Use of walls

A day spent drilling holes in my wall, just because I can. Oh the wonders of being a home owner! With the help of my parents I have made the final crucial additions to my flat; things that I've had planned right from the start: wall mounted storage solutions.

I was actually shocked how expensive wall-mounted shelving can be. It's surprising, but once you've bought the tracks, brackets and the shelves themselves as separate components and it quickly adds up. Never mind, I can now officially say that my flat is properly fitted out and all it needs now is a good tidy up.

Best of all though is that I have now implemented what I call bicycle storage for men. That's right ladies, none of this "bicycles belong outside in the shed; inside the home is only for pretty things like pot plants" malarkey, we men hang our bicycles on the wall.

Short Story - Joy

As promised here is the short story I've been writing. Hope you like it!

Joy

By R.J. Parker

“Miss Harrison, if you’d like to come in please.”

Joy rose from her seat, placing the copy of The Guardian she’d been reading back on the coffee table. Retrieving her bag from the floor she followed the man through the open door.

She wasn’t sure she was ready for this. This morning it had all seemed so easy, sitting in her cosy little flat listening to thought for the day on Radio 4 drinking tea and spreading jam on her toast. She had felt so civilised. Now, if she were completely honest with herself she felt extremely anxious. She really needed this.

The scene that greeted her was all too familiar. It was feared the world over; three people sat behind a single table leafing through identical paperwork and before them an empty chair. Even as she went through the business of introductions, shaking hands and lowering herself into the seat she was painfully aware that she had been through this too many times.


“Okay, so you’re applying for the role of research assistant at the university.” the chairman observed. He was a sober fellow, probably in his 40s, balding but well dressed in a suit and tie. Glancing up to her from what she recognised as a copy of her CV he gave her an appraising glance over the top of small oval spectacles.

“Would you please tell us why you think you would be well suited to this position.”

The standard opening question, Joy thought, and one she had a rehearsed answer to.

“It sounds like interesting work.” she said, “I’ve worked for four years now as a personal assistant so I think I could do it well.”

“Ah yes” the man - she had already forgotten his name - said, “and this brings us to the question of your past experience.”

He paused.

“You say in your CV that your experience since leaving university has been with this company...” he checked his notes “Grant Blackthorn, but none of us have heard of them and the company website is pretty vague. What do they actually do?”

Grant Blackthorn; her current employment. How to explain that a graduate leaving university with a humanities degree, bills falling on the mat and a rumbling stomach had to take whatever came her way. When your father knows a man who was at school with someone else who knows another who needs a summer intern at their firm, don’t ask at least they’ll pay you, fate can freewheel from there.

How to explain what she really did to keep the lights on and Waitrose chocolate cake on the table? Best to give them the usual spiel.

“Grant Blackthorn is a company that specialises in locating and acquiring individuals and intellectual property from overseas for third parties.”
 
“So they’re a search firm? Like an employment recruiter?”

“That sort of thing yes”

That sort of thing if you really wanted to push definitions to their most elastic point before they snapped and whipped you in the eye, yes. Yes they were.

They searched all right, “search firm” was often a good description. Granted they had the comparative problem that they people they headhunted didn't want to be found, but they didn't let that stop them. Recruitment not so much though; given the usual circumstances that tended to be the last thing on anybody's mind.

“You say in your CV you can provide references on request.”

“Mmmhmm”

She almost cringed imagining a phone conversation between this tea and biscuits academic and her boss. Boris Levchenko, a grizzled Russian ex-pat, was a good man to be on the right side of. He was the most imposing figure she had ever met, ludicrously tall and wide with a weatherbeaten face that sported a short moustache and beard with grey streaks that made him look like an aging cossack. His accent was so thick you could spread it on your toast.

"If I may," the woman to the chairman's right interjected at this point, "could you tell us a bit more about your current role at Grant Blackthorn."

This woman was obvious the head of human resources Joy realised. They all had exactly the same intonation whichever company you went to: a kind of feigned friendliness that bordered on patronising.

"I'm a personal assistant to one of the search operatives... I mean, executives." she corrected herself.

"and what does that entail?"

“I started out just doing office based research but I’ve actually accompanied my boss out on international trips several times now. It’s up to me to make travel arrangements and to ensure that he has everything he needs such as visas, paperwork, equipment...”

“...ammunition...” she added mentally.

“So you are used to having some degree of autonomy in your work?”

“Yes, for example more recently I've been quite involved with scouting meeting locations."

Borneo was the worst, she thought; those damned mosquitoes.

The chairman came back in with a new question. “Do you do any work from home in your current job?”

Joy’s mind jolted back to her cosy two room flat and an awkward question her friend Laura had asked the previous summer.

“What’s this in your umbrella stand?”

She had looked up from the teapot she had been filling, not quite sure what to say then either.

“Er... well, you know that air rifle your brother has?”

“Yeah...”

“Well, that’s a... um... rifle rifle.”

She answered the chairman as best she could. “I’ve taken stuff home from time to time but I’ve found I’m more productive in the workplace.”

Boris had suggested the thing with the rifle. He had declared that he needed an assistant who could strip it down and reassemble it blindfolded. She’d gone off the idea after blindly knocking over her friday night glass of wine and all the oil stains on her best tablecloth. Besides, she’d probably get complaints for using the thing in a communal garden. Better to practice on the range at work where the neighbours weren’t going to complain because they were rabbits and, most likely, Boris had shot them and cooked them in a stew.

The third member of the panel spoke up at this point. He was at least ten or twenty years older than the chairman and looked more than a little bit untidy next to his two colleagues in his tweed jacket. He was a research scientist, he had to be, there was no other plausible explanation for the bow tie, white hair and half moon glasses.

“Miss Harrison,” he said “I would like you to elaborate on the sort of work you do on a day to day basis. You say you’re at a recruitment agency; why don’t you tell us about the last person you recruited.”

“Well, what usually happens is our client asks us to look for an individual or individuals who meets their specific set of criteria. It’s up to us to use various means at our disposal, including private inquiry and internet searches to locate these individuals, make contact with them and... introduce them to our client. My role is to assist with the searches, make sure all of the documentation is properly kept and then to accompany my boss when he goes to meet the prospective.”

The last individual the firm had searched for had been wanted by seven different intelligence agencies but they had got to them first. Boris had forgotten to tell her to bring the chloroform so they had needed to “recruit” him with the judicious application of a rifle butt, but the finder’s fee had still been good. She had treated herself to a new window box with the bonus money.

“I have to say what I am most interested in is your work with intellectual property. What sort of work have you done? For example, have you any experience with generating patents?”

“Not with generating them, no.” Joy admitted, “We work for clients who are interested in locating and acquiring existing intellectual property that meets their specific requirements.”

Intellectual property. There was at least some logic in the idea that it was a pointless duplication of effort and an inherent flaw of capitalism that a company would have to develop a technology again when someone else had already done it and had the information sitting on a computer somewhere. Or at least this is what Boris had explained to the security guard he had gagged and bound with gaffa tape to a nearby office chair whilst Joy had accessed the research lab’s database. It was amazing how far a basic understanding of Microsoft Excel would get you in corporate espionage.

“I do,” she offered, “know a bit about patent law.”

She knew that what they were doing almost certainly wasn’t legal.

The HR woman spoke up again at this point.

“It says on your CV that you’ve done a lot of travelling in the last year.”

“Well, our searches are global, so I have made more than a few overseas visits with my boss.”

“That sounds nice.” the woman said, “Is there anywhere that stands out in particular?”

“I’ve been to the Middle East a few times,” Joy said, “that was quite memorable.”

The T-62 crawled toward her across the opium field the growl of its engine an imposing rumble, growing ever louder. Clutching the rocket launcher to her shoulder Joy brushed her hair back from her eyes, adjusted her glasses and waited for the metal beast to crest the ridge, exposing its underbelly, the moment when it would be most vulnerable. As it rose up she waited for the last second before it tipped forward, unleashing the anti-tank missile in a world consuming bang.

Fire blossomed on the nearest corner of the tank, metal fragments flying in all directions. The wounded beast skidded sideways down the near side of the embankment leaving a trail of shredded tracks behind it, finally coming to rest at the bottom.

The dust had hardly settled when the turret sprang to life, swinging toward her angrily, the muzzle on the end of the gun barrel yawning wide.

“Do you not think that working in a university would be a bit sedate for someone who is used to such a glamorous international lifestyle?” the HR woman asked.

The shell exploded with a deafening roar in the pond to her right, showering her in water and green sludge. To her left, between staccato bursts of machine gun fire, Boris was letting fly a stream of syllables that she was sure she’d find deeply offensive were it not for her lack of fluency in the fruitier parts of the Russian language.

“I would be okay with it.” She replied, completely honest and sincere for once.

More than anything else she just wanted to unpack her suitcase.

And the love life! Try explaining to that cute guy who emailed you asking if you’d like to meet for a cup of coffee sometime that no you’re not playing it cool, it’s just that WiFi is hard to come by in Helmand Province.

“Well I think we’re just about done here.” the chairman said, “Just one last thing. Tell us about yourself, do you have any hobbies? What do you do when you aren’t on the job?”

Images of assault courses, rifle shooting, unarmed combat, and practicing crawling through a room full of lasers in a black catsuit raced through her mind.

“Jive dancing” she replied simply.

“Well, thankyou Miss Harrison,” the man stood and leant forward to shake her hand. “We’ll be in touch.”

- <> -

This is the first short story I've posted online. I had a lot of fun writing it and I'd love to hear what you, dear reader, think of it. Be sure to post a comment.

©R.J. Parker 2011

Branding

I've often been perplexed by some of the advertising and branding that gets thrown at me as a consumer. I like to pat myself on the back for my objectivity in the face of the bombardment my subconscious is being subjected to, before taking another swig of Pepsi, which I have preferred to Coca-Cola since the Corrs promoted it back in 1998.

The thing is though when you actually stop and think about it some of the messages behind branding is just a little bit weird. For example, I saw this in Sainsbury's today:


When you think about it, who would actually take a pilgrim's advice when choosing which particular cheddar to buy? Whilst I'm sure that pilgrims can offer good consumer advice on such things as footwear, maps, spiritual literature, etc, I'm not sure why their expertise should necessarily extend to dairy produce. Moreover, I'm not sure why advertisers would think that the the public at large would think this is the case. Did a survey of the British population find that 4 out of 5 individuals would defer to religious fundamentalists when choosing a cheese?

Answers on a postcard please.

Whilst I'm on the subject of bizarre quirks of retail, yes Mr John Sainsbury do I accept that my bags must be verified. I can see that we wouldn't want me trying to carry my shopping in, I dunno, a brick or something by accident. Summon an attendant forthwith!