No good deed goes unpunished.
Every now and then I like to do something nice for someone. A little gesture. Something to show people that I remembered I like to do something nice every now and then.
My general rule is to stick to the physical. For example, nodding silently with a smile when someone in a cafe asks if they can sit on the table adjacent to me. (They’re only required to ask if the tables are touching. If their eyesight is poor and they ask me without realising the tables are a midge’s dick apart, I’m obliged to spit on the floor while giving them a look dirtier than the first square metre of my flat in winter (I don’t have a welcome mat)).
But occasionally, I let my guard down and deviate from party policy.
I have a knack for picking the compliments which change definition in the time between you googling what they mean and physically saying the words. Today was no different.
There is a lady at work, from an office in another country, who has been saddled with me to perform the British part of what should be a simple task for her. I carry the weight of the United Kingdom on my bony shoulders.
But we both know the empire is not what it once was.
I’m a symptom, not a cause, of that.
After weeks of emails, calls, video calls and back to calls again (she professionally took this decision as she couldn’t hide the frustration on her face anymore), she felt she had no choice but to fly over. I worried she was George Clooney in Up in the Air and she was coming to sack me. Face to face, a nice touch.
She arrives at the office with that intoxicating air of competence. Her stride is elongated and counterweighted with a just below arrogant swing.
In comparison, people have told me that when they see me work it paints the image of someone going into a burning building and slithering on the floor to move as the smoke is so thick. They envisage me using the technique of arms by my sides and slamming my forehead flat on the floor while straining my neck to drag my body along like a slug.
I’ve booked a two person meeting room. Something I can do as people prefer to reprimand me away from the rest of the team. It always seems to be me booking the room. I’m a turkey voting for Christmas.
She re-explains the task. I’ve heard this more times than Wonderwall and I could have harmonised with her in real time.
But this time she draws a diagram, and early on. I’m mesmerised and struggle to concentrate on what she says for the next 20 minutes. At the end she sees a glazed over look she’s familiar with, but it’s not for the same reason.
I can’t hold it in anymore.
“Did you used to do art?”
An uncomfortable pause as she thinks I couldn’t get any weirder, “Err… no… why?”
“Because you can draw a perfect straight line freehand”
I wait for her speak as she’s about to thank me.
“No one’s ever said that to me bef-“
I interject, “You’re welcome”.
Good deed done, I decide I will treat myself later that day.
For years I’ve had to endure a stressful tube journey home after work. I used to enjoy the tube, but since I decided to stop spending the time catching flies and start reading books, things have become difficult.
I try to read books people say are good. But they’re inevitably in a black Penguin cover and their copyright ran out a century ago. So I can’t understand a word they say and it aggravates me.
It means when I finish one, I vow to read a book I will enjoy next. I don’t enjoy books so an enjoyable book for me is just one I’m able to read. Which forces me into the young adult section of the bookshop. A young adult is a 12 year old. The books are a pleasure and have words I can understand and a plot I can follow.
But on the tube in rush hour it’s all over 12’s and these books are taboo. So the stress comes from making sure no one can work out what I’m reading.
If I’m seated, I have the cover parallel to the tracks which means my head is as well, and I’m hunched over for half an hour. If the name of the book is on the top of every left page then I have to have my left thumb over that too. So now I’m twisted diagonally.
I don’t even buy books which have named chapters instead of numbered now. When it’s something like “Pink Ladies”, I have to quickly skip the whole page and I lose the flow of the story and never find out why Sandy was upset with Danny before finally dazzling his every sense.
If I’m standing, I have to press the book against the ceiling of the tube. This brings its own set of problems, including the blood rushing out of my arms and paranoia about whether I put on deodorant that morning.
After all this, the last thing I need coming out of the tube station is something without a face smiling at me passive aggressively.
But that’s exactly what M&S have designed. The self checkout.
I scan quicker than someone who’s pulled a sickie and is walking to a pub near their office. But still I have to wait as the children’s TV presenter asks me “Do you have a Sparks card?”, pronouncing the first syllable of every word at dog whistle frequency.
I’ve never been able to wipe the smirk off its face. But after today’s delicately delivered compliment at work, I gifted myself a Sparks card. A sword to slay the beast. A glimmer of hope in the war against a machine which could do zero damage if it ever became self aware.
There’s two camps in 2022 for loyalty card sign up schemes. One is you go on their website, sign up and then download the app where you can use it. The other is you directly download the app and sign up within the app, then you’re ready to use.
For any given retailer, whichever method you try first is not the one they use. Marks and Spencer falls into the neverleavetheapp camp (which you have to go on their website to find).
Generic form to fill out, which I did. Usually instant acceptance as they’re getting your precious spending data for free. But my application takes over a second to go through. I start thinking it’s strange, before I’m distracted by being asked if I want to add it to my wallet. I take the customary pause to think “Is it safe?”, and then add it as I don’t care. If someone gets access to my wallet, yes my credit and debit cards are all in there, but hopefully the money they spend from those accounts will be offset by the points they rack up on my Sparks card.
Hmm… what does a Sparks card get you anyway?
I do my first fully armed shop, fresh from muddling through half a page of Wuthering Heights with a good posture. When I come to the checkout, I scan my Sparks card FIRST and then my shop. I can’t take any chances of being asked if I’m carrying. But in between confessing how many bags I’ve used and selecting my payment method, CBeebies comes on! My nostrils flare and I’m ready to hit the nearest Teletubby. But after asking me if I’ve got a gun after I just shot them, Dick and Dom finally reveal what my reward for bringing firearms into a supermarket is.
I’m thinking surely it’s a few quid off in a shop that sells own brand stuff for twice the price of branded (admittedly their stuff is better than branded, but it still doesn’t feel right to pay more). At minimum, I presume I’ll get a discount on electrician call out rates.
“Everyday, 1 person with a Sparks card wins their shopping for free!”
My eyes narrow. I draw my pistol back up on my phone wallet and start swiping my Sparks card, riddling the till with bullets. Trying to overwhelm its circuitry and kill the terminator.
It’s no use. And then I realise why my application took so long to be approved. It’s because it’s a postcode lottery scheme!
There are two types of postcode lottery.
One relates to where you live having a huge bearing on which schools your kids can go to and therefore on their future prospects and the rest of their life.
The other is a jubilee street party of a lottery where, every time you enter, you enter your postcode into the draw. The more people with the same postcode enter, the more chance that postcode wins.
So you need to get the entries in your neighbourhood up.
You enter. You then tell your neighbour you both have a subsidence problem in your gardens. You make sure you’ve smashed up their car the week before so they’re strapped for cash. Then as you’re both presiding over your bogs, tinnies in hand, you suggest that one way they could pay for it is by entering the postcode lottery.
If you win – great. Same again next month.
If you don’t, you say “Don’t worry mate, I’ll pay for the gardens and you pay me back when you have the money”.
Keep doing the same scam and eventually they’ll hand over their house to pay you back, thinking they’re not losing much because of the swamp, while also wondering how you kept fixing the subsidence problem on your own.
Your chances of winning have doubled at very little personal cost.
No one’s ever entered from the same postcode and won so it’s unclear whether the prize gets split or everyone in that postcode gets the prize amount. I imagine it’s split.
This is relevant because to drum up new entrants, the Postcode Lottery puts an advert in the last ad break of This Morning with Holly and Phil each day.
The advert sees a washed up children’s TV presenter, who now does supermarket voiceovers, go to a leafy suburb, knock on a door, greet the owner with a big smile while feeling sick that they’re reduced to this, and then handing over a giant cheque for £12,637.
This caused a problem for the M&S board when my name came up. The argument was economic vs reputational.
The problem is 95% of my shops comprise:
- 1 pint of semi skimmed milk
The CFO straight away says “Great! Make him win the free shop each time” (like the Postcode lottery, the M&S lottery is unlikely to be random).
But then the Head of Marketing rightly points out, they can’t put an advert on national television where they send a crew of five, two vans and a celebrity presenter being paid less than a crew member, to hand over a pint of milk to a 28 year old bloke devoid of emotion and trousers.
Especially when you factor in the risk I’ll check the date and, if it’s shorter than the one I’ve already got, hand it back.
But money talks and I’m granted my firearm license.
The tree swinging supervisor patrolling a forest of self checkouts comes to investigate the gunfire.
As Tarzan approaches I assume the role of a hard-to-get Jane.
I flash my receipt and spit “Where does it say whether I won my shopping items?!”
His grammar was surprisingly good given his upbringing in the jungle “Item”.
“Where?!”
He took the receipt and circled where it said I didn’t win.
I snatched the receipt back and was about to go for the classic crumple into a ball then throw in the shopping basket for the next shopper to be perturbed by. (I think that’s how the TV mags near the front of the shop get sold. If there’s only one basket or trolley left and it has an old receipt in it, you can’t touch it and bin it, so you throw a TV mag over it like a fire blanket). But then I got hit with the same feeling as when I saw my first Sky box – reverence at its awesome potential and its understated humility.
“Excuse me!” my voice beagling high pitched as I screamed, Tarzan turned around silently, with one eyebrow raised, as I composed myself to commend him “Has anyone ever told you how perfectly you can draw a circle freehand?”