When the phone rings, who do you most want it to be? And who would you hate it to be? Who is the first person that comes into your mind, Roy liked to ask people, at that moment?
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‘I think there should be a National Service of Hospitality. The best way to see the true face of humanity is to serve it a plate of chips.’
Camilla Grudova on bad-mannered customers.
‘Anyone who has ever worked night shifts will understand the vertiginous feeling that comes with staring down the day from the wrong end.’
A.K. Blakemore on working nights.
‘I was constantly reading job ads, trying to find my holy grail – a job I could stand to do, and someone foolish enough to hire me.’
Sandra Newman on learning how to play professional blackjack.
‘I loved being a receptionist. What I loved about it was playing the part of being a receptionist.’
Emily Berry on being a temporary office worker.
‘Every part of you would swell, including your eyeballs, and no matter how much water you drank, you were always dehydrated.’
Junot Díaz on working for a steel mill.
‘One day at school–an all-boys comprehensive on the border between London and Kent–our music teacher told us that John Lennon and Paul McCartney didn't actually write those famous Beatles songs we loved so much.'
‘The man died as Arnold predicted. It kept happening, and it was disconcerting, terrifying, like being possessed or going mad.’
A new story by Hanif Kureishi.
‘My response to the music had reminded me that concealed inside myself was a more excitable and open self raring to get out.’
‘The warmest companion with the coldest vision of where Humanity might head.’
‘Sometime after the First Gulf War, I heard on the news that sixty-three per cent of young Americans could not identify Iraq on a map of the world.’ Catherine O'Flynn in Granta 103: The Rise of the British Jihad.
