Apply Within: Stories of career sabotage

By Michaela McGuire

When Michaela McGuire was hired by a federal MP eight months before the 2007 election, she didn't know exactly what to expect. She probably should have, because before that she had worked in the highrollers' room of a casino and had overseen lap dances in a strip club. It would become another novelty job to add to her brief but colourful résumé.
Michaela has advised a Liberal MP to campaign for his seat rather than get a haircut, cleaned ashtrays and helped organise a senior partner's stamp collection at a prestigious law firm. Whatever the contributing factors to her brilliant career, foresight was not one of them.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Melbourne University Publishing Ltd
• Release date: Sep 1, 2009
• ISBN: 9780522859423

Book preview

happened.

1

VIDEO EASY

Moorooka is on the Southside of Brisbane. Not the Deep South, which is what we called places like Logan and Woodridge, grim neighbourhoods whose only discernible feature is the shopping centres, which were never called malls or arcades but always ‘Hyperdomes’. You find these in and around suburbs with names like Shailer Park, which is only two letters off a joke.

It is easier to think of Moorooka as being in Middle Brisbane—one of those outer suburbs shaped by the city’s wide, flat, brown river, which twists and turns until Brisbane slowly forgets that it aspires to be metropolitan, and instead you’re left with places like The Magic Mile.

Moorooka is famous for only one thing and that is its Magic Mile. The suburb is tormented by long arterial roads that trucks thunder down on their way to places like Beaudesert, and the longest of these is lined with car yards. Bargains are scrawled across the windscreens of cars in obnoxious colours, long strings of balloons float wearily above the whole scene, and the entire stretch smells of smouldering eggs because it is very close to the Weetbix factory. This is where the Magic happens, and my video store was just around the corner.

The manager of the video store lived on the city’s Northside and was almost menacingly middle class. She seemed to have never recovered from finding out the hard way that somebody had pissed in the store’s overnight returns slot, and subsequently harboured an ongoing resentment towards Moorooka and all its residents. Other items she had discovered mixed in with the new-release videos included melted ice-cream and, on more than a few occasions, half-eaten meat pies. One, she said, was ‘half digested’.

Most impressive, though, was the cane toad that had somehow survived being flattened and forced through the narrow returns slot, and then, having recovered from its ordeal, swelled up until it was ‘as big as a kitten’. Having regained its original constitution, the toad was still there at opening time, when it enthusiastically bid the Manager good morning. I found all this out within the first half-hour of my training shift.

‘Ferals’, the Manager said when she had finished her story. She was telling me this while I was gingerly emptying the returns bin. ‘They’re just ferals. All of them. This whole suburb.’

I thought it unwise to mention that I was a third-generation resident of Moorooka, and I could sense that she had more to say, so I remained silent.

‘Everyone thinks that all you do when you work in a video store is stand around watching movies and eating popcorn’, she said.

I nodded grimly as if the idea had never occurred to me, and over the next six hours I reluctantly learned dozens of ways to keep myself busy. The Manager referred to the long stretches of time during which the store would be completely void of customers as ‘quiet time’. ‘When you’ve got some quiet time’, she said, ‘it’s a great opportunity to tidy the shelves’.

Tidying the shelves involved walking around the store very slowly, flicking your eyes carefully over the titles, and pulling out any movie that had made its way out of alphabetical order. You then nudged the videos around to make space for the errant titles. You would do this again and again until either a customer interrupted or your shift finished.

The Manager would often find herself with a bit of quiet time and so she would tidy the shelves with me. She was shorter than the store’s shelves, so I never knew exactly where in the shop she was. But her various ongoing grievances reached me regardless and I quickly learned to regard them as a sort of sonar.

‘That man is the rudest individual I have …’ she would begin after a customer had left the store, and I would negotiate my way down a few rows of shelves until I could no longer hear the man’s ranking in the list of people who had done her great wrongs.

At the end of my second day, the Manager decided it was time for a quick performance review. ‘You’re going really well’, she said. ‘I guess the only thing is that I’d like to see you have more interaction with the customers. Talking to them about things beyond their movie choices, I mean.’

I told her that I’d really like to have the rapport that she did with the customers, but that it would take some time for me to strike up the sort of personal relationship that she enjoyed with them.

‘Just use the message boxes’, she said.

In addition to tidying the shelves, the Manager had apparently used her own quiet times over the past three years to collate an extensive database of her customers’ personal information. The MS-DOS program we used was older than I was and did not recognise the existence of mobile phones. Bewilderingly, it would not allow the addition of a customer whose date of birth preceded the year 1930.

It did, however, have one useful feature, and this was the message box that appeared at the bottom of the blue-and-yellow screen. The Manager used these four lines to record any minutiae a customer happened to mention during casual conversation. Typing in someone’s name brought up not only their address, phone number, account password and hiring history but also the names and ages of their children, their chocolate bar of choice, and which Hi-5 video was their child’s current favourite.

A customer would place their videos on the counter and tell me their name so that I could bring up their account. I’d quickly scan the message box and say something like, ‘And how is Little Johnny? His third birthday must be coming up really soon. Anything special planned?’ while the Manager looked on approvingly. The customer would then stare back at me with an understandable degree of suspicion, since I—unlike the Manager—hadn’t known her when she was pregnant with Little Johnny.

Six weeks later I was deemed competent enough to close the store, but even though I was now working exclusively by myself, I received no reprieve from the Manager’s watchful eyes.

‘Michaela, I was watching the surveillance tape of your shift last night and I noticed that you were stationary from 8:46 p.m. to 9:03 p.m. Do you have a good reason for wasting those seventeen minutes of my time?’

I did have a good reason, which was that there had been no customers for an hour and the shelves were tidy, but instead of relaying this, I made the unfortunate mistake of asking the Manager how many minutes she had spent watching the surveillance tape on replay.

The silent, glittering glare that I received in response lasted for one long year.

The Owner of the store had retired from his previous life as a carpenter at a relatively young age. Now he spent most of his time on Fraser Island keeping a questionable eye on the running of his various investments, with a fishing pole in one hand and a cigarette in the other. It was a year before I could understand anything the Owner said because he had a raspy voice that hinted at a sinister medical history. The strangled noises that did manage to escape his mouth sounded as if they had journeyed through a throat filled with gravel.

‘Do you know exactly what’s wrong with the Owner’s voice?’ I asked another staff member after we first met and discussed who knew what.

‘He did tell me once’, she said. ‘But I couldn’t under -stand him.’

The Owner had an odd business partnership with a middle-aged secretary who found it as difficult to use internet banking as she did to begin the day without a stiff drink. Every Monday we gathered at the store to collect our little envelopes of cash while pretending not to notice the bottle of sherry she kept alongside them in her briefcase.

The Owner and his secretary kept a ledger of the Manager’s bad moods, and it would be fair to say that they attributed more importance to this careful record keeping than they did to the general business of the store.

‘Can predict the tides by her period’, the Owner would laugh. You could hear the wetness in his lungs and the dryness in his throat, which was a peculiar enough reversal of the proper order of things that you knew you were listening to a man who was not well.

‘Regular as bloody clockwork’, his secretary would add. ‘Every twenty-one days she’s in the foulest temper for exactly a week.’

This was how we knew that the Manager was pregnant before she announced it officially. The Owner quickly named one of the existing staff members as the Manager’s successor and the months passed and her belly swelled along with our own bold hopes for a happier store.

The Manager left only one instruction when she went on maternity leave, which was to fire me. Unfortunately for her, her successor was a 19-year-old girl with whom I’d forged a strong friendship of convenience. Alison told me the Manager’s parting wish with a delighted giggle, and from then on it was always summer.

School broke up for the year and Alison hired her little sister and then my little brother to help with the holiday rush. Kids would swarm towards the store, their thongs slapping out the cadence of summer on the pavement. They spilled into the shop, arms and necks pink from the sun and their faces sticky with ice-cream. We played Christmas videos non-stop, and after days of watching cartoon snowmen, mis chievous reindeer and Tim Allen’s Santa Clause, we went crazy with the proximity of the festive holiday. We were delirious.

Content that the old Manager would never trouble him again, the Owner spent weeks at a time on Fraser Island, and his secretary began taking every second day off. This meant that we were free to enjoy the majesty we had always suspected a suburban video store could provide. We stopped wearing enclosed shoes and instead came to work in rubber thongs that we would then kick off, racing each other around the store to put back returned videos as fast as possible.

Stocktaking became a distant memory, and we ate so many Caramello Koalas and Chomp bars while we worked that we had little choice but to lie down in the Drama section and sleep off our discomfort. The door would chime when a customer happened to venture into the store and we would then stand groggily, pick up a strategically positioned feather duster and make noises to suggest that we had been bending down to clean the shelves.

With summer came blackouts, and every couple of weeks the Moorooka electricity grid would fail. A special part of summer folklore in Queensland is that if it reaches 41 degrees, you are allowed to go home from school—I don’t remember precisely where I heard this, and I don’t recall it ever happening, but everyone insists that this is the case. Similarly, I knew that if the power had been off for more than two hours in the video store, we were allowed to close