Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead, forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep sea swell...
There's this guy I work with at the club, who is nice enough to ferry me home after work; he lives in a nearby suburb to mibe, y'see. He has been working at the club maybe a couple months now, and seems to be picking things up nicely- much more quickly than I did at first, anyway.
After work, everyone who works until closing time (which is either 4, 5, or 6AM) stays behind, has a few gratis drinks, and generally winds down a little.
He didn't want to stay behind last night, and as soon as he'd been signed off, he wanted to leave. Which suited me just fine, as I hadn't wanted to work in the first place, but ended up having to work for 7 hours, during which time I was sick twice. The smoke that fills the place has been making me feel rather unwell on Saturdays over the last couple of weeks, a process which I'm assured by a colleague is only exacerbated by quitting smoking pot.
On the way out, I noticed that my friend was even grinding his jaw, giving evils to the objects in his way, things like that. So I asked him what had happened to him, besides the blood all over his shirt from some moron punching out another and the latter person sneezing on my friend as he walked him to the door.
(Getting a little bloodied is no cause for distemper, it's a common occurrence. Another person had also sneezed on me when I got him a wad of paper and some water to clean himself off with after he'd been similarly punched by someone else, putting a Pollock-like spray of incarnadine all over me as well. People who have been punched in the nose sneeze a lot, I'm slowly learning.)
What had happened was this. He had arrived at the club in the middle of the night, after first doing a shift at another venue our employer provides security for.
He was put in a room which has a few 'boxes' for us to stand on so we can see what is happenening, and see each other, when the club is full. When standing on these boxes, it is the responsibility of the people on the boxes to keep track of the people on the other boxes- otherwise, when the club is full and someone gets off their box without first signalling to everyone else, they could well end up being badly beaten up, without anyone to help them out. Because when the club is full, it is extremely difficult to see all four corners of the room and what is happening in all of them.
(The only time we are meant to get off these boxes without first signalling is when there's a fight, you see.)
So no-one else was on a box when he took his box, but he stayed where he was- not only because he had just begun and needed time to get his bearings, but also because it's also a bad idea to leave all boxes in a room un-occupied, in case of something bad happening with no-one to see it. After a little while, people got back up on their boxes, looking a little dishevelled (messed hair, untucked shirts, unbuttoned top buttons).
And after a little while longer, the boss came by and berated him. "Why did you just stand on your box then? There was a big fight in the corridor (which connects the room to the foyer)! Didn't you wonder what was happening?", plus a whole lot more things which were a lot ruder and a lot more unfair than this.
And then, when he was signed off, he was berated again, not just by the boss but by the two other people, senior staff both.
He, not surprisingly, wasn't too happy about this.
"But I was told to stay on my box if I ended up being the only person on a box in a given room!"
" can go and get fucked! I'm not taking that sort of shit for peanuts!"
"I had just gotten out there, how I was meant to know what was happening when it wasn't even happening in that room?!?"
What was most interesting to me about all of this wasn't so much his reaction, but his reaction as compared with my own. You see, the same thing's happened to me a few times, and when it did, it seems to me that I took it a lot better, a lot less personally, than my friend did.
Which surprises me, because I know he's a much calmer person than I am, though a rave-attending metalhead and a few years younger. Maybe I am growing up. Or maybe, as someone who won't be spoken to rudely without responding in kind, I'm a complete fraud.
Anyway, though a lot of the other staff can be a little spikey at times, but for their occasional fits of pique they're very professional, it's one of the better run venues in Perth in terms of security, and I'm concentrating on learning as much as I can while I'm there, before I can find a better paid job that doesn't require me to work at night and on the weekends. That way, I can always come back to this if I have to.
After work, everyone who works until closing time (which is either 4, 5, or 6AM) stays behind, has a few gratis drinks, and generally winds down a little.
He didn't want to stay behind last night, and as soon as he'd been signed off, he wanted to leave. Which suited me just fine, as I hadn't wanted to work in the first place, but ended up having to work for 7 hours, during which time I was sick twice. The smoke that fills the place has been making me feel rather unwell on Saturdays over the last couple of weeks, a process which I'm assured by a colleague is only exacerbated by quitting smoking pot.
On the way out, I noticed that my friend was even grinding his jaw, giving evils to the objects in his way, things like that. So I asked him what had happened to him, besides the blood all over his shirt from some moron punching out another and the latter person sneezing on my friend as he walked him to the door.
(Getting a little bloodied is no cause for distemper, it's a common occurrence. Another person had also sneezed on me when I got him a wad of paper and some water to clean himself off with after he'd been similarly punched by someone else, putting a Pollock-like spray of incarnadine all over me as well. People who have been punched in the nose sneeze a lot, I'm slowly learning.)
What had happened was this. He had arrived at the club in the middle of the night, after first doing a shift at another venue our employer provides security for.
He was put in a room which has a few 'boxes' for us to stand on so we can see what is happenening, and see each other, when the club is full. When standing on these boxes, it is the responsibility of the people on the boxes to keep track of the people on the other boxes- otherwise, when the club is full and someone gets off their box without first signalling to everyone else, they could well end up being badly beaten up, without anyone to help them out. Because when the club is full, it is extremely difficult to see all four corners of the room and what is happening in all of them.
(The only time we are meant to get off these boxes without first signalling is when there's a fight, you see.)
So no-one else was on a box when he took his box, but he stayed where he was- not only because he had just begun and needed time to get his bearings, but also because it's also a bad idea to leave all boxes in a room un-occupied, in case of something bad happening with no-one to see it. After a little while, people got back up on their boxes, looking a little dishevelled (messed hair, untucked shirts, unbuttoned top buttons).
And after a little while longer, the boss came by and berated him. "Why did you just stand on your box then? There was a big fight in the corridor (which connects the room to the foyer)! Didn't you wonder what was happening?", plus a whole lot more things which were a lot ruder and a lot more unfair than this.
And then, when he was signed off, he was berated again, not just by the boss but by the two other people, senior staff both.
He, not surprisingly, wasn't too happy about this.
"But I was told to stay on my box if I ended up being the only person on a box in a given room!"
" can go and get fucked! I'm not taking that sort of shit for peanuts!"
"I had just gotten out there, how I was meant to know what was happening when it wasn't even happening in that room?!?"
What was most interesting to me about all of this wasn't so much his reaction, but his reaction as compared with my own. You see, the same thing's happened to me a few times, and when it did, it seems to me that I took it a lot better, a lot less personally, than my friend did.
Which surprises me, because I know he's a much calmer person than I am, though a rave-attending metalhead and a few years younger. Maybe I am growing up. Or maybe, as someone who won't be spoken to rudely without responding in kind, I'm a complete fraud.
Anyway, though a lot of the other staff can be a little spikey at times, but for their occasional fits of pique they're very professional, it's one of the better run venues in Perth in terms of security, and I'm concentrating on learning as much as I can while I'm there, before I can find a better paid job that doesn't require me to work at night and on the weekends. That way, I can always come back to this if I have to.