Moving People
Image: Tierra Mallorca
When I left school, it was pretty much agreed that I wouldn’t amount to anything. I say ‘agreed’ because that was a view held jointly by myself and most of my teachers. There was nothing particularly wrong with the school I attended (St. George’s CofE Foundation in Broadstairs), but there’s only so much pushing you can do when the pupil in question doesn’t want to learn...and I didn’t.
I had three interests at school: reading, playing games and fancying every girl in a short skirt (which was just about all of them). I also held a record that, thanks to my distorted sense of values, I had actually become very proud of: 105 sessions absent out of a possible 111. I believe that record still holds, and the school was practically ancient, even then.
The headmaster was a Justice of the Peace, a local judge who was so active in court that his office was often empty. We had quite a few teachers at St. George’s who had other jobs: my maths teacher was a Wimbledon umpire during the school holidays, something that seemed hilarious to us all during her lessons.
‘What are you planning to do with yourself, Stone?’ The Head asked me on my last day.
‘I’m going to work at my mother’s estate agent.’
He looked at me over the top of his half-moon glasses and said: ‘Your poor mother.’
At the time, I thought he was a bastard. As it turned out, however, he was right.
My stint as an estate agent didn’t exactly see me covering myself in glory.
If the impending recession or the firm's various shady senior partners hadn’t bulldozed the business, I would have managed it all by myself. I didn’t actually do this on purpose (as I really liked the £72 per week they were paying me: it helped to maintain my Discworld collection). Still, it happened because I was so incompetent and mentally disconnected from the job that I literally saw every day as a new opportunity to do exactly what I wanted. Examples of these horrific endeavours (and the resulting disasters) included:
1. ACTION: Creating fictional characters and then inventing various addresses for them in Broadstairs beforefiling them as applicants on the computer. RESULT: Countless first-class letters on the mailing list went to people who didn’t exist at addresses that didn’t exist, like:
The Wizard Wankaplet 4 Boner Drive Broadstairs CT10 2KK
2. ACTION: Misunderstanding a phone call and informing a couple that the house they’d just bought was ready to move into, one day earlier than agreed on exchange.
RESULT: The buyer and his two furniture vans arrived from North Wales, and said buyer held me up against the wall while my associates called the police. I think I’d annoyed him by saying “Look, I SAID I was sorry: what more do you want? Blood?”. It turned out that’s exactly what he wanted.
3. ACTION: Never turning up at viewings. RESULT: A shocking amount of couples stood outside
empty houses all over Thanet, waiting impatiently and saying things like “He was ginger, the bloke who set this up: wasn’t he?”
4. ACTION: Telling a couple – very untruthfully – that a house had once suffered a major ea infestation once they were INSIDE the property. RESULT: The couple constantly slapped and scratched at themselves for the entirety of the viewing.
5. ACTION: Agreeing to distribute a major leaflet campaign for a multinational property agency and then dumping the entire print run into a skip in the backlot. RESULT: None. They never found out.
Ahh...they were great days: it’s no wonder I didn’t last long in the job, though.
