Le Parking

 

Decades ago, I had a summer job for a couple of seasons with National Car Parks, in Birmingham, in between school and Foundation College, and then between Foundation and Art Colleges. I was about nineteen years old, unclubbable and generally quite Bolshie about most things. Most of all, I was broke - a recurring theme throughout my life - and the paltry wages offered by the company in return for a life-threatening workplace environment: think carbon monoxide poisoning as standard fare for the working day/night - were not exactly going to engender loyalty to the company.

Basically, everyone supplemented their meagre stipend on the fiddle. You milked the system in whatever ways possible: newbies were inducted from day one in the numerous methods of skimming from the day's take without being noticed. The techniques employed varied according to the type and layout of car park, from the more sedate outdoor, waste-ground parks, mostly looked after by crafty pensioners, to the multi-storey jobs where I spent most of my time. The most lucrative of all of them was Park Street: several storeys of poorly designed parking, where, on a Saturday, it could take someone half an hour to get from the upper decks to the pay booth.

Because of certain subtleties in the regulations imposed by the company, a sizeable skim was possible by the booth operators. In saying that, it was physiologically impossible to work more than half a shift in the place, due to the accumulation of exhaust fumes in the well that the toll booth sat in: I never worked more than four hours in the place, but would always leave with a thumping headache and feeling on the point of collapse: there was no attempt by the company - or probably even awareness of the problem - to alleviate what were obviously dangerous working conditions.

However, the sharp among us were amply-rewarded with a level of fiddle that we felt justified the short-term cost to our health and the utter disregard in which we were held by the company, and we helped the less able to get their 'fair share' of the spoils, if they were struggling. Our official weekly take-home was well less than twenty quid; but a four-hour Saturday shift at Park Street easily netted me between fifty and seventy on a good day: a lesson to bosses who pay peanuts and care little about their workforce; do not take your source of profit lightly, or you will get bitten in the arse in the long run. Do I feel guilty? Given the institutionalized fraud exhibited by government and business in recent years, I consider it a small victory in the levelling-up process.