Colleague

What else of this bar? I could tell you more about my regulars, yes, but they all have a few shared characteristics that reduce them to an amalgamated whole. Basically, they’re predictable boring drunks, or friendless geeks. I have to spend my days with these people. What does that do to me? Other than force me to write cartoon versions of their personalities on here, I’m not really sure. It makes me weary. It makes me rethink my own habits.

And my co-worker is an interesting subject. A Geordie man in his late 50’s working in a student union bar. Here’s a typical example of the withering way he treats his patrons:

Student “Coke please”
JE “_”
Student (assuming, he probably didn’t hear, he is old after all) “Coke please”
JE “Yes, pint, or half? Oh, actually we don’t have coke any more.”
Student “Umm, half pint please”.
JE “But we don’t have any coke left”
Student “__”
JE “We have DIET coke”
Student “Ok, diet then, whatever.”
JE “Well why didn’t you say so. Bloody hell.”
Student “There you go.”
JE “Twenty pound note for a bloody half pint of bloody coke! You ought to be shot! Have you got anything smaller? No?! Bloody hell.”

And so it goes on.

This is all coming from a man who has the kind of facial hair that never fails to inspire sniggers from those uninitiated. He has a kind of ‘eyebrow on the cheek’ thing going on. Slap bang in the middle of each side of his face rest two (I guess quite deliberately trimmed) square patches of coarse black hair. I’d like to think it’s a result of too much masturbating, though I suspect it’s actually a result of too many years in the navy. Which is probably the same thing.

So this guy’s travelled all round the world. He was in the navy aged 15 onwards, then he was a policeman (in the ‘polis’, as he says) up until an early retirement at 55. The guy’s clearly seen a lot. Unfortunately, his stories are about as interesting as looking at that rotting stuff that accumulates near the bottom of your shower: curious but ultimately irritating and requiring of some serious work.

When asked about his travels, he resorts to simply listing countries:”Ooh, where have I been. Well I never managed the West Indies, South America or Russia. But I seen Germany, France, Sweden, Holland, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Norway, Hungary, Czechoslovakia – most of Europe then. Africa – travelled around Africa; travelled all around Australia, America, Canada…”

Jesus, I get the point! Were you alive during this time or were you in a coma while a helicopter flew you about, landed occasionally and took a soil sample?

His stories make me stronger in my conviction that if I’m going to live to be a cumbersome old liability, I might as well be an entertaining one and have some good stories to pass on. The most I get out of JE are a few bad jokes like this one:

A pregnant cat swallowed a ball of wool,
It gave birth to mittens.

I’d like to say it’s improving my ability to feign interest in dull stories or to fake-laugh but a) this only shortens your life and b) I’m not getting any better at feigning interest in dull stories or fake-laughing. My eyes definitely glaze over. My approving nods are getting lazy – you can tell because my head doesn’t just move up and down, it kind of sways from side to side as well, just wondering if something interesting is happening off in the distance.
It isn’t.