*deep breath*
I’ve been putting off writing about this all year, because it’s upsetting to me. But I need to get this out (and I think, scary as it is, I need to make it public). So here goes.
I started working at this little second-hand book shop — the one widely rumoured to have inspired the sitcom Black Books — shortly after moving to the city, back in early autumn of ’09. I loved it. It was all dusty and disheveled and full of its past; and the owner, David, was equally quirky and interesting, and was teaching me how to evaluate and repair books. I admired his cavalier attitude to standard business practices, as well as his meticulous care over the bits of order that actually mattered in this place of seemingly accelerated entropy. We share an obsession with optimization, and I was impressed by the ingenious systems he’d devised for keeping track of stock, evaluating the sale performance of titles over time, and the like. And, sure, he wasn’t paying me anything close to the minimum wage, but it was pretty clear that the shop couldn’t have afforded to do so, and so as a corollary he insisted that his staff only spent 3/4 of their time actually working — it seemed like a fair exchange.*
So it went for the first few months. Then David’s at-first-delightful quirkiness began to take a turn for the sinister. He started to get suspicious of me, in that way that makes whatever action I might take become somehow suspect, and anything I might say in my defence seemed to make me more suspicious still. I’d been away for most of December, and, having been given a great deal of praise and responsibility in the few months since starting, had negotiated a wage increase commencing upon my return (to the lofty heights of £4.50/hour — I’d been hired at £3/hour, though this increased to £3.50 shortly thereafter, and to £4 after a month). During the same conversation, I’d asked about learning to do the accounts for the shop. I meant this as a duty I wanted to take on, since number-crunching never bothered me, and David very vocally considered it a real pain-in-the-ass chore, but evidently he read my interest as highly suspicious indeed, and thereafter would periodically accuse me of believing the shop to be exploiting me, or in his words, that I thought he was “making a lot of money by grinding the faces of the poor”. In late February, he emailed me my notice, stating “we dont [sic] get on well enough to be able to co-operate productively in the shop”.
I was pretty stunned, since apart from one clearly drunken email he’d sent me a fortnight previously — in which he variously called me “Boudica”; “psychically powerful, as in occult”; “a cuckoo in the nest”; “a potential terrorist”; and so on, and yet professed to be very fond of me — I had no idea anything was amiss between us. Granted, I’d been pretty depressed over the winter, and so may not have noticed. After a somewhat confused and confusing email exchange, we agreed to meet in person to talk it over, over drinks. David then explained to me that he’d been watching my body language and had come to believe that I hated him because I seldom made eye contact when speaking to him. I explained that I was in fact quite fond of him, and the body language and lack of eye contact he was observing were most likely just symptomatic of my depression and general social anxiety (I suspect I seldom make eye contact with anyone in conversation). We chalked the whole thing up to a misunderstanding, and were friends again, with my job reinstated indefinitely.
Towards the end of May, David retired from the shop. Chris, who’d been the nominal “manager” for several months, took over full management. I don’t want to speak ill of Chris, since he was and is(?) a friend, but his takeover was not without friction. Most of the changes he made were good ones — e.g., the removal of dust, which David had considered a waste of time, but which I and other staff enthusiastically supported. It’s just that he didn’t communicate these desired changes very well, or sometimes at all. For instance, David had made me the “assistant manager”, but Chris decided he didn’t want to have an assistant manager at all — only he must not have decided this until sometime during the summer, as he went on calling me “assistant manager” for a while. In any case, he didn’t actually tell me about this decision at all until sometime in September or October, when I asked him about it, in the midst of great upset over his having gradually removed my responsibilities within the shop, and then reduced my hours for the coming winter in favour of James, who was a newer employee but one with a lot more secondhand book experience than me (and who, admittedly, worked a lot harder than me — Chris having also quietly done away with the 3/4 work for 3/4 minimum wage deal, also without informing me or, to my knowledge, any of the other employees who’d started working under David). I’m not really blaming Chris — he was just inexperienced, having never managed any other business, nor (to my knowledge) held other “leadership roles” or even worked anywhere else. But it was a source of tension, and we did argue over it, but in the end it was resolved amicably enough.
Fast forward about a year, to last autumn. Chris had decided to leave the UK, and while I was a little hurt that James was clearly being groomed to succeed him (and had thus begun to take on the in-shop responsibilities that Chris revoked from me when he decided against having an assistant manager), I understood the decision and didn’t mention it. By then we had settled into a division of labour within the shop that suited me better anyway, although I harboured secret ambitions to try to take on the running of the accounts when James took over, since he professed to strongly dislike “that sort of thing” — and, quite frankly, because he made so many mistakes when just balancing the daybook totals and cash floats that I was a little worried about the health of the books if he were to be looking after them entirely.
I never got the chance to propose it, though, because Chris came to me in late November and told me that James intended to fire me when he took over. I asked for reasons; he told me he didn’t know of any except maybe that James just didn’t like me; he told me he’d advised against it; he told me he’d write me a glowing letter of reference. Perhaps I was a coward. Perhaps I should have gone to James directly earlier. But I didn’t know, at that point, how much time I had — Chris had only told me that he intended to leave “some time in January”. Besides, I was hurt, and maybe a little bit conflict-averse — I’d had no idea James had any problems with me; he’d certainly never expressed any. So instead, I made various entreaties to Chris to broker some sort of conversation, which he evaded, only saying that “the decision was already made” and that James was adamant that “nothing I could do would change his mind”. I also got a little bit of legal advice, and upon discovering that this was a totally illegal way to fire someone, and said so to Chris. He told me I sounded threatening. He reminded me that David had once fired me, and that I had somehow miraculously wormed my way out of it — he supposed James might be afraid I’d do the same to him. I reminded him that David had fired me based on a misconception — a misconception based on my failure to look him in the eyes. “Yeah,” said Chris, “yeah.”
I didn’t contact James directly until mid-December, by email. He never replied. Shortly before Christmas, already out of the city for the holiday and unable to sleep for the worry of it all, my partner made me resolve to speak to him on the phone. The conversation I had when I did was pretty confusing. James apologised for failing to reply to my email, but stated that this was his “only regret”. He cited my apparent dissatisfaction with the pay structures in the shop (against my flustered protestations),** my supposedly too-frequent lateness,*** my “attitude of insubordination” towards Chris (which apparently is what it’s called when you’re friends with your boss and speak casually to him, and occasionally respectfully disagree with his decisions), and my inadequate performance as assistant manager — citing as evidence the fact that I wasn’t working very many hours in the shop(!), which seemed to him to indicate a lack of care. He then refused to believe me when I told him that I hadn’t actually been the assistant manager for well over a year, and that I would have liked to work more hours if given the chance. My self-defence and his further accusations were cut short by a crackling-bad phone connection, though, so we resolved that I would come in to discuss it in person when I got back to town on the 30th.
When I did, he seemed to have steeled himself up for the conversation — which was ultimately less a ‘conversation’ as such and more me repeatedly trying to engage him in some sort of dialogue and him repeating his talking points and barely bothering to even grammatically restructure them into actual responses to what I was saying. He’d gotten Chris to forward him some emails from back when we’d argued over a year previously, in which (among general disparaging of my worth as an employee and human being), he’d complained about me being late, and James decided this counted as “written warning”, and would provide him legal protection in firing me. I had gone into the conversation hoping that, as with David, this was based on simple misunderstanding (given that most of the reasons James was citing, and the ones he seemed most worked up about, were, y’know, factually inaccurate), or that, barring that, I might be able to get a clear idea of just how much time I had left to work, and maybe negotiate a week or two more on top of that, or severance pay, because of all the confusion. It turns out that Chris leaving “some time in January” translated to James taking over at the beginning of January; he also considered Chris telling me of his plans to fire me in November as being my notice of being fired, and flatly refused to believe that this had not been communicated clearly. I left the conversation without my keys (and, incidentally, without most of my CDs, which to the best of my knowledge are still somewhere in the shop, although no one can find them).
I fell into a pretty deep depression. I went to the Citizen’s Advice Bureau, who reckoned that not only was I illegally fired, and entitled to severance pay in damages, I was also legally entitled to my whole employment’s worth of back wages up to minimum wage, plus holiday pay. But there was a strict and quite brief window in which I had to make that claim. I spent a long while deliberating, knowing that if I put through claims for all of it I might end up getting the shop shut down entirely, and despite several vengeful twinges, I didn’t want to do that. I considered pursuing the matter informally, explaining what I would legally be entitled to should I pursue it, and asking for a month’s wages in severance pay instead, but ultimately decided I couldn’t deal with that conversation emotionally. It’s too late for any of it, now, but I’m still having trouble parsing my feelings over the whole thing. Feeling like a coward for not doing anything; like I just let bullies walk all over me. Feeling weirdly guilty for still loving the shop after all this, despite everything, despite more than two years of far too frequent bullshit (they even broke my camera, once, and never even offered to fix or replace it). Especially since David, Chris and James have all accused me of not loving the shop enough — I still don’t know what it was they would have wanted from me. I am so hurt and so angry and so, so sad.
__________
* Although it did cause me a bit of worry, given that one can’t avoid bureaucracy entirely in life: I knew that I wasn’t making enough money to pay income tax (or even NI contributions), but I was pretty sure none of my earnings were being reported to the government, and so I worried about being audited and taxed on presumed earnings I never actually made. My advice from the Citizen’s Advice Bureau (as well as pointing out that David’s official justification of calling us all “apprentices” was nonsense) was just to keep my own records in case anything like that should happen, and try to get them to give me payslips (for which I eventually substituted just taking a few scans of the daybook).
**As mentioned, the shop did (and, as far as I know, still does) pay its staff below minimum wage. I understood the reasons for this and have never, to date, actually complained about it, but it did come up occasionally in conversation. David was constantly suspicious of my opinions regarding this, and when Chris took over he would periodically bring it up in conversations, which usually ended with him anxiously demanding that I concede that I did not feel exploited by the shop. I suppose I did myself no favours by invariably citing the marxist/anarchist position that all wage labour is inherently exploitative — but I always maintained that I did not feel more exploited, that I felt in fact in many ways less exploited, in the shop than in other jobs. In this case I think James was mostly thinking of a conversation I’d had with Chris a month or two before, which he must have heard about, in which I mentioned that other businesses (e.g. NGOs and the like) that weren’t able to adequately pay their employees often compensated in other ways, like paying for travel, which would be a tiny expenditure for the shop but a major saving for employees — which James re-rendered as “you asked the shop to pay for your bus fare” in a tone so incredulous you’d think I’d asked them to finance my duck house.
***Persistent lateness, of course, is something that a person can legitimately be fired for — but there are procedures for that. Warnings and the like. Thing is, different workplaces have different standards for punctuality, and the bookshop had always been intensely casual about it. I was repeatedly told, by David and later by Chris, not to worry about it, just to pay myself less if I was more than 5 minutes late. Punctuality is something I struggle with, but it is something I’m capable of, if the struggle is important enough. The job I’d had before that was in a theatre, where being on time is super important, and I managed it fine — but it was a struggle. So with people telling me not to worry about it, I took them at their word, and just made sure to phone if I was running more than a couple of minutes late. Besides which, I was not ≤5 minutes late any more frequently than some other employees; the only difference was that, unlike them, I tend to apologise profusely if I am even a minute or two late to something (and tend to think I am even when I’m not, since my phone clock runs fast), and so I guess drew attention to it, since nobody in the shop seems to believe me when I tell them that my level of very-slight-lateness was not abnormal. I was perhaps more frequently >5 minutes late than others, but again, I was consistently told not to worry too much about it, including by James. More fool me for taking people at their words, I guess.
Dust-Covered Curios 
