Jobs and Dogs

I’ve spent the day filling out an application form for a job. That’s right. I said I spent the entire day ticking boxes and writing in tiny block letters to get everything in the space provided. And I’m still not finished.

The problem I’m having is with people who think we all fit into those boxes. What happens if you went to more than one school? What happens if you have more qualifications than boxes? What happens if you your life doesn’t neatly shrink down into three lines? What happens if your life doesn't reduce to the synopsis of a bad B movie? Also, what happens if you don’t want to admit to what you last did for work? And why am I expected to tell them my last salary? Is it any of their business? What possible reason could they have for knowing it except to offer a pound a week more instead of the salary they printed in the job ad?

Glossing over these details is what a CV is for, I suppose. But in that case, why not just ask for a CV and leave the forms for the bare minimum: sex, age, address, email, hat size.

However, I don't want this to get in the way of the real reason I’ve come online. At the risk of turning my blog into the sort of place where we conduct thought experiments, I want to pick your brains.

A good friend stopped me in the street today and we had been chatting for a while when a pretty aggitated dog passed us by. My friend told me not to worry. She knew the perfect way to disarm a dangerous dog. She explained that her mother had once told her that it’s possible to kill a dog by taking its front legs and pulling them apart. She swore it was true though I didn’t believe her.

I’ve looked all over the web for evidence to back up my friend’s claims, but I’m beginning to think that it’s one of those myths, like the one about what to do when a pitbull has got you in its jaws. As you know, a pitbull’s jaw are supposed to have some mechanism to stop it being forced open once the dog has you in its maw. According to legend, you stick either a pen, a pencil, or a finger up its rectum, thus triggering a hard-wired response in the pitbull’s brain which forces it to let you go. I don’t know if it’s true but you can be sure that I’d let you go if you tried the same with me.

Unfortunately, I don't think this could be considered proof. So, your task for today is to find out if either of these are true. I don’t care how you do it but extra credit will be given for a practical demonstration. (And yes, Mopsa, I'm looking at you. I know you have at least one dog you could try the rectum trick on.)

Geoff Capes's Thighs

It was her large thighs. I couldn’t bear to look at them a moment longer. I had to quit.

For five days I’ve been watching these thighs walk the aisles in the air conditioned telesales office, just outside Bangor. They belonged to my supervisor Doris (I have to call her Doris because she’d probably sue me if I used her real name), who was a hulk of professionalism in navy polyester, cheap Bodyshop perfume, and heavily into good Karmic vibrations. She generated so much static electricity in her skin tight skirt that she crackled as she walked. You could go into cardiac arrest just by touching earthed metal whenever she was in the room. And then there was that voice…

‘Chip? Remember to smile, dear! Nobody loves a sulker!’

‘Chip, hit your quota and you go in the draw to win the dreamcatcher!’

‘Chip! If you’re feeling tired, go to the water cooler and touch the blue crystals!’

If I’m honest, I’ve been too busy obsessed about her thighs to smile or feel happy or tired. They have filled my dreams with images of Geoff Capes, circa 1978, in Britain’s Strongest Man. I swear she could carry a hod full of bricks up a ladder and still have the energy to tell me off. The way she rubbed her legs whenever she criticised the way I’d handled my customers was no idle threat. I was too afraid to make jokes about cracking walnuts.

In the end, I had no choice. This morning I only made it to ten o'clock before I decided to hand in my resignation. I chose to do so by throwing my headset through the window and declaring that ‘I’d rather be broke and happy than in this dump with your thighs’. It was a Freudian slip. I’d meant to say ‘guys’. I stormed out before Doris could catch me.

Telesales has been an experience I probably needed to endure for however short length of time I could manage, but I wasn’t going to last another minute of listening to customers wanting to talk dirty about bank charges. There are more perverts in the world than I’d ever imagined and an unhealthy number of them seemed to have Yorkshire accents. It was, as they say, an education.

I don’t know if I’ll get paid but I know I have psychological scars that time will struggle to heal. But for now, The Chipster is back. I’m looking for work but, in the meantime, I’m getting back to my writing. The only good thing to come out of these bad few days is I’ve finally come up with an excellent title for my next novel.

And you might be surprised to know that it has nothing to do with thighs.

How Can I Help You?

You might have been wondering if there’s more than incarceration in the Chipster’s life lately. Well, there is. And I’ve been keeping it a bit of a secret. I don’t know what to say… I’m feeling ashamed.

I’ve had to get a job.

It gets worse. I’m had to take a job working in telesales. This is supposed to be my lunch break but I’m forcing myself to update my blog. It’s why I’ve been so quiet. I get too little time to write or do anything. I had to work over the weekend. I’m pretty miserable but there aren’t a whole lot of jobs for a man with my unique qualifications in this part of the country. If you ring up a certain bank and hear a Welsh voice on the line, it might well be me. No point in asking me anything. A monkey could do the job I’m doing. I have a computer screen in front of me and I work through problems according to that. It barely involves my brain.

The job is terrible and the pay is unacceptable. I don’t know how much more of this I can take. Feeling the way I feel now, I might not last the day. I’ve quit better jobs than this before. Only the Chipster’s finances have never been so low. Tips for stripping just aren’t what they used to be and Gabby has refused to cover the hotel bill for the mini bar I raided throughout our holiday to the Lake District. I have to rush and get some lunch. My shift starts again in five minutes.

A Bitter Stripper

I stayed up late last night writing a post I didn’t have chance to finish because the spin cycle on the washing machine came to a premature end and I had to go hang out my thongs to dry. I was intending to finish writing it today but changed my mind after reading the papers.

My thongs are now dry but, unfortunately, I’ve decided to give up blogging.

I’ll probably have a change of heart tomorrow but at the moment The Chipster is feeling very bitter and down. I’m planning on selling off my collection of thongs and getting a proper job. I don’t want to be part of Bangor’s entertainment industry any more. I don’t want to be Welsh. I don’t want to be a man. And I don’t want to be single.

That’s right. I want to be a wife in the north! I want to write about my infirm mother and the things she can do with her false teeth when my father’s standing with his trousers around his ankles flogging her with his belt. I want to write about the whimsical things my dog tells me and the things my children do to beggars they meet on the streets. I want to write long meandering sentences full of apple pie metaphors and smudged similies like finger painted smiles and clowns’ eyebrows.

But, Chipster, I hear you ask, if you want to do that, then why give up blogging?

Well, there comes a point in your life when you think ‘why bother’. Why risk serious pelvic injury every night to dance for audiences who forget you the next day? What’s the point in writing to amuse your readership? What is the point in trying to do something different to the ten million other blogs out there?

Today’s Sunday Times front page had the story I’ve been expecting for weeks. It’s the announcement that ‘The Wife in the North’ has just landed a 70,000 pound publishing deal to turn her blog into a novel.

I wish her well, of course, but I dislike the pretence that this was always just an ordinary woman who decided to start a blog. It’s one of those blogging success stories we all hope will happen to us. Except they don’t happen to us. They don’t happen to ordinary bloggers. They don’t happen to male strippers from Wales. They happen to ex-education journalists from the Sunday Times.

Yet here I am, a real man in a really grim northern (well, the north of Wales) town, stripping for a living, yet nobody wants to hear about the reality of my life ‘up here’.

The Chipster is feeling bitter today and even knowing that he owns Wales’ biggest collection of posing pouches can’t make him feel happy.

UPDATE: Bryan Appleyard has written a wondefully playful piece which just about captures The Chipster’s sentiments. I guess if I’m not the only one thinking this, I’ll be back in my thongs tomorrow.