If you enjoy Staff Infection, please take the time to Like, Comment or better yet, Follow me for more stories. If you don't enjoy it, leave a Comment and say why...your feedback is important to me. 578Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡGzBA8RWx79
I578Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡ1JOVnfIPo4
There were two of us in O'Meara's, the starting point; all hair-gel, aftershave and best casual clothes. Greg and I.
Your best of a bad lot chance on these occasions is to buddy up with at least one regular person; it removes the risk of entering alone and having to gratefully (smile, smile and nod) sit down at a table of welcoming, well-known unwanted acquaintances. Aching hours of stilted, forced-friendly banter stretching before you, knowing that if you were seated at your preferred table these would be the people you would be dissecting. Two at least can speak amongst themselves, when the drunken conversation goes through a rise can quickly pass comments of mutual commiseration.
The Tap Room then; clean, local-cum-tourist bar. A prearranged meet of small groups, every individual wanting to pad himself with as many not totally objectionable people as possible to protect against the totally objectionable and against the hundred-yard staring, sore-thumb isolation of the man whose sole friend got lucky, got dancing with potential luck. Greg and I/Herman, Janick and Dave/Kev and Mike; the group, a loose affiliation of looser ones.
Greg is a sophisticated young Eastern-European who speaks English as well as me, wears great clothes and has a taut, dark-haired, thong-wearing girlfriend who hails from his home country and lives only a one-hour bus ride (50 minutes off-peak) from him. Despite these massive character flaws I can get along with him and we often meet for a drink. Lastly, he is wry and intelligent and we are friends.
Lastly, he is better at the job and better liked than I am though I have been there longer and I often pray for his deportation, but not his girlfriend's.
Herman used to manage a supermarket and it shows; he whines quite a lot and this is his only discernible personality trait. I have little against him and less for him.
Janick is a short and single man in the limbo of his mid-thirties who believes himself strong. Of course, he would be if he ate better, worked out and wasn't weak. His every year is the year before he will quit this shitty job and do something important. Normally, he is gruffly bland and quietly superior. Drunk, usually after two beers, he laughs loudly and enthusiastically at everything and tries to start fights. He is beaten up on a regular basis by anonymous men in nightclubs.
Dave is obnoxious in an unobtrusive way and spends a lot of time snorting laughter at his own witticisms. He has large ears attached to a large head, beady eyes, a weak chin and a pug nose and bears an uncanny resemblance to a warthog. He wants to be and probably eventually will be a manager. When he began work a new consignment of uniform shirts were in the long process of being obtained and for weeks he was allowed to wear his own clothes; black or white shirt, bad tie, bad tie-clip. In his own clothes, the uninitiated would often mistake him for a manager or supervisor causing me to have flash fantasies of grabbing that particularly mistaken individual by the legs and using them to bludgeon him to death. When the order did arrive and I received my first view of his bulk stuffed into the regulation blue, short-sleeved shirt I locked myself in the toilet and laughed quietly but viciously for a couple of minutes. On re-emerging I overheard a manager telling him that "everybody has to wear the name-badge" and I quickly returned to the toilet. But he is nothing and nothing bothers me.
Mike is an uninteresting young man who rarely enters my thoughts and has yet to bother me. Kev is my polar opposite and though I should hate him for his good looks, hyperactive sex life and swaggering self-confidence I cannot bring myself to. He is unaffected and that is rare.
ns 15.158.61.23da2
