Man, I love that kind of music. And I even got the job!
But my actual workday is a bit different than I expected..
While the customers office and general meeting place is a nice, funky, yellow-brownish lounge-like place complete with orange plastic chairs and large, grainy black and white pictures of famous rock'n'roll singers, motown bands, barbershop groups and doowop stars - that we don't even publish - are decorating the walls, the actual work is done in a different place. Behind an "Employee only"-labelled door, you feel like you enter a completely different place..
First, there is a small room with no natural daylight at all. Undecorated walls, a vent lets the slight smell of London's private traffic and moreso the ambient noise of revved-up mopeds and diesel engines from the alley behind the other side of this wall. It smells like hot plastic and electronics here. They crammed in a desk with a reel to reel tape machine that looks pre-WWII, a chair that has no upholstering left and a set of headphones equally worn out. On a stack of boxes labelled ROYAL MAIL, there is a turntable with no speakers. You have to change the headphones each times, the boss does not want to invest in new things, "dey still do dair job and datts grayt cannsiddered all dees years, innit?!" he set, laughing and leaving me alone, engulfing me in cigarette smoke as he closed the door. A bad habit of him, talking to me and the other guy whose name I don't know with his Beatle hairdo. Maybe I approach im later. Apparently, this is the place were I have to prepare tapes for the customer to take away after the paperwork is done in the much nicer front office.
Apart from a small bathroom the size of a phone box, there is a cellar door that leads to the basement. The boss called it "the archive". After 5 steps down, you find yourself in a maze of wooden shelves. The low ceiling height makes it impossible to see anything but the next shelf in front of you. The layout is chaotic as hell, s-curves everywhere. What were they thinking? They store thousands upon thousands of records here, from six different labels. Every so often, a 100W lightbulb drenches everything into a golden light, making some of the labels hard to read. Boxes upon boxes of records, labelled with the company's own catalogue system that is as messy as Mr. Furltons hair. My boss' name by the way. Further down this almost claustrophobic place, the tape spindles are stored. The air is hard to breath from both the dust and the heat - those lightbulbs emit a heat that feels like sunlight after a couple of minutes. I feel somewhat bestranged, this is my first day and I am not sure if I really want to keep this job. I sneeze - the dust in here makes me a bit sick.
Suddenly, a shrill sound got me out of my pondering state. Rrrring-Rrrriiiiiiing. A telephone! Somewhere! I ran down the maze, trying to identify the location of the goddamn thing. I wait for it to ring again. Ah, right over there! Against a red brick wall, there's a wall phone and a small wall-mounted desk. Out of breath, I grab the phone and caught "Hello?!" into the phone. "This is Mrs. Wellington from Radio Southampton, who am I speaking with?" asked a voice on the other side. Me realizing how unprofessional I accepted the call, explained who I was and excused myself. "Mr. Furlton gave me this phone number to speak with his experienced colleague in the archives. Can I give you the numbers of the disks we'd like to use in our station. Do you have a pen at hand?" I look left and right and, for once, this place makes sense as the wall-mounted desk has a drawer with pen and paper. "Yes, go ahead" I huffed, still out of breath. She then gave me absolutely cryptic numbers what appears to be catalogue numbers that I hastily wrote down to the point I could barely read them myself again and wished me a good day. So, my first task I guess?
Right I hung up, Mr. Furlton's heavy-smoker voice could be heard from where the cellar entrance is located in this friggin maze: "Oi! I heard da dellephone ringin! I gave dis womann from da raidia station da direct dial namba. I figurd you arr a cleva boy and know what da do. Heh! *cough cough* Now bring da records here and ay show ya what to do nexd!" The door slams shut. Okay, 17-C, 28-Y. She wants a track from an album that has only 7 tracks on the B-side. Must be a mistake from her. After I picked up several LPs and breathed in half a kilogram of dust, I came back to the small backoffice. It feels like I am leaving a bunker. "What do ya think yo r doin', mate?". I looked at Mr. Furlton's angry face, thinking of what I could have done wrong now. "Turn off de light in the baisment! Money's not grawing on trees, dass it?!!". Dude, what the fuck...
"Now, ya gotta do is simpl. Just maik a capy of the tracks they want. The frash taips are..." Mr. Furlton looks around, his eyes scanning the small room for blank tapes for me to record on, moving rubbish around, scratching his almost bald head. "Fergasson?....FERGASSON!!" The Beatle look-alike puts his head through the front office door. Aha, Ferguson is his other employees name. "Wher ar the fresh taips at! You took da deliffary dis week!" Ferguson shoves his head out of the door, five seconds later producing a reel of blanc tape and closes the door. "Diss boy, heh! I loff him, he's me boy, but soamtimes, he's such a muppet HEHEH*cough cough*". I flashed him a fake smile and proceeded to thread the tape into the machine. Like father, like son I thought..
Unlike the whole place, except for the front office which is super nice and I would not mind to live in there, the audio equipment is of nice quality. The tape is of high quality, the turntable professional grade. My butt hurts due to the poor chair and the constant plugging back and forth of the headphones make me a bit annoyed, but I got the tape done for the radio station. A mix of jazz, big band and lots of brass stingers. You learned to hate the 12-second stingers, probably for channel jingles or something. Getting one disk out, onto the turntable, skipping to "A-27", press RECORD on the tape machine, just for it to have a five-note vibraphone tune to play. Stop recording. Put the record back into the sleeve. Rinse and repeat.
"Ai, ya got tha tape dann? Good! Fergasson will prepair it for shipping tamarraw. You ar doing well!" he said, leaving me. He comes back into the room: "Do not forget to include da laicense sheet. Dis is how we do make manney, and also how I pay ya salary!" Oh yes, the paperwork. There is a stack of pre-written forms with the company logo and all that. Very professional again. I note down the customer's name, the tracks included. I checkmark the "for radio broadcast" box and proudly sign the slip. I hand it over to Ferguson who, after giving me a smug look, reluctantly stamps the slip to make it more official. The tape, the slip and some filling material goes into a box that I pack up, get up, bring back the records into the so-called archive and wave them goodbye. My first day is over, I did it!
Next day is a sunday, and I am actually looking forward. Monday was fine, Tuesday too. Basically the same stuff. As I walk into the flashy front office, Mr. Furlton barks angry things into my face and I could not understand at all. "Mäit, are you shtiupid?! You häd wann jab! Haw could ya screw that app sou bädly?!" I became pale, what did I do? Or better: What did I do wrong?! "I gat a call fram da raida station. Dey säd we are too expensif and dey neva want to work with us again. Den I checkd the list ya wrote." What's wrong with the list? He slapped his hand onto the slip while holding his cigarette with it. He blew his smoke-filled breath into my face as I tried to read the slip and figure out what's the matter. "Ya idiot charged dem with television broadcast fees!!! Not da radio fees!! Ya bellend, ya are too dumm to read, ey? You can fock off, mate, and neva come back agän!"
After a couple more of this, I just left that goddamn place. As I looked back into the front office window, Ferguson gave me a smug smile, but seeing his fat, bald father with sweat stains under his armpits and the cigarette in his mouth walking up and down and making gestures while audibly still yelling, I knew that I rather listen to the music on the radio than preparing it..
