Morning John

Hello,

     one of my first full time jobs was for a charity which carried out important work in the field of exams. One would expect the assessment board I worked for to be a Government Department but it was a registered charity who only took on temporary staff by existing staff recommendation, and  advertised full time posts at any level with the requirement to have a degree (from 1994 onwards, am guessing this previously did not apply....)

I worked the majority of my periods of employment (since I did not have a degree) at Joiner Street in Sheffield and there were a small number of permanent staff who ran the show all year round, including quiet periods when it wasn't immediately obvious what it was they could have found to do. Although I did once find an answer machine message asking one of them to sort the elastic bands out into size order....

Dan, Christine, Alan, and Wotsit John were those thus tasked. If you are, or worked with and liked anyone there, I will apologise now. Am going to have to be honest about what went on.

Dan was in charge, Mrs Christine as I called her was in charge of office functionality, Alan wore a shiny blue coat, and John was a very thirsty fellow indeed. On my first day I didn't realise Dan was in charge because he was dressed in overalls unlike almost everyone else, but found out he was prior to making any terrible mistakes. Mrs Christine was friendly if a little unsteady, Alan was also friendly if a little over serious and John was paralytic. I initially thought he had a speech impediment. He did. His speech was severely impeded by excessive quantities of alcohol.

Over time I came to realise that Mrs Christine also liked a drop. The first female member of temporary staff of the year was surprised to find a box with bottles of gin in it in the Ladies toilet. Christine's unsteadiness was less obvious to link to frol but her wavering vocal tones belied the truth. Dan probably knew about both but seemed fairly relaxed, until one of the senior managers came down. He said to John, " Now then John can you just nip down to check if everything is alright in the warehouse in the yard please" in a cunning rouse to keep John from putting his foot in it or appearing as in his cups as he actually was. He ignored this request, and on seeing him, the senior manager Roger said "Oh, Morning John" to which John replied "Morning John". I get the feeling Roger also was aware.

Break times were an interesting affair involving interaction between yoot (including I) and the more experienced staff members. George and Howard were good friends of mine, and I tolerated BananaDon, a not yellow phallus shaped dinosaur, and to a far lesser extent, John. John often started his day's tale (oft repeated) with the line " Ehvum er wotshit. I er ad Sheppus pie lasht night". There followed an awkward pause whilst the wise chose to escape, and John tried to reassemble the disparate fragments of his memory to treat us to the next line, before he continued  " Ehvum er, minsch beef, taties, massed, gravy...evhum, er...." after which salient facts the candle or his memory was snuffed out by his alcohol stream. He also told us many times about his mate's oven which he had offered to fix, about a fish which was 12 inches long (to his surprise, although there was no conclusion to this anecdote) and his favourite " Ehvum wotsit, a frenjaminesyjz  daughter.....".

Alas as a nineteen year old my cup of sympathy did not overrun. I once coined the phrase at seeing someone fail to throw a parcel into a box by miles " What, on a scale of John to ten, was that?" and things got worse the day we discovered his stash.

We were clearing out one of the rooms downstairs, next to the one the band Longpigs used to practice in, and were asked to dismantle some shelving. In his crapulence, Wotsit John had clearly forgotten that his stash, or more likely one of his many stashs, of rum, was kept in the one we were dismantling. Imagine our surprise at finding three bottles of rum, two open, one half empty, with no sign of dust. "What are these doing here John?" we asked, knowingly. "Ehvurrm, er Wotsit um....ave ad a cold". That must have been some virus to require that much alcohol....

Am not proud to say this but we watched where John put his stash and went straight back down, found, and hid it. We then put up signs saying Rum - this way. John was understandably not amused, although neither were the managers (likewise understandably) so the signs, and my mate's hilarious caricature of John wearing a jumper saying Pisht on it in a sea of rum, were removed. Am not proud, but it still makes me laugh. Something Christine didn't do when John rang in sick one day and I asked if he'd had a rum do.

I left to take up a permanent job in 1998 or 99 shortly before all such work was moved to Manchester, but am still in touch with four of the people I worked with. It is still something that comes up in almost every conversation we have. There are many more tales from this place, but I will have to think very carefully about how, and indeed if, I can share them.

Cheers!

Yannis