My First Job

My first job lasted about eight minutes, after which I was obliged to resign. It was the Summer of 1995 and my Dad pulled in a favour through his office, scoring me a role at Irwins the construction contractors in Leeds. My parents handed me the address as they left for a holiday in Egypt, and I was on my own.

Turning up at 9am in what I imagined might be work gear - polished shoes, old school trousers, an almost ironed shirt and tie - I enquired at reception and was instructured to go round the back of the building and talk to Jeff.

Jeff, it turned out, was an obese old man living in a portakabin filled only with cigarette smoke. He decided that I should be a lorry driver, handed me a pair of keys and instructed me to put some diesel into one of the articulated lorries and drive it to Pontefract.

I had been expecting an easy role in a comfortable office, but as this was my very first job I didn't really want to cause a fuss. It seemed rude somehow to point out that I didn't have a license to drive an articulated lorry, nor indeed that the largest thing I'd ever driven in my life was my mum's mini metro (having gained my license only the year before). To show willing, I took the keys, climbed into the cabin and tried to work out how to start the thing.

The cabin of an articulated lorry is very different to that of a mini metro. For one thing, everything is so much larger: the driving wheel is like that on the deck of a ship, the pedals like steps on an escalator and the gearstick the size of a gentleman's umbrella. I felt like one of the Numbskulls from The Beano, operating comically giant machinery inside the human head.

The engine started easily, I pressed down the accelarator and ten or more tonnes of metal lurched at speed towards the building housing the typing pool. Turning the wheel in panic, the back of the lorry seemed to sweep across the car park and risked crushing a row of directors' cars. I then managed to manoeuvre the vehicle close enough to the diesel pumps to attempt to fill it up.

I'd not tried to put fuel inside anything before, not even a mini-metro, and so I took hold of the nozzle with some trepidation. I squeezed the trigger lightly to see what might occur, and diesel sprayed all up the side of the lorry and then onto my shoes. I hunted for what might be a petrol cap but without much luck, and so stuck the nozzle in the nearest likely-sized hole. It didn't fit, and I was wise enough not to pull the trigger a second time.

I decided that I probably had enough fuel to get to Pontefract anyway (not that I had any idea where the hell on god's earth that might be), so rationalised that I should speed things up by driving there first and then filling up on fuel. I climbed back into the lorry, reversed slightly, realised there was a row of cars directly behind the lorry, edged forward a bit and realised there was now a wall directly in front of me, and then - after repeating this three or four times - realised the lorry was now effectively trapped lengthways between the typing pool and a row of incredibly expensive directors' cars.

I did not, by choice, wish to crush either of them. I searched inside my soul and found it empty of enthusiasm for this new task, and so it was that eight minutes into my first job I found myself resigning. And reeking of diesel.

I took the rest of the week off, and when my dad got home from Cairo he got onto the phone to Irwins and discovered the whole thing had been a mistake. I should have been given an office job. How mistakes like that happen I don't know, but I was very grateful for a clandestine week of sunny freedom before the doom of office work clouded my days.

[Time: Summer of 1995]