boring cunts worldwide

If there's one thing I regret, is not delving into detail of the people I meet and work with in my previous jobs. No more, with this job I shall endeavour to introduce to you the cast and crew of this bizarre enterprise.

First day on the job was Monday. I arrive at the office and am shunted off to a break-time area to wait for further instruction. I am sitting at a small table with 2 neds in what they would consider to be workwear (i.e. no trainers/tracksuit) as they discuss something. I'm relieved to know the neds won't be working with me. I am on a different team. We are ushered into a freezing cold mausoleum of a computer lab equipped with ancient Dell desktops positioned around the room. We sit around a large conference table in the centre while a sari-clad HR clone drones on over power point slides depicting the thousands of tortuous little work rules and policies designed to crush and reduce to a fine powder any sense of individuality or freedom. The firm operates on the age-old carrot-and-stick principle... give the workers lots of benefits and perks (carrots) but make it damned difficult to enjoy them by setting these arcane and ridiculous rules (very long sticks).

I'm given a binder filled with a dizzying array of forms: previous employment experience, bank details, request for agreement for random blood and urine samples (no joke, I said NO), and other sundry items. I'm later freed from the cold room and ushered over to attend a Health and Safety tour of the building. I notice that the exit on the ground floor is unlocked and open. So much for the security that the H&S rep was blathering on about. After this I'm shunted off again, this time to my future office and work area to be greeted by an overly made up thin pencil-eyebrowed grinning black-clad wicca named "Claire", the Quality and Training Team Leader". Her teeth are absolutely terrifying, like something out of Alien or Predator and she was to be mein host for the next three days.

She turned out to be not half bad although her constant use of hackneyed old expressions was cumbersome. If I have to hear "at the end uv tha dee" or "noo weer cookin wid gas!" one more time, I'll eat my hair. I sat through three days of training, which she doubtless found just as tiresome but I humoured it, said all the right things, took in information quickly (hello, I have a master's degree, did you think I was a blithering idiot?) and nodded at the right times. Yes, I'm a regular whiz now after just 4 days, they have such high hopes for me.

They paired me up with a Swiss-born polyglot whose been with the firm for over seven months whose an absolute scream, Sasha. He reminds me of a cross between JP and my old childhood friend Tomasin. We get along like a hoose oon fire (Husband mentionned today that he thinks Dutch pronunciation has more in common with Scots than with English). He's a musician too which is why we get along (me, natural born music critic/lover). I told him about my experiences at CRSG/the Link/Foufounes/etc in Montreal. Solide! He knows one Quebecois guy and he was a separatist to boot. I joke around today at work with when I see an email and exclaim "Tabarnac!"

Sitting next to Sasha is one of the slyest gallegos I have ever met, a man named Carlos, with very annoying facial hair and a dry wit. (My mother always warned me NEVER to ask who is Carlos "Quien es Carlos" because the response will invariably be "El de los Huevos Largos!"). Huevos is an assistant team lead. He rarely displays any real emotion other than a sphinx-like Francoesque smirk except during an afternoon break we (Sasha, Huevos) were sitting with a bottle-blonde buxom local ladette who snarkily told off Huevos for speaking in gallego (he was joking with me) saying that it was against company policy to speak in any language other than English on the premises. I laughed out loud.

"Yeah, I think she's taking the mick."

"Noo, ahm not."

It was, of course, on the tip of my tongue to tell Mein Fuhrer that the language spoken by most of the locals then would not qualify as English and would therefore lead to a mass sacking if that were the case but I decided I didn't want to start antagonising people on my first week. Huevos, of course, was fuming when we went upstairs, talking in rapid Spanish on the stairs saying that that hija de puta didn't know what she was talking about but she was probably annoyed at not understanding what was being said. I could understand being annoyed about people speaking a foreign language in front of you, but threatening to tell management is tantamount to "telling on the Headmaster" at any rate. That was the wrong reaction. Mental note: stay away from this mad, racist Bitch as much as possible.

Also, today is the first day that I arrived late. I was lucky enough to get the number for the company via my old recruiter to inform my team lead that I would be late. There was a gas explosion and fire near the train track and all trains that morning were cancelled. Standard rules of the job is that you are NEVER late, not even 2 minutes late, because you clock in and out of your phone but I suspect it is at the discretion of your team leader to report it. If you are late more than twice, you are dragged up to what is patronizingly termed "a disciplinary hearing". You could be racking up millions of cash recovered on the job but you could be sacked for being late twice in twelve months. As the HR drone had said "People are rarely sacked for performance, more for time-keeping." Is this a way for a company to operate?

Anyway, there are more characters. There are about 32 poeple working in that room, an alarming percentage of them are team leads (I calculate one team lead per three workers). Of the more memorable people on my team there is one guy, a big, soft slicked-back aryan blond with an almost comedic Deutsche accent named Tobias who's like the Garfield of TLs. My TL, a short, brunette Catalan smiley-faced woman with very sad eyes named, appropriately enough, Carmen. A young, spec-clad, slim brunette with blonde tendencies named Andrina, who has about the intelligence quotient of seaweed but who appears to be harmless. ("Hah!" scoffs Sasha, "She shafted me big time reporting my lateness from a previous team to HR") so I shall nickname her Jellyfish. A slant-eyed Eurasian girl (half-French, half-Iranian, all Screaming Bore) named something I can't remember so I shall call her Persiana (which is Spanish for window blinds), and your atypical, boringly dressed rail-thin Mrs. Doyle of the Hispanic world named Yolanda (why is it that every boring, plain Spanish woman that I have ever met was named Yolanda) - Yenta for short. There are 2 Israeli girls, who I barely spoke to but seem nice, the requisite polyglot Pole, a Slovakian girl and a couple of other polyglots, and, of course, the locals who deal with English-speaking accounts (God help those they call around Ireland and South Africa - I can almost hear them cursing the thick godless language this country laughingly refers to as "Scots". Scots hasn't been spoken in these parts for over half a millenium.)

More news to follow. Stay tuned.