10/18/2007 11:43 am
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It had to happen sooner or later. I had to get off my chubby backside and get a job. I find it hard to imagine what people do all day. I mean obviously, teachers, firemen, doctors – these are all jobs that people can be seen doing on daytime television and in children’s books. But what on earth does a quantity surveyor do? Or a licensed conveyancer? What do office managers manage? Is it still possible to get paid employment as a Chubb Fuddler?
My lack of imagination has drawn me back to the employment agency I’ve worked for (and written about in Shameless Mention of Pole Dancing to Attract Attention) before. This is mostly sales promotions work – or as D puts it, ‘jiggling your tits’. Today I’ve been helping to launch some gruesome-looking ‘health bar’ made from budgie seed and sawdust but with as many calories as a Mars Bar and at only twice the price. It’s been concocted by a couple of Tristans who clearly fancy themselves as the next big thing after Innocent Smoothies. To underline the ‘healthy country naturalness’ of their product they’ve dressed me in (brace yourselves) a gingham shirt, knotted at the front to show off my midriff, pigtails with ribbons, little strappy sandals tied with more bloody ribbons and hotpants. If Heidi had run away from home and joined Ken Kesey’s Band of Merry Travellers aboard their travelling bus, swallowing peyote from morning ‘til night until she was a frazzled acid casualty giving hand jobs in the gutters of San Francisco – this is what she would have worn to do it! I mean honestly, I’ve been on actual farms with cows and chickens and mud and nobody wore hotpants!
I stand in a draughty convention hall, way-laying bored looking people in suits who are already laden with free products. Nobody wants to try our stupid cereal bar. No, that’s not true, nobody wants to try the stupid cereal bar on my tray but lots of people want to try the stupid cereal bar on Akanke’s tray. This may have something to do with the fact that Akanke is an Amazonian Nigerian with skin like polished walnut, an afro and tits like watermelons who has ‘forgotten’ to wear a bra under her gingham shirt. I actually think people are coming from other convention centres in buses to take samples off her tray and stare at her cleavage.
In our break she tells me an alarming story about having left her boyfriend because he posted photos of her having sex with strangers in a car park on the internet. Apparently he then came round to her flat with a group of his friends who smoked dope and fucked her until she agreed to get back together with him. This went on for three days.
“And you went back to him!?!”
She shrugged. “He’s not that bad when you get to know him.”
More of the same tomorrow, when I expect Akanke to tell me about the time she was whipped naked through the streets of Lagos before being staked, spread-eagled outside the British Embassy and gang-raped by an angry mob who are apparently, “Really sweet people in their own way.”
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