The bus journey of memories

I get on, beep my Oyster card and sit down. I have a magazine with me, intending to read it, but I know deep down I won’t actually read it. Because this bus journey is one which runs through the memories I have made since coming to London. I’m always drawn to look out of the window.

It starts by the pharmacy where I would come and get Bio Oil every week or so after my operation last year. To try and make my huge hideous scar fade a little. Next I’m at the garage I used to walk to when I was allowed off bedrest, to try and get my energy back. There’s the bike shop where I wheeled my bike in despair one day when I had a puncture while cycling to work. It was a brand new bike and I felt very protective of it. I hung around nervously while they took it in the back to fix, trying to catch a glimpse of it. And there’s the shoe shop where I worked for six weeks before leaving because the manager was awful. And opposite is the Waitrose I don’t like because it’s laid out differently to the one I usually go to. There’s the pub I once went on a date to. One of those dates where you realise that someone is much more likeable from a distance. Moving on to the getting-to-know-you stage had been a mistake. The Oliver Bonas shop is next. I’ve never been in there. I had a friend who worked at one of their other shops. On the left is the running shop which used to be a running and cycling shop. I lost faith in them when they got rid of the cycling part of the shop. I was quite a regular visitor, used to get kitted out in my lycra there. Then here’s the garden centre on my right. I used to cycle down here for compost and seeds etc, when I started keeping an allotment in my final year at uni. Next is the Memories of Mortlake shop. I always look at it from my bike or from a bus window and think it looks lovely but have never been in. Next, we are at the traffic lights and the bus stop on the other side of the road is where I used to wait when I worked at a coffee shop where the shifts started at 5.30am. Once, while waiting for the bus there, an old man started mumbling and shuffling over to me and when I listened to his mumbles, he was asking me what colour my knickers were! I promptly set off walking fast for the next bus stop. Next we come onto a road which is flooded with early London memories. We’re passing my old university on my right and the council estate where I lived for two and a half years having loads of fun but with the worst landlord in the history of the world.

The university buildings cover the whole right side of the road until it ends at the road I used to cycle down when going into the park. I went through a phase of cycling around Richmond Park twice every morning first thing, before I did anything else. Next is the little cobbled road on my left where my uni friends and I would get a takeaway from Dong Phuong’s at least once a week, minimum. Next, up the road to the motorway and on my right is the other council estate where my friend, Sophie, and I viewed a flat before ending up at the one we passed earlier. We pass by Putney Heath and another council estate where Sophie and I viewed a flat with a girl we didn’t know, who never got back to us about whether she wanted to move in. It was a bit of a walk from uni anyway, so we opted for the one just over the road! Turn left and follow the motorway through Wimbledon Common, which I used to cycle across when the coffee company I worked for, needed me to cover shifts at the Wimbledon branch. I once got very very lost on the common for over an hour. I was quite frantic by the time I found a dog walker and asked him for directions. We’re now in Wimbledon Village and the bar where my friend, Robyn, brought me years ago, when I first came to her house and we had gone out dancing. We danced to Kylie’s Can’t Get You Out Of My Head. I had learned the dance moves from the video and we did them, over and over. Down the hill and approaching Wimbledon station, where we dropped Joe off to get the train, before going to the bar I just passed. We turn before the station and it starts to get into unchartered territory. We pass through Southfields, where I thought for years that my friend Jay lived. She would always leave early in the evening to get home on time and I wondered why she was being so over-cautious. After all, she just needed to jump on the one bus…. I think it was Sophie who pointed out that she did not live down the road in Southfields. She lived significantly further away in Southall…. Oops! Well it’s all south, that’s what I say. We go through lots of areas which are unfamiliar until we hit Tooting, and the cafe on my left where I once met Joe so we could go and explore Tooting, to report back to a friend who was soon to move to a campus there from abroad. And the restaurant shortly after where I met an old uni friend for dinner a few months after my operation, still feeling a bit fragile. This is where I get off, to do a bit of exploring and to make some more memories.

The worst manager I’ve ever had

A little while ago, I worked in a shoe shop. It was not a good job. Well, let me qualify that statement. It was an alright studenty job but the manager was… I’m thinking of a polite way to put it. She was just a bit rubbish really.

 

You know when you can’t understand how someone got to the position they did. It was like that with this manager. I was constantly puzzled by her. She was confident and took charge etc. She just didn’t seem to understand things people said. Simple things. And she was quite rude, but I think we call that being ‘a bit rough around the edges’ nowadays.

 

Anyway, I should have sensed all would not be rosy in the world of shoes in my initial interview. You know how, usually, the interviewer will direct questions at you and it’s for you to answer, talk about yourself, your knowledge, sell yourself a bit? Well, in this interview, she talked for probably 60% of the time. Now that’s wrong isn’t it? She already doesn’t get what the interview is for.

 

Almost at the end of the interview came the killer question that should have told me not to accept the job when she called to offer it. She said something along the lines of “Can you tell me about an experience you have had of receiving bad customer service.”

 

And I replied that, since I’ve worked with the public for years, I know that often it’s nothing to do with the actual customer, it’s the one before who annoyed you, or something just happened elsewhere, you just broke a plate, or you’re tired. There are plenty of reasons why someone’s grumpy. So when I go somewhere, if I don’t get good service, I don’t take it personally really.

 

She looked at me, blankly. She didn’t know what I was talking about. So she said to me, in a let-me-slow-this-down-because-you’re-too-thick-to-understand voice, “No darlin, it means when you’ve got bad customer service somewhere else. Not when you’ve given bad customer service.”

 

I wanted to say ‘YEH I KNOW YOU STUPID WOMAN! DIDN’T YOU HEAR ME.’

 

Instead I said, “Yeh, I mean I don’t really remember negative customer experiences because I don’t take it personally. I’ve worked with the public for ages so I know what it’s like and sometimes you don’t give your best customer service and it’s nothing to do with the customer.”

 

“No, okay,” she says, taking a deep breath, “What it means is, you’ve gone somewhere else to buy something and the person doesn’t give you good customer service. Not when you’ve given someone else bad customer service. Do you see what I mean?”

 

It was un-be-liev-able! She was really really talking down to me. I could see her mind ticking away, thinking, ‘how am I going to make this girl understand the question? I was like, I DO! I’M ANSWERING YOUR QUESTION! It’s that YOU don’t understand ME. But, of course, I’m in the interview, I want the job, the only way to explain properly is by being rude to her, which I can’t do. I was about to start my second year of a postgraduate course that was costing me a lot of money so I thought it would help to just have a little extra coming in. It had been advertised as 8 hours a week. Easy peasy.

 

So instead of trying to explain again, as she apparently couldn’t hear (maybe she left her ears at home, maybe that’s the problem), I just went, “No, I don’t remember receiving bad customer service.”

 

I mean, what did she think I thought was happening? Did she really think that I thought she was saying to me, ‘Have you ever given bad customer service?’ and I was going ‘Yes, all the time, because sometimes you have bad days, dont you?’ As if, in an interview, you’d really be asked that! And as if I’d really answer in the positive. When I’m interviewing for a job!

 

She was just plain rude sometimes too. She was fitting a little girl for some school shoes and the girl had hold of the one shoe which was from the shop floor and she was saying to the manager, in her little five year old voice, “But there’s only one of these.” As five year olds do, they don’t understand the ins and outs of how buying shoes works. And the manager, super irritated, snapped at her “Yeh! I’ll get the other one from the stockroom!” At a five year old! Ridiculous.

 

She would also sometimes ‘teach’ me things, to train me. She would ask me how I would usually do something, register a transfer of stock to another store, perhaps. I would tell her my version, which was guesswork as no-one had taught me properly, and it obviously wasn’t right. She’d go, “No, ok, we’re going to start again. What’s the very first thing you do? You’ve got to transfer shoes to the Notting Hill branch. What’s the first thing you do?” I’d say whatever I did, which was wrong. And she’d go “No, what do you do first, before that?” And I didn’t know. So I’d say it again.

 

She wouldn’t stop this and go, ‘Right, well let me show you how to do it properly, then you’ll know.” She just kept saying, “But what do you do before that? First?”

 

Inevitably, during this nonsense version of a training session, a customer would come over needing help, she’d run off and do that and we’d never revisit the problem.

 

When I finally left, six weeks later, the assistant manager said I was their shortest staff member ever. I was shocked, six weeks felt like a lifetime, I didn’t know how all the others coped being there longer.

 

I had asked for a day off the following Monday, which was about a week and a half away. My official days were Tuesday and Wednesday so I was actually doing extra hours that day. Given that it was about nine days away, I thought it was more than enough time for a place which has about twelve members of staff, all pretty flexible. At the end of my shift I approached the manager and said the following Monday would be a problem and would I be able to get it off?

 

“Nope!”

 

I’m sorry. I didn’t really know what to do with that answer. I just kind of stood there. There was no way I could work and even if I could get out of the other thing, I didn’t really want to go to the shoe shop. By this point, I was starting to dread it.

 

“It’s too late notice!” she said. “Can’t do that. No.”

 

The assistant manager, who was standing next to her, tried to be helpful. “Maybe Rachel could do that shift?”

 

“No, Drew. People should be allowed their days off. I can check the rota later,” she said, in her most doubtful voice, “but for now, it’s a no.”

 

I couldn’t believe it. I just kind of nodded and, as it was the end of the shift, got my bag and left. I went home, checked my contract for my notice period, and wrote my letter of resignation straight away, which said something about the ‘inflexibility of the shift patterns’ and that I ‘had not enjoyed my experience of working here as much as I had expected.’ I gave some obligatory nonsense at the end about my school year starting again and too much work but I just put that in for politeness sake.

 

What an awful awful woman. She used to tell me about her and her boyfriend going motorbiking at the weekends and she wore those fit-flop things which are the most hideous things ever.

 

She also called me Lauren the entire time I worked there.