I had a cafeteria job, serving food, and some people were really nasty. There was a stack of nice, cool plates, and a stack of hotter plates that had just come out of the kitchen. So, if a person was an arsehole, I’d hand them a hot plate with a smile and watch them deal with it.
Originally asked
The Guardian, to a different person each week, The Q&A
The Guardian's long-running Q&A repeatedly asks this standing question, with minor tense variation.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
The Q&A, The Guardian, 2 December 2023 source ↗
Others on this question
View all 229 →I worked in the customer services department of a mobile phone gambling company and it was very depressing, because the people calling up were usually not happy.
Working in a very busy bar in the West End when I was trying to pay my way through drama school. I had to dance in a cage in a vest and cycling shorts to Venus by Bananarama, Greased Lightnin’ and Y.M.C.A. every night. It was excruciating.
Telesales. I refused to wear a tie, but my argument that “They can’t see what we’re wearing” didn’t wash with the manager and I lasted a week.
More from Denise Welch
View profile →Stopping being such a helicopter parent and worrying about these grownup children’s lives. It drives me mad. And I am having therapy. If I could stop thinking that I should be their first port of call for everything, it would free my head up a bit.
Now, because of my marriage and because since September 2019 I’ve been free of clinical depression.
Oversensitivity.
My husband, Lincoln, for getting sober with me. He turned his own life around to turn mine around. We didn’t do AA, we anchored each other.
Shitting myself in New York last November. I was wearing cream trousers. We were going to see my son Matty and his band, the 1975, at Madison Square Garden, and I was walking through the streets, enjoying the sunshine, pretending I was in some kind of video – throwing my hat into the New York sky like Mary Tyler Moore. I saw a couple of people turn and look at me. Now, although I’m not famous in New York, whenever Matty’s there I do get recognised as his mum, so I’m smiling and waving at them. I went back to the hotel room and bent over to get something out of the suitcase, and my husband said: “Do you realise you’ve shat yourself?”
Funny, annoying and kind.
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