Tick Talk Tales (Two)

I Make My Mark

From being offered the position of Receptionist by Mark, and accepting of course, there were a few weeks in which I had to fulfill commitments I had already made so that it was about one month before I began to work at the shop properly.

Meanwhile I worked odd days here and there so that by the time I was full time I felt truly part of things and was keen to make my mark on the place.

One of the earliest ‘incidents’ occurred on the first day, after my trial day.

“Did you say your name was Marjory?” asked Mark, stupidly in my opinion. What woman wants to feel so forgettable that even her name can slip her employer’s memory? There was only one way to deal with that.

“No, I didn’t.” said I shortly and went about my business. Huff would hardly describe my mood. I was determined he would actually have to come right out and admit his problem. Alternatively he could continue to be embarrassed and address me with ‘Excuse me…err…err…pause…could you….’

It took him almost an hour and much whispering in the workshop with Darrel, of the ‘you ask her’, ‘no you ask her’ type but eventually it was Mark who came out into the shop area.

“I’m sorry but we really can’t remember your name. I have looked on your application letter but you only put your initials and I didn’t write it down at the interview.”

He looked quite embarrassed and through the door I could see Darrel, head bent over his work as though he was unaware of anything but the job in hand though his shoulders shaking was a bit of a give away at how amusing he found the situation.

“It’s Margaret but my friends call me Maggie.”

“Okay, thanks Margaret.” Mark said a bit sheepishly.

I let him begin walking back to his workshop before adding, “you can both call me Maggie.”

He laughed at that. I heard him pass the name on to Darrel. There was a relieved murmur, “’bout the only bloody name we haven’t tried.” muttered Darrel his shoulders shaking a bit more as he leant over his work giggling but the first sticky patch had been overcome.

At the end of my first full week I was handed my wage cheque and got the distinct impression that it was painful to Mark to be paying out this money. I think something about the way, even when I had a grip of one corner of t he cheque, he held on with an even tighter grip to the opposite one. The pain showed in his eyes.

“I have earned this you know.” said I trying to lighten the moment for him.

“I know … I know it’s just that I worry about whether you will actually be worth it in the end.” said he.

‘Charming!’ thought I as I looked around at the almost dust free shop. I had cleaned my fingers to the bone during the week, (I’m a woman I’m allowed to make statements like that!) and this man was grudging me the pittance I had agreed to for the first few months of this new employment!

Mark noticed my chagrin and added, “I know you have worked hard this week but its been very hard for Darrel and I to build this business up and I’d hate to think that we are paying someone to do something we could be doing ourselves.”

‘Hmmm.’ I thought. ‘You’ve not managed to do much cleaning or organising in your time building up the business.’ I knew I couldn’t be too hard on them though. They were both very fragile at this time and I could see that a woman barging into their close knit little working area had exacerbated their stresses. This would obviously get better I was sure but for now they both need to be treated gently, a common trait with men!

“Well, you have tried that way for a while now and from our conversations I have the impression that it was all too much for you. You and Darrel are clockmakers, let me get on with the clerical side and deal with the customers and you will be able to do so much more in the workshop. Able to do the stuff you are good at. Let’s give it a few weeks and then we’ll see if I have made things better. Improved things. Surely it is worth something just to have the pressure off a bit?”

“Yes it has been great this week not having to answer the phone and keep stopping to deal with browsers.” he agreed. “Okay we will give it a try and see how the business works with three of us.”

This man really didn’t have much idea of tact. I had reorganised my life to take this job, (okay I chose to but just at this point I was a miffed woman and under a ‘no fault of mine‘ banner); now he was making me feel about as secure as a goldfish swimming with piranhas.

I left that Friday wondering what I had got into and whether I would actually stay. (Whether I’d even be allowed to stay.)

It was apparent that both Mark and Darrel were stretched too far in fact at times I felt they were under so much stress that both of them could have done with a healthy dose of counselling. They coped with the pressure by having outbursts of outrageous hilarity behaving like schoolboys and laughing until they cried over some silly thing or another. I resigned myself to either taking offence or giving them as good as I got on the joke side of things and trying to take a business which was obviously a winner, if properly organised, to new heights. The challenge aspect swung it for me and I squared my shoulders thinking, ‘I’ll show them.’

During the early days I didn’t, to my mind, achieve very much but I did get to grips with the ‘system’ as it was called, a bit of a misnomer as it was organised only in as much as it was regularly and consistently chaotic!

I absorbed a lot and had plenty of ideas but it wasn’t until I felt myself truly settled at the clockshop that I began to apply the woman’s touch which went down like a lead balloon in a storm!

Another issue raised its head early on when I turned up for work in jeans. Mark took me to the side and explained that he did not approve of jeans at work. I told him he probably wouldn’t approve of my dry cleaning account either when I presented it to him and I was wearing jeans until the place was a whole lot cleaner. He never mentioned jeans again and within a couple of weeks I was in smarter clothes and all was well.

Well that is, in as much as things were tidier but Mark and Darrel then had to go through the inner turmoil of watching their beloved shop undergo a slow but steady transformation.

Looking back now I can understand how it must have been for then but back then I was a ‘Maggie on a mission’ and pretty near unstoppable.

For however many years, the shop seemed to have been left pretty much to its own devices. There were cobwebs thicker than the wallpaper they held to the walls. The carpet was not just well worn, it had holes in it as well as a few peculiar stains. Everything was covered in dust and any clients entering had to struggle past clocks of all sizes. It was so bad that if one couple entered the shop no-one else could come in until they left. We had people queuing up outside some days.

As I saw things my first priority was to get the workshop running more smoothly by fielding calls and keeping customers away from Mark and Darrel to allow them to actually get some work done. Then they had to be able to cut the hours they were working which were verging on the ridiculous.

The biggest problem they had was too much work and only two hands each. It was manageable but not when they were dealing with paperwork, customers and telephone too. Within a few weeks we had settled into a fairly comfortable routine and I began my onslaught on the shop’s appearance.

I began by washing windows outside and in and trying to make a more interesting display of clocks for sale. Then I began dusting, polishing and sweeping. I set up areas of work waiting to be done and work waiting to be collected. It all took time but soon the place looked and smelled a lot better.

Now potential clients came in and commented on the fact they had often thought of doing so but the place had always looked closed and abandoned. Point number one to Maggie!

My next project was to set up a proper work area for myself. I think by this point even Mark had realised that a wire tray, stapler and lop-sided chair does not an office make.

He was out one day when I inveigled Darrel into helping me make a ‘desk’. I had the idea of using a couple of two drawer metal filing cabinets with a piece of worktop laid across them. It was a struggle to fit them in and involved Darrel sawing one prop leg from the home made bench running along the back wall of the shop but it did work. He was concerned about the clocks sitting on the bench but as I explained to him, my desktop would take the place of the prop and all would be well.

 Later as I sat for the first time at my ’desk’, precariously poised on my wobbly chair I was very pleased. I had also brought in a spare phone from home, bought and installed a telephone extension line which reached my new desk and also invested in some matching box files (up until this point paperwork was ‘filed’ in old shoe boxes), so began to feel I had truly arrived. Until this point too I had been working at a high, old, probably Victorian cabinet of which only two drawers worked the rest being stuck fast due to warping so it was a novelty for me to now have my feet on the floor rather than dangling uncomfortably twelve inches above it, a truly level surface to work on and four good sized drawers to store paperwork and all the other things I was slowly gathering together.

Over the previous weeks I had been able to devote time to calling customers and reminding them that their clocks were awaiting collection. This had been, and still is on occasion, a problem at the clockshop. Space is at a premium and the clockmakers have to be paid. It doesn’t take long for a backlog of uncollected and therefore unpaid for work to accumulate and it can cause havoc with cash flow and other jobs which need bench space for testing in their turn. No clockmaker likes to set down a clock once he has spent hours repairing or restoring it so it becomes a battle to keep them all going in an ever shrinking space.

There have been times when as long as an hour has been spent in a day just winding and regulating clocks which are waiting to be collected. That is an unpaid hour for the clockmaker and an hour lost which could have been spent on another customer’s clock. This is why strict scheduling never works, as some of you may know if we have had your clock in for repair. ‘probably by the end of March’ can easily turn out to be August!

My solution to this problem of completed work hanging around, taking up space and unpaid for, had been to implement a storage charge. I let everyone know that they had fourteen days to collect from notification after which there would be a storage charge of £5 per week or part week. This was in my eyes reasonable as space was valuable and easily worth £5 and most people do not like paying more for something than they need to. In my first week I shifted two clocks which had been ready for 5 weeks and 8 weeks respectively.

This move paid off, I had managed to get a better flow of work in and out, and in a moment of financial exuberance Mark, on returning to find me installed at my new work area, went out and bought me a new, well second-hand really, (new would have been too much to expect), old but refurbished, office chair! It didn’t lean to one side and all the castors worked. Progress indeed.

This was a breakthrough. As a ‘northerner’ Mark is wary of spending money, which explains his pain at paying wages. Make do is his motto unless urgency forces him into an expenditure. I was over the moon. New chair, desk, if somewhat makeshift and the phone to hand rather than having to go into the workshop every time it rang.

I had gotten the measure of both Mark and Darrel by this time too. Mark was apt to put his foot in it on occasion but was full of fun and I could never stay angry with him for long. Darrel was very wise, a thinker and as full of fun as Mark. Together they were a lethal combination.

One of their ‘things’ was the word snib and its ‘naughty schoolboy meaning’. At first I was an innocent and totally unaware of exactly what I had said to give them so much cause for laughter. This continued for a while until one day when I was rearranging shelving to hold some work waiting to be done.

“Mark can you help me get this up please. I can’t get it up and in at the same time.” I called through to the workshop one morning.

This was met with a great loud yell of “Snib!” from Darrel followed by chortles and giggles which built up into great guffaws of laughter from the workshop.

The ‘snib’ thing had entered my consciousness some time earlier but I didn’t want to seem unworldly so ignored it to a large extent, though I continually wondered what it was all about. I tried to take note of the events preceding them but sadly couldn’t quite work it out. I got the distinct impression they both desperately wanted me to ask. They took so much pleasure in my confusion. I was not going to give them the satisfaction but I was looking for a fairly adult explanation, which in retrospect was rather naive of me.

On this particular morning I had had enough of this ‘snib’ thing and determined to get to the bottom of it. “Okay, spill the beans.” I said “I give up. Tell me what this is all about.”

Mark finally began to explain about the VIZ character and the ‘double entendre’ thing. I had to laugh too when I realised. School boy humour was rife in this place. They both chuckled like five year olds as they told me tales of ‘famous snibs’. As they lost themselves in reminiscences, giving me some examples now and then if they could stop laughing long enough, I could see that these two who were so close and had worked together for a long time used this as a release. No point in fighting it I decided and from that moment on I was as good a spotter of ‘snibs’ as they were. Though I was also often the unwitting instigator as I didn’t quite have the knack of thinking before I spoke most of the time!

We were slowly evolving into a good team and by accepting the fact that I was working with two eccentric males and not making a big issue of their amusements both Darrel and Mark were more accepting of me than they might otherwise have been.

I knew I was accepted when Mark told me one day,

“You are as good as any man, most of the time!” This came across as a compliment and I took it as such, though I did go home and apply a face pack that evening, just in case!

It was around this time that Mark told me of a previous attempt to hire a receptionist. The lady in question had turned up for her first day and worked until it was time for lunch. She picked up her bag and left for her break. 10 minutes later Mark had a phone call from her telling him that she wouldn’t be coming back as she had changed her mind about working there. Poor woman! I could understand. It was daunting, not just the need for a major spring clean but coping with the tight knit group of Mark and Darrel. I guess I’m just lucky in that I have more balls than most men and like a challenge.

As most of the clients, mainly male, got to know me they too accepted me. Usually their first comment when being introduced was along the lines of,

“We’ll have to watch our P’s and Q’s now.”

They soon realised that I was not going to be that kind of a woman and some real friendships have developed from those early days when I was a threat to the equilibrium of the whole ‘clockshop experience’.

As I have already said, Mark has a knack of putting his foot in it and a prime example of his tactlessness occurred during my first few months at the clockshop.

We were having coffee in the workshop when he asked me, “Didn’t you ever want to have children then?”

I was a forty year old, single (divorced) woman on my own and he was obviously curious.

“How unfeeling of you to bring that up!” I snarled at him. “For all you know that could be the saddest and most tragic thing in my life? How do you know that I haven’t wanted to have a child but been unable to? How do you know that I don’t live with the scars of that failure hurting me every minute of every day? Did you even think about whether that question may have been painful to me?”

He turned white, Darrel gave a distraught gasp and as usual buried his head in his work.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t think. I don’t think. What a bastard I am. Really I am so sorry. Please forgive me.” said Mark.

I got up, emptied the slops of my coffee into the sink, placed my mug down carefully and walked back into the shop throwing over my shoulder as I went,

“That’s okay I don’t have kids ‘cos I can’t stand the little buggers. No way I was ever going to have one!”

I left a stunned silence in the workshop then there was what could almost have passed for a snigger as Darrel said,

“I think you have met your match there.”

“Bloody hell.” said Mark. “I think perhaps I have.”

Sitting by my desk I grinned to myself,

‘Bloody hell! I know you have, both of you!’ I thought.

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