Big Mac dreams and pox ridden Estate Agents

Way back when, long before the internet had really kicked off and people were forced to venture out into the wild once in a while to catch up with old friends and drink themselves into inebriation, I worked for the big M, flipping burgers for small change. I was young, but I had big dreams of Friday nights spent downing pints and staring at cleavage and that required some sort of fundage.

The money McDonald’s paid was pretty poor – I think I was on about £3.40 an hour at the time, but it was either that or Sainsbury’s and that was well known as being even more oppressive and dull. McD’s was partially alright in that while it was a) full of plumbait management that lacked any form of ability or power of communication and b) full of rude customers that believed entirely mistakenly that they were better than the 17 year olds manning the tills and c) a land of constant peril, where the repetitive tasks could lull you into a false sense of security causing you to hideously burn your hand on a grill or slice a wrist on a tomato slicer; it was redeemed by a good quantity of the staff. From A-level students (the vast majority), crazy economic migrants, reformed criminals, drug dealers, to young strumpets, miserable school leavers and black power supremacists, you were always guaranteed a laugh during the few hours you spent greasing up your hair and skin over the grill plattens.

I was consigned to the kitchen along with many of my closest acquaintances (we all pretty much joined up at the end of one summer in classic late adolescent sheep tactics), due to my inability to be polite to ingrates at the till and my saving grace of being able to simultaneously cook up to five types of burger at one time without breaking a sweat. Commonly teamed with Lurcho, Crimp or Steedo (on till for his greater skills of diplomacy) we would spend all day shouting abuse at each other, eating cheese and lecturing the constant stream of new recruits on the fine art of burger dressing, indie music and management baiting.

Sometimes I would work late, cleaning up equipment before clearing out the doughnut cabinet, while other times I would rock in at 7:00 on a Saturday, reeling from drunkenness rolled over from the night before. The trick on those occasions was to quickly fire everything up, get some food in the stager and then lie on the cool tiled floor, watching the ceiling spin until you felt a little better. Bloody hell, that was a long time ago. Before I had to pretend to be able to blag my way through decisions. Before the freedom and excess of university. A time of hideous A-levels you didn’t want to be taking, precariously balanced with a growing appreciation of the attractions of fucking about.

Anyway, it wasn’t all good, but it’s done now and in fact McD’s in Pinner closed a good year or so ago now. The franchisee wasn’t making the returns he had been used to now that the nation had suddenly gone health conscious and anyway, the groups of hoodies frequenting the place in the evenings were making the whole thing more trouble than it was worth.

It closed its doors and stood empty for a while until rumours took hold that it was to become a Wetherspoon’s. This wasn’t entirely unwelcome as though this portended the prospect of a town full of a old and unpleasant alcoholics at all times of day, in the last year, many of the pubs had closed down. The powers that be have decided that Pinner is to become one of those places full of restaurants that inextricably attract enough customers to make money while avoiding alcohol related disorder, noise and everything else that offends rotarians, spinsters and people who think that a Heath Robinson museum is a good use of a few million pounds of public money. The result of there being no pubs, meant nowhere for the upwardly mobile youngsters to go, which had detracted from the area, forcing me to near enough entirely avoid it in my weekend hours, keeping my money firmly in the illegal economy and out of the hands of faux Italian restaurantiers that charge high prices for poor food presented nicely, while people sit there going “lovely, lovely”, because they don’t know any better and it all feels like something slightly mundane, but no-one dares call it.

Anyway, that’s a bad tangent to go off on. The point is really that Wetherspoon’s did not move in the space left by the Golden Arches. Instead they were outbid by the zenith of evil as we know it. The prepubescent boys of Foxtons Estate Agents have descended and now we are all doomed. Their sign lights up the dark street (primarily featuring signs fitted in the 1970s) changing colour as if to say I have no knob, but I shine very brightly, their scribbled on mini-coopers fill the carparks and pull out of intersections driven by scrotes that can barely see over the wheel. These same scrotes then turn up putting leaflets through my letterbox once a week telling us that we could sell the house with them for five billion euros and if you let them in, lecture you about Sport, the state of the market and their inability to give anything, but the best service. Knock-kneed greed merchants playing on the size of their organisation to practice unfair competition (they have launched with a no-fees for six months offer) on an already saturated market of independent providers, loss-leaders that can guarantee with a voracious approach to sales motivated by a policy of publicly humiliating low-performers on a regular basis, the right amount of shoeshine and enough Amy Winehouse powder on the nostril, that success is just around the corner. Ah, I have so much to say about this, but first I have go to go and plan a new strategy. The battle of Pinner has just begun and there is nowhere to get a cheap slab of meat wrapped in ketchup, plastic cheese and bread, to keep our sustenance levels up.