At the beginning of October my car failed its MOT. The cost of making it roadworthy again was more than it was worth. I had to resort to the bus to get me to and from work. It wasn’t too much of a hardship – the bus stopped less than a hundred yards from my front door and dropped me just round the corner from work. I only had to change once. The Monday after bonfire night I was sitting on the top deck of the bus looking at nothing in particular out the window. The bus was stopped at the traffic lights and on the opposite side of the road, a van was waiting to come out from a driveway. The lights changed to green and the van shot across the road just as a motorcyclist was approaching. At that moment, the van was out of my sight, but I heard a screech of brakes, a bang followed the sound of metal being bent into some abnormal shape. No vehicles moved and in a few minutes a police car had arrived at the scene. The van had seen the motorcyclist too late, tried to avoid it, clipped the back of bike and slammed into the bus. As a witness to what had immediately preceded the accident, I was required to wait and give a statement. I phoned into work to say I would be late. Sally, the girl who had replaced Neeta when she left three years previously, assured me she could cope.
By about ten, I had given my statement to the police and made my way into work. The factory was unusually silent and empty. There were no workmen and the office was empty except for Geoff, the owner. He looked embarrassed and glum. The company had gone bust. There had been a meeting at 8:30 that morning to tell everyone they had lost their jobs and how to claim redundancy from the government. Within an hour, everyone had removed their personal belongings and left. Geoff gave me a potted version of the speech he had given to the workforce and then broke down and cried. He felt guilty for having let down the workforce, but he had lost almost all his money. One of their biggest customers, a local house builder, had gone bust, owing a quarter of a million pounds and there was little likelihood of getting any of it back. Geoff couldn’t pay his suppliers and they were refusing to make any more deliveries. The bank wouldn’t provide any more finance and there was no alternative but to close the business. I gathered my belongings, packed them in a carrier bag I found at the back of my desk and trudged wearily and dejectedly away. It had slowly sunk in that I now had no job and wouldn't be getting paid, yet the bills would still be almost the same. Council Tax, electricity, insurance and all the other costs didn't reduce in line with my income. We would have to tighten our belts quite considerably.
The bus was leaving as I rounded the corner. It would be another twenty minutes before the next one. I was still feeling sorry for myself when the realisation hit me. I would need to get another job. And quickly. It was obvious really, but my mind had been temporarily kidnapped by the loss of my current, or rather, my last job. And if I needed a job, I’d need to register with at least a couple of agencies. It was only a ten minute walk into town. There was no time like the present.
The board outside the ‘Jocelyn Adderkins Agency’ indicated urgent requirements for a chef, a fork lift truck driver, an HGV driver and an accountant. Not particularly encouraging, but I went inside and enquired about office jobs. There were none at present, but the pleasant fifteen year-old (well that’s what she looked like) asked me to fill out an eight page registration form and they’d be in touch if anything suitable came up. I wondered at the relevance of many of the questions, and there was next to no space to write what I wanted to write if I thought the question important. After twenty-five minutes I’d completed the form and the fifteen year-old gave it the once over and proclaimed it satisfactory. I was about to leave when her colleague, who must have been all of two years older, asked if I was interested in a job that had just come in. It wasn’t exactly an office job, it was working in a bookmaker’s, and the pay was almost three thousand pounds a year less than I was last earning. Politely I declined. I really did want an office job. The teenagers seemed put out.
I fared little better at ‘At The Office’. They supposedly specialised in office jobs, but it seemed that any job that wasn’t in the open air and involved at least one piece of paper qualified. Fortunately, the registration form was shorter and more relevant to my skills. Neither Marjory nor Alicia were teenagers and both seemed friendly and helpful. There were still no suitable jobs, but we had quite a chat. It seems that Alicia had a cousin who went to the same school as me. The same class even. Wendy, her cousin, had married an American, had two children, one of each, and was now living in New Jersey. Alicia didn’t really keep in touch with her cousin, so there was no point in passing on my regards. New jobs were coming in all the time, they told me, and seemed optimistic they’d find me a suitable job.
Their optimism raised my spirits a little, but not enough to lift the depression I felt on my journey home.