obsessive and a bungler. He is both imprisoned and liberated by his own imagination. It depends on the day. He can be contacted on: mailto:[e-mail] Amendment May 2017. Though Morrissey is oft quoted and rightly so during my first book, any genius he had seems to have dissipated into idiocy and bigotry. It's a pity, but true. I have no time for the man these days.

Book preview

THE TEMP PEST

RICHARD BATCHELOR

Copyright

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law.

Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly. Thank you for respecting the hard work of the author.

Epub ISBN 978-0-9873317-9-3

Version 1.0

Published by Richard Batchelor at Smashwords

Copyright © Richard Batchelor 2013

I give my love and undying thanks to my girlfriend Jo Lewis and my co-writer and friend Matthew Schafer, aka Mikey Lee Ray, whose continual support and practical help has underpinned the creation of this work from start to finish. A special thank you also goes to Christelle Chabredier, who kick-started the whole thing by suggesting I write on the train. Finally I wish to express my gratitude to my good friend Dr Yiddrian Burke, for passing on his expert medical knowledge. During this book I am less than complimentary about the EFL business. I would like to add that my present employers in this field have, however, been cool to me so far. This book is a true story, give or take an exaggeration or two, set mainly between 2002 and 2004. I dedicate it to my beloved son, Antoine Henry Batchelor, aged eight years and two months, who is happily too young to understand the misery of dull labour.

Cover by Jo and Mikey. Thank you very much to Talya Davies, Bozwell Feign and Charles Swann for the expressions ‘a maelstrom of inefficiency’, ‘lumps and bumps’ and ‘backwash’ respectively.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. INTRODUCTION – HOW I BECAME A TEMP-ER

2. SQUIRT YOUR LOAD ON ME, SAUCY!

3. PULP AT MATALAN

4. DE BURGHALAN’S AGONY

5. DE BURGHALAN

6. THE TEMP PEST

7. GREEK LEGENDS IN THE WORKPLACE

8. DON’T TALK, JUST PACK

9. FEED THE WORLD

10. MELON ENTRY, MY DEAR TEMP PEST (ALTERNATIVELY TITLED, SINCE TWO JOKES ARE BETTER THAN ONE, ‘MASSAGING MELONS SURE BEATS FONDLING PLUMS’)

11. SEVERIANO BALLESTEROS

12. TREVOR FRANCIS

13. THE ZOMBIE

14. MAYONNAISE MUSINGS

15. WILLY WONKA AND THE HERB FACTORY

16. OWZTHAT IN KIRKBY

17. BALDWOOF

18. A TUMOUR IN MY HUMOUR

19. IN BALDWOOF’S GOOD BOOKS

20. F- FOR B+

21. DESTROYING A MYTH

22. HOW I COPED, PART 1: REVERIE

23. HOW I COPED, PART 2: I REIGN IN GEEKDOM

24. THE JOB THAT NEVER WAS

25. I’D RATHER BE A NERD THAN ONE OF THE HERD

26. HOW MY SON ANTOINE DIDN’T QUITE BECOME LONNIE DONEGAN

27. A CURIOUS AND AMUSING SIESTA

28. WELCOME TO SOUTHAMPTON

29. THE SUNSET AND SUNRISE BREAD GRAVEYARD SANDWICH

30. THE EVILS OF DRINK

31. BACKWASH

32. A STUDY IN PSYCHOPATHY

33. BACK TO SCHOOL

34. DON’T MAKE ME ANGRY – I CAN’T WORK VERY WELL WHEN I’M ANGRY

35. COL AND TIM FULFIL THEIR DESTINY

36. THE TEMP PEST WILLINGLY DOES THE GRAVEYARD SHIFT FOR FREE

37. 96.7 FM

38. AU REVOIR 96.7 FM

39. 1-2-3-4-5 SENSES WORKING OVERTIME

40. THE DRIVER’S MATE

41. A SHORT NOTE ON DRIVERS’ MATES

42. NIGEL’S ONLY MAKING PLANS FOR US

43. MY PART IN RIPPING OFF AND GIVING FALSE HOPE TO SWEET OLD LADIES WITH PROBABLY NOT VERY MUCH MONEY

44. ON THE OTHER SIDE AT MAC AND SPONGE

45. MURDER IN SEFTON PARK

46. UP THE WORKERS! (OO-ER)

47. THE TEMP PEST CHUCKS A WEEKS WAGE’S DOWN THE PAN

48. EPILOGUE

About the Author

1. Introduction – How I became a Temp-er

Dear Mr Batchelor,

Following our visit to your residence we have decided to indefinitely suspend your Jobseeker’s Allowance as from the date of your last payment. We have judged you to be in cohabitation and therefore no longer fulfil the criteria necessary to be in receipt of this benefit.

Please do not hesitate to contact us if you have any queries regarding the matter. Also, if you wish to appeal against this decision you may do so by going through the usual channels (see enclosed leaflet).

Yours Sincerely,

Barbara-Ann Vernon

Barbara-Ann Vernon

Branch Manager, Williamson Square Job Centre, Liverpool

As I had suspected, the hints of homosexuality and therefore theoretical impossibility of cohabitation with a woman had not worked. A few cobbled together posters of topless hunks working out on the lounge walls hadn’t convinced the Dole Office Hag (DOH for short) that it was guys and not gals who got me twiddling my todger at night. You may say I should have put them in my bedroom, but after the effort we’d gone to converting a tiny and freezing spare room into the said bedroom, our visitor didn’t even check the sleeping arrangements. I didn’t quite get that one, I must admit, and it confuses me to this day. A few questions in the lounge were put to me and my girlfriend, who was posing as the best soul mate a gay guy could have, and the DOH left politely with questionnaire filled in roundly and squarely, giving no hint in her facial expression or tone of voice as to what she really thought.

That went well, I said to my girlfriend after she’d left. I mean, what possible reason would she have to think we were lovers?

I had, in the hour or so leading up to the appointment, utterly convinced myself this was the truth, only just stopping short of applying the Stanislavski technique of method acting and feasting on some gay porn to get into character. I wondered if murderers went over and over their story like this, until they were so profoundly consumed in their part that they were genuinely convinced of their innocence while recounting their alibi to the police. However, despite our utterly convincing Burton and Taylor (great acting) yet anti-matter Burton and Taylor (no sexual chemistry) performance, we lost the case… and as cases go it didn’t need a Holmes, Dupin or Columbo to put two and two together – i.e. that this was now the third address at which we had been ‘flatmates’. She was earning, I was on the dole, and morally upstanding folk across the globe could now rub their hands together and celebrate the comeuppance of another unworthy benefits scrounger. Not to mention a few quid off the national welfare costs.

Stunned and afraid, (not because I didn’t think it was fair as it was totally, utterly, completely and wholly fair in absolutely every possible, conceivable and thinkable way) I went to a café with a mate and we discussed the failure of the homosexual ploy.

Yeah, you can’t get away with living together just the two of you twice. They systematically get you for that. It’s a pisser, but to be fair I don’t know anyone who has been caught who wasn’t guilty as charged, he said.

Yep, the logicians at Job Centre Plus (or whatever it’s known as these days) play the percentages game and they nearly always get it right.

So as I panicked and squirmed and consumed coffee and ciggies at alarming rates, what I didn’t know was that the heroic odyssey of The Temp Pest was about to begin. Within ten days I had a job and flags were mounted and waved in the Northern wind;

Three cheers for Batchelor, Hip Hip

HOORAAAAAY!

Hip Hip

HOORAAAAAY!

Hip Hip

HOORAAAAAY!

Through gritted teeth I can reveal to you that for over a decade I had been registered as one of Britain’s unemployed in what proved to be a vain attempt to make a living out of rock ‘n’ roll music. Through a mixture of shyness, incompetence, sloth, cowardice, lack of business acumen, naïveté, poor decisions, working with too many like-minded people, sloppy musicianship, a want of braggadocio, procrastination, relative poverty, phobia of phone calls, a dearth of marketing flair, a failure to see the bigger picture ranging from personal image down to album sleeve design, uppity and misguided ideas of artistic integrity and an inability to write a Number One smash, but most of all shyness, fame and fortune and even a weekly wage had eluded me. Apart from those faults I was quite brilliant in my pursuit of living from my art. I regret nothing. It could have been worse. At least great gigs were performed, fun things happened, places were visited, bonds were formed and recordings were made and some of them were bloody good. We hardly ever got the groupies though, for some reason. Or perhaps with a blindness born of humility akin to the two heroes of Dumb and Dumber in the final scene of the film, I failed to notice scantily clad buxom babes inviting me on board their ride. Blindness born of humility… no, hang on; make that blindness born of being a dozy, grinning klutz. I think I feared the exposure of fame, especially the interviews. I have only ever given one decent interview, which was in a pub with a lanky sixteen-year-old I’d never met before with whom I just hit it off for some reason. I assumed if I made it big everyone would find out what a boring bastard I really was.

At least we always had the nous and guts to create. I was never scared of that and I was rarely afraid beyond the healthy butterflies of standing on a stage, as long as I could stick to singing and not giving speeches. Therefore, despite total commercial underachievement there was at least a long string of shows – some of them memorable – and a list of recorded songs not far from hitting three figures to my name. So I have avoided the dreadful and tragicomic fate of the middle-aged pisshead at the bar telling and subsequently boring shitless kids half his age about how he could have been a contender, while the truth had been he knew all the while he wasn’t much cop and had only ever finished writing six and a half songs, three of them any good. All this played out while boasting, again down the pub, about how massive he was going to be. So I reiterate, I have avoided this fate and am simply a middle-aged pisshead.

As for bumming from the state for so long, I can assure you the main problem again was shyness when it came to jobs, with the shame of going so long without gainful employment only adding to the shyness when faced with awkward questions (about why I’d gone so long without gainful employment) and hence the vicious circle was created. When Morrissey sang So you go and you stand on your own, and you leave on your own, and you go home and you cry and you want to die in 1984 it was the soul of poignancy to my timid adolescent self, yet months before when he’d sang I’ve never had a job because I’m too shy it seemed a bit daft to me, but how true it proved to be.

Both lyrics are incredible in their risqué straightforwardness and none of the other pop stars of the day would have dared to sing them. Such words wouldn’t even have crossed others’ radar. That is why I consider Mozzer in the highest possible terms, as there are dozens of such quotable, obvious yet amazingly original lines. You will see him quoted and paraphrased in my heroic tales, as it is often appropriate to do so. A prickly and maybe unpleasant sod he can be, but as he is so oft cited we can consider him the modern Shakespeare.

If my ex-lifestyle offends you then I promise I am now paying the penalty teaching English as a foreign lackey – sorry, I meant teaching English as a foreign language – and this is a far darker and deeper tale than my twenty four months of job hopping you’re about to read about.

And so it came to pass that in order to survive I gained experiences I would never have willingly sought, as a performer of temporary work. Any old shit I could get my hands on. I only turned down one job before looking at it; packing frozen pizzas in North Wales, which involved getting a daily coach put on by the agency at some absurd and unseemly hour in the morning. I imagine this won’t be one of the things I’ll be lamenting on my death bed, should The Grim Reaper not take me with one fell swoop of his indefatigable blade.

Three things struck me during my time as The Temp Pest. Firstly, that I wasn’t quite as much as a pest as I’d imagined I would be. This was partly because of the second thing that struck me, which was that I generally worked pretty hard. I suppose this was because there was nothing else to do but get on with the job anyway most of the time. Not doing so would be duller still, and often not doing so would involve unwanted conversations. I say this neither as a snob nor a misanthrope – indeed I testify before The Almighty that despite my occasionally sardonic and often sarcastic critiques, I hold kindness as the highest virtue and it is the main quality I look for in a fellow human being – but in the spirit of candidness, since I don’t cope well with a conversation I cannot contribute to except disingenuously. Nor did I want to be questioned about my rock and roll ambitions. I didn’t want to answer the question, What type of music do you play, mate? too many times.

I am, returning to the first thing that struck me, a hopelessly impractical eejit. Technically a moron perhaps, when faced with a mechanical or D.I.Y issue. I don’t want to exaggerate. I can change a lightbulb, use a screwdriver and just about wire a plug.

My father did try. He was a dab hand in woodwork, skilled in gardening and useful in certain other home improvement matters. He bought me a tool box at a fairly early age and did his best to put hammer, screw, saw and vice in my hand, but apart from once making a Roman sword for school I had no inclination at all for such prosaic yet baffling instruments. The poor man was always fighting a losing battle and he eventually gave up.

Nevertheless, I muddled through my jobs with little fuss on the whole. There were incidents but I didn’t cause damage, blow up a building or seriously injure another human being or myself through faffing or kerfuffle.

The third thing that will strike you upon reading this tale of heroism and valour, is that unlike the Greek doers of epic deeds who can count chivalry among their list of qualities (though in Zeus’ case it was only because he wanted to add one more Zeusette, mortal or otherwise, to his Mahabharata-length list of sexual conquests), there are curiously few female players. This is basically because most of the jobs I did were male-dominated, with a handful of exceptions. You will see why, by and by.

So let The Temp Pest begin!

And I hope I may be Gonzalo, but suspect I shall more likely be the jester Trinculo.

And as the honest and kindly Lord nearly said,

All torment, trouble, wonder and amazement inhabits here: some heavenly power guide us out of this fearful warehouse/factory/office!

2. Squirt your load on me, Saucy!

The first time it was funny. The second time it was still funny, the third time too. By the fifteenth time, and four changes of overalls later, forgive me if I say the joke was running thin.

This is the worst fucking job I’ve ever done, I’m getting REALLY pissed off now, said a teenager of intense and aggressive air, as a fountain of sticky sauce claimed another bulls eye over his lapels.

I envisaged him walking out or punching someone.

As the kid stormed off to change his jacket I changed from stacker to filler and within minutes I was again splattered with goo. The kid seemed to be returning from the clean jacket closet via a long toilet break encompassing a shit, spliff and cigarette, so I stayed on, wiping off the pastel gunk before it dripped and coagulated on my jeans. Extracts, water, additives, vinegar and colorants caked in cracked little lumps on my overalls and gave off an unpleasant stench.

These were sauces surely used in the fast-food trade. There were generic ketchups, generic mayonnaises, generic barbecue sauces and some nasty-looking prawn cocktail slop that gave the impression a salmon demon from Buffy the Vampire Slayer had just walked onto a porno set by mistake and shot his not inconsiderable load, which had then been scooped up and slapped into a vat.

Would you like the pink sperm or the spicy dogshit with your sausage, sir?

They say once you work in a restaurant kitchen you never