All of my adult life has a been a chaotic process of trying (and failing) to unravel the knots of a parental and educational upbringing that instilled into me that I was stupid, lazy and destined for failure, not much helped by depression, autism and sociopathic tendencies (makes you wonder why no-one suggested being dealerscum a LOT sooner…). It certainly made sorting careers out interesting…
When I was 13 we had a careers advice day in school - at that point I genuinely wanted to be a public executioner, specifically, a hangman. The careers chap asked me to leave, assumed I was just being a cunt (only partly right) and dropped me in the shit with the deputy head. I hadn’t really grasped we didn’t kill the nastiest pieces-of-work any more, and thought Hangman was a dignified career that wouldn’t exactly have people queueing-up to do…
Around that point I decided that was enough of school and turned my hand to crime, which I had some talent for: burglary, “recycling” pushbikes and motorbikes, usual scrotey kid stuff - so long as no-one was banging on the door, my parents were too Librium-ed up to GAF. That was all still going strong at 15, (albeit I was back in school fairly regularly), when one of the the other little shits I was involved with got pulled and then grassed the rest of us up. I’d already had a wrist-slap recently, so Magistrates packed me off to Verne borstal on Portland for 6 months - a Victorian crime academy basically, and certainly a learning experience - I was out in less than 3 and I knew I couldn’t go “home”, so fucked off up that London for a few months to see what was what, and ended-up in various squats getting as numb as possible or more often just spazzing-out sleeping for days on end.
When the money/opportunities ran out, and I started to grasp how much danger I could be in not having a clue what I was doing, I went back down south to see my Nan and tap her up for some ££, and stayed long enough to find that I could still go and sit my O-levels, which, bizarrely I did, and while I didn’t do well, I passed enough that it was suggested I join the Army and learn a trade.
Big Career Mistake no.1 - I did’t take the offer, instead I fucking stupidly decided I’d go straight and make a go of it (and doss-off from doing a real job for a couple of years) by studying for A-levels at the local shitty tech college. What a fucking waste of time that was - I was far too lazy and immature to study, and bollocksed that opportunity royally, though I did end up back at my parents place for a while…
Towards the end I met an older married nurse and ended up taking-up with her when she bailed on hubby and kid… ugh… I fucked-about with shitty dead-end shop and factory work for a bit, and then she got me enrolled on a training course at the local general hospitals - Operating Dept. Assistant it was called, you train 2 years to scrub-up and assist during surgery and/or work with the anaesthetists to prep drugs, machines, tables etc. Red, wet end of patient care, and it actually suited me cos most people you had to deal with were asleep and not shitting themselves all over the place. Not something I’d ever dreamed of doing exactly, completely random TBH, but it helped pay the bills, albeit pay was abysmal and the unceasing split shifts, nights, weekends soon ran-on as we were always ~30% understaffed and sickies were a way of life for a lot of fuckers. Six years of that, early days of AIDS too - back when you couldn’t even screen people, and I saw some stuff in those days, some of it I wish I could forget…
Without warning or discussion the woman I was with at the time sold the house we were in and fucked-off to a new job in a different town, so I was stuck at me Nan’s for a while until I decided to fuck off the operating theatres job and its long hours/unliveable pay. A job had come up advertising for clinical staff to retrain to code the regional health authority’s first all-singing, all-dancing computer system - better money, 9-5 hours, so I lied about ever having touched a computer, somehow blagged an interview and bullshitted my way into the job.
Training consisted of being dumped in front of an IBM AT and told to get on with it - in a room full of completely clueless people like myself who’d also lied their way in, managed by people who knew nothing about computers or management… Saving grace for all of us was when they took-on some Industrial Release students form the local Poly - those lads actually knew their stuff, and trained us useless lummocks - talkabout arse-about-face…
That dull-as-shit job persisted for some years, until the RHA’s IT dept was privatised - which meant all us useless cunts became a useless private company, which was then sold a couple of years later to an outfit with a vestigial clue what they were doing - and that was very quickly the end of my career in IT…! Not sure I ever did a day’s useful work. Not sure any of them did to be fair. Fucking shameful.
I was out of work for a while, signing-on and scraping by as jobs were scarce in the early 90s, (much to the annoyance of the woman I was with at the time!), when a friend of mine at the Natural History Museum called to let me know they were hiring trainee curators. Despite my profound streak of scroteyness, I had always as a kid loved natural history, and especially anything to do with fossils, and so had somehow kept that going as a hobby through much of my life, especially in the more settled, employed times - and, along the way without meaning to, I’d taught myself a lot, so when it came to it, I not only got an interview, I also managed to bullshit my way into a job - not the one I’d applied to either, but one working on a group of fossils that I really liked and knew a ton about!
That must have been a mistake by the NHM, who notoriously normally kept employees as far as possible from anything that actually interested them! Most of my pay in the early days went on the bloody season ticket from Winchester to South Kensington, but I DGAF at the time, and the 5.50 to Waterloo had some interesting fellow-travellers - various politicians, TV journalists, govt experts, famous solicitors etc - quite an eye and ear-opener that was!
I fucking loved that job with a passion, it was a dream come true, but of course being wrong in the head meant I was bound to fuck it up in time, instead of just cracking-on being grateful. Circumstances didn’t always help mind. I’d been with my then-GF for some years, and in the job for three of 'em when I came home as usual one evening to find all of my possessions on the front lawn and all of the locks in our house changed - not a word had been said. I’d been paying into the mortgage, too, cheeky cunt. It was a shock to say the least, but I loaded what I could into my old LWB Land Rover and fucked-off to find a quiet layby to sleep in.
Drove into work the next day, got a copy of Loot! and managed to get a tiny bedsit in Surbiton sorted quickly. I was about the last person to realise the bird in Winchester had done me a big favour - she was a chronic alkie who it turned-out had been dropping her knickers for absolutely anything with a pulse, and since neither was something I would put up with, binned me off when I started cramping her style. Still, it fucked me up self-esteem wise, and I decided I was probably washed-up human-relationship-wise, so instead I formed an even-stonger bond with overeating and boozing. I probably should have done something about getting my share of the house, as this was the second time I’d walked away from what was partly mine, but in the end I was just glad to be free.
The boozing was very easy to do back then in the NHM - there were a large number of full-time career alcoholics, lots of drugs, every kind of off-piste-bonking imaginable, and every second person had some sort of mental health issue - autism was pretty much a job-requirement; Chris Packham is not special… 25 years ago it was all largely swept under the carpet and called eccentricity.
FWIW, I’ve blown a lot of great chances over the years - I was offered the bedsit in Surbiton for peanuts but decided I didn’t want to be tied down with property again, instead I devoted myself to getting as many assorted knee-tremblers as were available and drinking heavily in local pubs. It was routine to go for “lunch” bang-on noon, and not actually go back again - drinking solidly until closing time. For the last 8 years I was on 10-14 pints a day, sometimes more if it was a party, and towards the end had as many as 3 mistresses as well as the main on the go. If this sounds fun, it actually wasn’t much, filling those holes didn’t fill the really big one, plus I was up to nearly 20 stone, light blue-grey in colour and looked about 70…
I’d had enough of it at the end, but I didn’t really consciously know it, and at the time I thought I wanted to make a go of the main relationship, escape the madness and reboot my actual working career, which by this time had gone from profoundly loving the subject and the work, to developing a mix of loathing and guilt about my failure to ever really make enough progress. I’d spent enough money in pubs to have bought a 3-bed semi in the suburbs outright, ruined several other people’s marriages, devoted insane amounts of time to winding-up senior management and had started coming out with some pretty deranged behaviours - threats, paranoia, that kind of thing…
Also, by then I’d taken to dossing in a filthy box-room in a colleagues spectacularly skanky former gasboard flat - possibly the last open-to-the-outdoors unheated flat in London - I mean, the guy was a Professor at the University of Greenwich and this place was worse than some of the squats from me yoot… Anyway, I prolly gave him more shit than I should and he was keen to GTFO me without any confrontation as I’d acquired a reputation as a sketchy nutter long since - so when a job came up in the University of Oxford he sang my (undeserved) praises, and pointed me in that general direction.
Like the twat I am, I saw it as an opportunity to escape the huge mess I was making of something good, and get my main relationship back on line… My gift for bullshitting my way through interviews once again saw 5 other much better candidates lose a chance to do a good job they deserved so that I could fanny-about with an ongoing series of delusions of sorting my shit out. I thought I was making a fresh start…
In reality I was changing the place, not the job, which was pretty much the same, but now I was working with a bunch of uptight and MASSIVELY snobbish twats, surrounded by highly-entitled teenagers who got on my tits royally, and expected to somehow magically step into a retired colleagues shoes seamlessly and do exactly what he had done for nearly 50 years… To this day it amazes me I lasted 10 years - some of it I learned to love: teaching school age kids could be huge fun - they kind of can’t hide their love and enthusiasm for a thing, and are so easy to get engaged with things if you’re passionate about them yourself and don’t talk to them like … well… like they’re kids. The undergrads were almost all complete twats, they are, after-all the people being raised to run the country… Postgrads however were almost all amazing, and I somehow fell back into the role I’d had at the NHM of being a go-to for the square pegs who were struggling with the transition to a research degree and needed some help and motivation, mostly life and Earth sciences, but curiously quite a lot of people in the arts too. That was probably the most rewarding work I ever did, and I still miss it, and like everything, it was an accident that I don’t even understand how it happened.
Still Oxford wasn’t really the place for me - it did rescue me from myself, inadvertantly, but the relationship I’d wanted to rekindle was just a case of history repeating itself. The lass in question had already long since taken-up with someone else, but left it until she was well and truly pregnant with his kid to tell me to clear my stuff out from our house (which was in any case hundreds of miles away with us having to live apart through the working weeks), and once again I walked away…
I stuck Oxford out for quite a few years after that, but my heart was never in it, and the black dog stuff really had me in its grip. To occupy myself in the days and nights alone I got more and more into music and hifi, joined various forums, not least being one of the original two-dozen that bailed out of the Hifi Choice one and helped to get the Wigwam started. Curiously for an online thing, the forum proved to be a social lifeline, something we all take for granted now. Never expected to meet the love of my life on one, that is for sure, but astoundingly just as I’d accepted I was unfit for human consumption, I met Sam (who will confirm I was right all-along).
That was the nail in Oxford’s coffin, the job had changed over the years, and was changing again - ever fewer people, ever less money, ever longer hours, and then they started telling us we had to work 3 weekends out of 4 - unpaid, cos, you know, you’re an academic, your work is vocational, you should do this… Weekends were the only time I got to see Sam - 200 miles away - so that was not on. The writing was on the wall, my no-shows got me into disciplinary trouble, post after post was being occupied by volunteers or kids straight out of college paid 1/3 of what I was, and I was the opposite of a “yes” man…
Fortunately I was enough of a thorn in my boss’s side that I negotiated a good redundancy settlement - “pay me to fuck off” - which left me to try to make a living aged nearly 50 from the one last thing I knew a very small amount about…
Never mind the fact that I’m hugely unsuited to it, nor the fact I had fuck-all to invest in it - it was flog hifi or go hungry… I moan sometimes about the minority of dickheads, but the fact is most customers are anonymous names the other side of a paypal account with whom you have no contact at-all. Still seems barmy, but that’s how it is. The ones who are old school and actually interact are the ones who make it worthwhile and fun - the ones you end up being friends with instead of dealer/client - swap music, all that… Thank fuck for it, cos life is pretty good now - only took half a century to sort-out. I’ll never be able to afford to retire, but luckily Sam can more than fend for herself financially and knew all along what a useless twat she was taking-on: good job she likes my cooking…
Well, fuck that went on a bit - TL;DR - if I give you advice: do the opposite, I haven’t go a clue!
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. And that was the end of that career path!
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No substitute for experience eh!
