The Ryno Pen

Those who identified the source of this post’s title are awarded one Cool Point, as is customary round these parts. Others may wish to go and see this bit of Choob.

Back in the days of yore, just after the Unpleasant Affair Of HMAS Corrupt, I was nursing a battered psyche (mine, actually!) in the wilds of rural New South Wales.

Farming wasn’t paying particularly well, so one did whatever one could. I hadn’t done any retail work since I was a spotty little oik flogging appliances back in 1974, but there was an opening for a Store Manager, and very little else going, so I applied.

I will need to be a bit circumspect here, but the owner, Graham (not his real name of course) was a big city store owner, wanting to expand his minor retail chain of budget furniture stores. He liked the cut of my jib!

That was about where the good bits ended. If Grouchy Graham had landed an adaptable, good-natured chap, it might have gone more happily.

For a start, the store was a one-man operation. That included deliveries. Oh, sure, Graham was going to get a bloke to work one evening and Saturday afternoons as an offsider… eventually.

There were some good challenges about the job. Mine was the first store not directly under Graham’s supervision: (the other two were within 30 minutes’ drive of each other) for some reason he thought I had the key to this particularly insular and clannish rural district. You had to have a few ancestors buried there before you were more than a “blow-in”.

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I did some radio spots, in which I’m (not at all) sorry to say I took the mickey out of the local community service announcements.

“The following is an Important Economic Announcement,” I intoned in a sort of pompous Sam Eagle voice. It sounded perilously close to the way the local guy did when he announced the funerals for the day. All the major adverts were outsourced from Sydney, and most of the local stuff tried awful hard to match that sound.

Of course my spot stuck out of the yappy yuppie mix like an Akubra

in a pile of bowlers!

I merely announced that the store was opening, that “shopping here is the next best thing to a tax cut“, and muttered “I’m so cheap I do me own adverts!”

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I opened the store and ran it like it was my own. Well, better than my own: I really took pride in the place. I made sure the local police had my contact details as keyholder, in case of any after-hours problems: after all, Graham was a couple of hours away by road.

The store only sold new furniture. When OtherGuys, the nearby, long-established furniture store tried a Dirty Little Subterfuge and put it about that I dealt in second-hand, I obtained my second-hand dealer’s licence, and actually inspected some stuff brought in, only to go, “No, that stuff’s not quite our standard, I mean, look at the price I’ve got on new ones. I think OtherGuys would make you an offer on it, though.”

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The old grannies would come in and talk, talk, talk. Well, dammit, I couldn’t get away: what was I to do? I made tea, gave out biscuits, and sold loads of furniture to their kids and grandkids. I’d love to claim it was my stratagem, but it was just an accident that worked. I never did less than Graham’s target sales figures on any day I operated the store.

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Lunch hours? Yeah, no problem. Every second Friday, Graham would come down with his secretary to do the books and a spot audit.

They’d be there until 1pm, and the theory was that I’d get lunch from 12 on that second Friday, just in case I had to pay bills, get a haircut, or do any of the other stuff I couldn’t do between 8am and 5:30pm, because…

… it had been made clear, with what I discovered was Graham’s usual abusive manner, that the doors must NEVER close during shop hours. He would have People, he said, Checking On Me.

Oh, and the lunch-hour was more than compensated for: 7am start on Tuesdays, when my new stock was trucked in from head office.

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So, did I get my offsider? No. After about  six months, it was getting a tad obvious that the mythical helper just was not going to materialise. There was no real benefit in using the store’s truck to-and-from home: it was a two-tonne diesel with an extended load-bed and Luton peak body.

^{Artist’s (crudely-rendered) impression of truck.}

The unpaid overtime would have easily paid Graham back for whatever the truck cost to run. On top of that I was losing time whenever I drove it: top speed of 90km an hour in ideal conditions compared to a reliable 100 in my own vehicle even on the (very many) hilly sections. It sucked.

Then came crunch time. I was delivering a complete bedroom suite to a property so remote I’d forded two creeks to get there. And, guess what, the man of the house was not home! I was going rather well offloading solo, despite the complete lack of any powered tailgate gear, until the second wardrobe was being eased down from the truck.

Have you ever torn an elbow ligament under load? Hurts a bit.

Well, all I could do was apologise to the customer. I tidied up as well as I could and drove home after a fashion.

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Graham was the usual torrent of abuse, and threatened to dock my pay for the broken wardrobe. I was off for two weeks (doctor’s orders), got one of my mates to bring the truck in, and he had to come down and run his own shop. The grannies did not like him.

When I came back, I asked again about the promised assistant.  I should not have been put in such a situation in the first place, I said. There was more Graham grouching. I resigned on the spot.

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After a couple of weeks’ stray work, mainly looking after a few shops and offices in town, I kept to the farm for a while. There were things that needed doing, and I could do most of what I needed in the smaller village a few miles away.

One night at about half-past-eight, the phone rang. It was the cops in town. Was I the owner of Grouchy Graham’s Cheapo Furniture?

Well, no. It had been about six months. Gossip being what it was, I also knew it had been at least three subsequent managers, too.

Before I gave them Graham’s (long-distance) number, I leaned what had sparked the call.

Graham must have been using his people skills on the most recent manager. Though the store was supposed to close at five, the cops had swung past at eight, only to find display furniture all over the lawn, every light in the place blazing, the doors open, and a real Mary Celeste vibe going down!

And, as the Schadenfreude Fairy’s gritty dust twinkled around me in the evening air, what could I picture?

(Click this for bigness, but it’s crap!)

Thanks, Both My Readers™, and G’Night!