“Anyway,” he went on, “I don’t expect you will turn out any different.”
Perhaps he was the reason why I stuck the job for so long – he got my back up and I wanted to prove him wrong.
My new bigoted boss gave me the rest of the good news. “I have been sent a two year training program for you from Head Office. The office manager will be in charge of that. You get one day off a week to study for the Banking exams (I didn’t – we never had enough staff to cover for me), other than that you will keep your nose clean and do what you are told. If you don’t like it, you know what the alternative option is. I joined the Bank 23 years ago and I started right at the bottom. Just like you are going to do.”
And that is precisely what happened. For the next six weeks I made tea and coffee twice a day for twenty-five people. The rest of the time I filed. I filed index cards, loan applications, correspondence, and memos. I filed every possible type of paperwork.
I was bored fucking delirious.
I eventually discovered that being a Left Footer meant being a Roman Catholic, even though I was now essentially an atheist and hadn’t been inside a church for years, it didn’t matter. The records at Head Office said I was a Left Footer. It felt a bit like those people you hear about who can’t get credit anywhere but have no idea why, and eventually discover that they have been accidentally put on a computer credit card blacklist. Once you are down as either a bad credit risk or a Catholic, it’s a bugger trying to get people to change their opinion.
It was even more of a problem in the Bank that I was with. They actually had their own Masonic Lodge for like minded White Anglo Saxon Protestants, membership of which was difficult to achieve for red haired freckly Irish Catholics. If you were not in the ‘Club’ your career was taking the slowest of slow boats to China. So I was a little confused as to why I was given the position in the first place – it just didn’t make sense.
I found out some time later how I had managed to slip through the net.
The bank would take on about a dozen graduate trainees every year. It turned out that the Recruitment Manager who hired me had been pushed sideways in some bitter office politics (the Nazi bastards probably discovered his grandma was Jewish or something equally inexcusable).