Let The Devil Wear Black by James F Linden (c)2003

CHAPTER 6

On Friday. I signed on as unemployed. The first three days of the claim didn’t count and the DHSS wanted to know how much holiday I had been paid for. The record in my personal organiser showed that I was owed just six days. They informed me that as I had been summarily dismissed, my claim would be paid at a lower rate because it was classed as ‘Voluntarily Unemployed’. They would be writing to K. K. Gazelles to confirm how I had become unemployed with the result affecting the value of my claim. The company had made sure that due to the nature of my dismissal, Marie and I weren’t eligible for our loan repayment insurance policy either, so we came to an arrangement with the bank about the loan although, thanks to this, we could forget about ever having another one off them.

When I took into account the cost of travel and the benefits of not having to pay our rent and rates, our new financial situation turned out not to be particularly different to when I worked for K. K. Gazelles but as far as spare time went, I was about fifty hours a week better off. One thing that I did find curious was that Child Benefit, paid to people regardless of income, was deducted from our Social Security benefit — a benefit paid to all in society except those who actually depended upon it the most.

* * *

The following day, Harry telephoned and said that he and his wife Carole would like us all to go down to Stroud to see them at the end of the next week. He said he would pay for it all and we would be staying in a guest house there.

* * *

On Monday, we received an envelope from the company. Inside, there was a letter from Snaith, my wage history and some, although not all of my personal appraisals. No training records, no cheque and no list of files for passwords. It was dated 7th January 1994 and had the wrong address.

It went on about how Snaith claimed he had conducted a proper hearing in accordance with the company disciplinary procedure and how I had been found guilty beyond reasonable doubt of everything that he had accused me of, including things that he had never even mentioned in the hearing — although to be fair, he might well have accused me of them in my absence. It all seemed to be based heavily around the word ‘unauthorised’. He had obviously been given a dictionary for Christmas, taken it to bed to read, found an interesting word, checked for the existence of the “un” version of it and decided that he could make good use of it at work.

Looking through the personal appraisals I discovered that the first two, which were done by Roger Morton before Deryck appeared on the scene, had been omitted. Then I saw Jim Stutton’s latest. It was incomplete and seemed to have been written on two separate occasions as the hand writing was the same throughout except for the section at the bottom of the first page where it was significantly different in addition to the content being substantially more negative in its tone suggesting that it had been written possibly months later under completely different circumstances. I was no handwriting expert but with evidence of this calibre, I didn’t need to be. This also fitted in well with Jim’s revelation that he might let me see my personal appraisal. I showed it to Marie and she didn’t recognise the person it was supposed to have been about. I started to wonder just how many of them were involved in this and when it had all started.

* * *

On Thursday, we took the train to Stroud intending to meet Harry when we changed at Gloucester. We knew what he looked like from his photograph in Universal PC — a fairly short man with distinctive glasses — so it should all have been fairly straight forward. However, half way there, Jonathan managed to break Marie’s glasses making her effectively blind. I attempted to repair them by tying the break with a piece of thread I took from the lining of my coat, something that always seemed to work in films but it didn’t last for long. At Gloucester, Harry proved to be invisible. However, with only a few minutes to go before missing our connection, the short PC consultant that we were looking for found us, turning out to be over six feet tall and built like a Canadian wrestler. The rest of the day went fairly smoothly, meeting his wife Carole and having dinner. It made a pleasant change for Harry and I to be able to speak to each other without a hundred or so miles of copper wire and fibre optic cable between us.

The following day, Carole took Marie and the kids off to the park while Harry and I went, via a computer shop where he bought a CD ROM drive for his computer, to the publishing company he freelanced for. The plan was that I was going to meet the infamous John Harrington, the real editor of Universal PC magazine. The offices were housed in a new, glass fronted, almost cubist, pale stone building that gleamed with recent, extensive investment. On the inside, everything was smartly decorated and being a computer magazine publishing company, there were plenty of computers. I was introduced to everybody as the man who wrote the Chen Chin program, well, everybody except John. Office rumours said that his absence could be attributed to too much drink at a party the previous night. At least I got to meet the rest of the team and it was interesting to see another company with computers, especially ones that were devoid of those nasty little InComp stickers. Looking at what could be done when people who knew what they were doing with personal computers were put in charge of buying and installing them put the efforts at K. K. Gazelle’s into perspective.

On the last day of our short break, we let Helen play for a while in the park but by the time we arrived at the railway station, it was raining heavily and everywhere was lined with wet, mackintosh–laden policemen in preparation for that afternoon’s football match. Without any fans to herd, some of them helped us up the steps with the pushchair. You know that you are getting old when a policeman offers you a helping hand up some stairs.

The journey from Stroud to Gloucester was a new experience for Marie. Gloucester, with its four foot wide 1970s style digital clock and corrugated roof somehow didn’t seem to conjure up quite the same romantic and nostalgic imagery as Cheltenham Spa’s pointed car–park railings and Victorian cast iron roof supports. But then again, it may have been that we were looking out of the wrong side of the carriage.

* * *

On Tuesday, my wages cheque arrived complete with an explanatory note stating that they had awarded me substantially more than the six days of holiday that my records showed I was owed. If they wanted to pay me for Snaith’s supposititious half days I would quite happily accept it but whilst accept it I would, I was not going to be bribed to keep quiet or lie about events.

* * *

Without any effort, it had crept around to the day of the appeal. At James Markfield’s office, I met Rachel Crabapple, the union’s busy, middle–aged district organiser who was, I assumed, going to represent me, along with Terry Johnson, a shop steward from another part of the site.

“Why are you appealing against this decision?” she asked abruptly as I sat down.

This struck me as odd as I was under the impression that she would have taken advantage of the opportunity to ask James before I arrived.

“They didn’t show us any evidence that meant anything. The whole thing’s just an obvious stitch–up.”

“I’ve been reading through your letter of dismissal and there’s nothing I can argue with,” she said. “I can’t represent you if I’ve got nothing to go on.”

This floored me. I didn’t know if she had been bought out before we had even started. I showed her the personal appraisals, pointing out the one that Jim Stutton had allegedly done but she said that that wasn’t evidence as such which was a pity as we hadn’t seen any evidence from the company either.

“There are some people who saw me working on the computers at lunch time when Deryck Simpson was there with me,” I said.

“Is he the one that gave you permission?”

“One of them, yes.”

“Well, if you can get them to give evidence in your favour, we’ve got the case sown up.”

I telephoned Kevin and then Frank but they both said the same thing.

“Sorry. They feel their positions would be compromised by speaking out in my favour,” I said with more than just a hint of despair.

“So this Deryck character’s got some sort of hold over them,” she said thoughtfully. “Would you be prepared to accept a retrospective resignation?”

I couldn’t believe this was happening. I could either represent myself in a bent and unfamiliar procedure or let Rachel sell me out. The disinterested leading the disenfranchised. She had taken the ‘rep’ out of ‘represent’. With the company failing to send things they said they would, covering things up, threatening me and everything else that had happened, the thought of just calling an end to the whole sordid affair became too valuable to throw away, so I accepted her offer.

The phone rang. The others were ready so James, Terry, Rachel and I started walking over to the main administration block where the appeals were held by Tod Bexley the human resources director. As we walked, James told me a little bit about Bexley. He was something of a laburnum bush in the management team — encouraging people and ideas, anything that might be a threat, into the apparently protective shelter of the space under his branches, only to stifle and poison them out of existence thus maintaining the barren, safe space around him. In addition to that, he also thought that he was God. So much for mere business unit managers on loaves and fishes courses, there was none of that ‘son’ stuff here, he was the one at the top. James told me that he would walk around the plant, going up to people and saying, “Do you know who I am?” As though that was not enough, the reason he was called the human resources director and not human resources manager, which is what he really was, went back a few years to a middle management restructuring. The accountants, who were by then in charge of everything, divided up the factory into business units and at the top of each of these was placed a manager. Then, somebody wrote down the acronym and decided that something had to be done. The BUMs decided that they should be called business unit directors or BUDs, in an attempt to convey an image of friendliness and trust. The managers just above them didn’t like having directors below so they had to be called directors as well thus Bexley became a director by default.

Into the main administration block we went and then upstairs to the oak panelled, parquet floored conference room. We sat on some brown plastic chairs on one side of a bellowed, cream coloured cloth partition that divided the room almost hermetically into two with what was apparently a lot of managers on the other side.

“What happened about the passwords?” James asked.

“I think it must have been a wind–up to keep people afraid and quiet,” I said.

Just at that moment, Tod Bexley came into our side of the room with Snaith tagging on behind like a puppy following its mother. Bexley looked in his late thirties. He had dark hair and was also the proud possessor of the ubiquitous K. K. Gazelles management see–through beard, clearly a result of the same course that Simpson and Burgess had been on, except that his was in black. We seemed to be accruing quite a collection of colours. If the Universe was infinite, there would be a planet somewhere that had managers with beards that had purple and yellow vertical stripes. Rachel spoke to him quietly, inaudibly to us, and after a while, he went back into the other section of the room and the other managers left. With Snaith following closely at his heal, Bexley returned, informing us that he would allow me to ask for a retrospective resignation if I gave him the passwords they had sent to my house.

“I’ve never received any list of passwords,” I said.

“We’ve sent you letters before,” he said.

“They’ve had the wrong address on them.”

“They’ve always got through. Why shouldn’t this one?”

“Our old postman knew us. We’ve just changed our postman and he doesn’t,” I said, just in case he hadn’t grasped the implication.

He had a quiet word with Snaith who went off to get me a copy. A few minutes later, he brought back a short letter, dated 12th January 1994 with the same wrong address on it. We all went through the partition into the main part of the room which was astounding. This shrine to humankind’s arrogance and plundering of the Earth’s resources had at its centre half a rain–forest’s worth of hardwood in the shape of an enormous, highly polished, elliptical wooden table. Surrounding it was a small herd of cows in the form of well over a dozen olive green leather upholstered wooden chairs. The use of materials and standard of workmanship was particularly high, making the Houses of Parliament look like the inside of an old, damp caravan parked on a derelict camp–site on the moors in comparison. I now understood why our bonus scheme had to go.

The listings turned out to be a small selection from the original InComp report so there were a lot of other files in there with those requiring passwords being marked with a ‘P’ and a red tick. There were eleven pages of full page, top to bottom directory file listings but with none of the usual details, just file names. Without the date, time and file size information, supplying the password would put the company in a position of absolute power, being able to ‘uncover’ anything they wished, so, I demanded that a copy of the full listings for these pages should be given to Rachel for safe keeping. It wouldn’t be a lot of security but it was better than none.

After a short wait, they returned and I started to write down the passwords. As I worked my way down the list, I noticed that they didn’t appear to need a password for my car petrol consumption file. I had abandoned it a couple of years earlier because I had forgotten it and was unable to guess it. If they had they broken into it with a password cracker, they wouldn’t need me. I wondered if they had assumed CAR.WSP was about the car, which it happened to be, and was therefore of no threat to them, which it wasn’t. For all they knew, it could have stood for ‘Customer Account Records’ and been full of all of the company’s secrets. Whoever had gone through this was either incompetent or a total novice.

Over the page, they asked for the password to my CV file, inadvertently putting somebody at the scene of a theft. Looking through the other pages, it quickly became obvious that they hadn’t been able to break into a single password protected file. The problem was that they claimed to have used the contents of them as evidence which was something of a violation of the second law of thermodynamics with ‘effect’ preceding ‘cause’. They were already in a position of absolute power as there was supposedly only one entity with the ability to breach the laws of physics and he was standing next to me, watching me writing down the passwords.

When I had finished, Bexley told us that he would get the IT department to try them out. If all of the passwords worked and there was nothing that represented a threat to the company, he might let me resign retrospectively. I asked him about the return of some of the files and he promised that once it was all over, I could have back what was mine. On the way back to the union office, James was half way through telling us more about Bexley when I realised that I had forgotten to turn on the Dictaphone. I couldn’t do anything about it now so there was nothing more I could do than make notes as soon as I had the opportunity.

Back home, I told Marie about Snaith’s letter. She went straight around to the so–called ‘wrong’ address only to find that it had been sent back to Gazelles as soon has it had been delivered several weeks earlier. Snaith must have known, concealing his ineptitude from Bexley by claiming non–co–operation on my part.

* * *

I had to find a job of some sort while the whole squalid affair was sorted out. In the meantime, Marie didn’t like the scrounger label rearing its ugly head every time we had a conversation with anybody. A friend of hers sometimes had her blind mother stay a few months at a time so, as she and her husband were both at work for most of the day, somebody was needed to look after her. We came to an agreement with them and they wrote off to the DHSS with a cover note explaining the situation. A week or so later we were able to hold our heads up and in addition, nobody could shop us maliciously to the DHSS or attempt to blackmail us.

In my new position as house spouse, I looked after Jonathan and while Helen was at nursery in the mornings I would often go into Manchester with him to look in the Job Centre for work. The job centres were filled with endless displays packed mainly with non–professional, low–paid jobs whose main function appeared to be to create the impression that something positive and exciting was happening in the job market. Caterers, labourers, hotel workers, shop workers, care workers, production line operatives, office staff. Forget the skilled end of the spectrum with these jobs — for caterer, read bin cleaner and dish washer; for office staff, read coffee maker and general dogsbody — this lot was there to keep people occupied in order to stop them from rioting, taking away all of their waking time and energy with work and travel and rewarding them with just enough to keep them trapped in high–rent, poor–quality housing in high–crime, deprived areas and sink estates.

Fortunately, I did manage to spot one that was appropriate although I had no idea how it got in with the rest. Perhaps they put in a few good jobs, an odd one here and there, just to keep people looking — most people simply giving up and settling for the last crap job they could bear to read the description of, with only those prepared to persevere along with the lucky getting the only real job that the centre had received details of that month. This one was essentially what I had done at K. K. Gazelles in the lab but unlike Gazelle’s, the pay wasn’t too bad either. I checked it again, just to make sure that I hadn’t made a mistake — I didn’t really want a job stuffing plastic bags of giblets into warm chickens, working in a warehouse full of sofa beds or putting the squirters into soap dispensers on a production line — no, this was real. I noted down the reference, participated in the job centre’s unnecessarily delaying and labyrinthine procedure in order to get the details and then wrote off.

* * *

In the second week of February, presumably in a half–hearted attempt to convince us mere mortals that there was a notably colder part of the annual cycle of cold rain and warm rain, three inches or so of snow fell and for once, the weather looked as though it was going to remain cold enough for it to stay for a few days. So, while Jonathan was having his early afternoon nap, I took advantage of the situation and indulged in a little snowman construction — that is to say, the construction of a little snowman. This was what having children was all about — forget nappy changing and getting up in the middle of the night, this was payback time. The longish grass didn’t exactly help but after a while and with some occasional rebuilding and with the odd bit of remedial work here and there, I managed to fashion a nice little figure in the front garden. This rotund, anaemic dwarf was about two feet tall, had small pebbles for its eyes, nose and mouth and, although it was perhaps a little challenged in just about every department relating to size and proportion, it didn’t look too bad — not for my first attempt for well over a decade and a half.

At around three o’clock, Jonathan woke up and having dressed him in his Arctic one–piece, woolly gloves and Wellington boots, I took him out to play in the snow. It was all a completely new experience for him and if I had anything to do with it, he was going to get the most out of it. At half past, we collected Helen and her friend Kirsty from school. Unfortunately, their idea of play was insisting on total destruction and soon, there was nothing left but a dirty pile of snow. Jonathan was devastated.
The following day, with Jonathan on my shoulders, I took Helen to nursery in the morning on a sledge we had found in the loft when we had moved in the previous October. Some people move in to find long forgotten oil paintings by the masters or rare pieces of exquisite, nineteenth century porcelain wrapped in old newspapers and stuffed in the corner where time had forgotten them, selling them off at auction and making hundreds of thousands of pounds. Our blue plastic sledge was worth £8.99, it was in perfect working order and was complete with its original polyester cord. Helen enjoyed her ride to school but on the way back, Jonathan screamed whenever I tried to move it with him sitting in it so I ended up carrying him and pulling the empty sledge. Later on and with a ball to keep him occupied, I spent a lot of my morning building a bigger and better snowman in the back garden, safely out of the reach of Helen’s school mates.

* * *

On Wednesday 9th February, I was in the spare room with Marie and Jonathan having a scintillating conversation about the gas bill and how we were going to pay it when the phone rang.

“Hello, can I speak to Alan?” said the voice.

“Speaking.”

“It’s David Snaith from Gazelles.”

“Yes?”

“We would like you to come into K. K. Gazelles for a meeting. We have a few things to discuss,” he added cryptically.

“Is it an appeal?”

“It’s in your interest to turn up,” he said.

I smelled a rat.

“Why should I?” I asked.

“It depends if you want to work again,” he said.

This took me by surprise.

“Are you saying that you’ll make sure that I never work again?” I asked.

He paused for a second.

“I think you should come here. Let’s say Friday the 16th at 3:30 pm.”

“You’ll apologise first,” I said.

He dropped the line almost as though his handset was on its return journey as I spoke. The little bastard didn’t need to hear my reply. I turned around and looked at Marie.

“He hung up on me,” I said. “Did you get any of that?”

“He threatened you didn’t he.”

“He said that he’d make sure I’d never work again”.

She looked horrified. I made a note in my personal organiser of the exact words he used to make his threat and then wrote to Bexley to complain, adding that until I had received a satisfactory, explicit letter of apology from Snaith, I would be temporarily withdrawing all of my help with the processing of their case.

I telephoned Harry to let him know what Snaith had done and although he admitted that he half expected them to do that sort of thing, he was still quite shocked that they had the audacity to go ahead and do it. He also told me that his ‘spare’ computer was now ready and that I could go and pick it up.

The following day, I received a letter from Snaith giving the date of the meeting I had not agreed to. As it had crossed in the post with my letter of complaint to Bexley I ignored it, instead, waiting for Bexley’s response. Snaith was just a pawn now, about as important as the remains of the snowman on the front lawn.

* * *

On Friday, I picked up a van and drove down to Stroud. Harry and I spent most of the day loading the system onto the computer along with a few programs. It was going to be nice to have a computer again, even if it wasn’t going to be mine. At half past three, he had a meeting to go to so on my way home, I dropped him off in the centre of Stroud at the Universal PC magazine offices.

Later on, at home, after the kids had gone to bed, I set up the computer on the work–surface in the spare room and installed my own copy of VisualBASIC Professional Edition compiler so I could write my own computer programs again. I could now write my own databases, computer models, games, anything I wanted and I didn’t need to ask Deryck for permission first. This computer was also substantially better than the one that Gazelles had issued me with and as another bonus, I didn’t need to put up with always having to fit in with half a dozen other users during lunch breaks.

* * *

The following Wednesday, 16th February to be precise, I wrote a covering letter to Bexley stating that I had not yet received a letter of apology or anything else from him for that matter, and hinted that I looked forward to his earliest reply, enclosing a copy of my previous letter to him. I posted it in Manchester and then went to sign on.

The dole office had just started to update its procedures and instead of standing in a slow–moving queue with unwashed and smelly of Cheadle in front and pissed–off and impatient of Hulme behind, we all sat down and were called out one at a time by name. When it eventually got around to my turn, I noticed a sheet of paper attached to my claim card. In my limited experience of these matters, pieces of paper attached to claim cards never had good news on them. She glanced at the card and I prepared myself for the worst.

“Your claim is being reinstated to the full amount,” she said, “and any money that’s due will be in your next cheque.”

I didn’t really want to stare too closely at a gift horse but my curiosity got the better of me.

“What have Gazelles said about my dismissal?” I asked. “Why have they changed their mind?”

“They haven’t. Gazelles haven’t replied to any of our attempts to contact them so we’ve decided your claim shouldn’t be suspended any longer. You’ll receive it in full from now on and we’ll back date it to the start of your claim,” she smiled.

I wondered what the company was up to. Was this a guilty conscience or incompetence. I got the impression that Bexley didn’t have a conscience to feel guilty.

“When did you contact them?” I asked.

“We wrote to them when you first put your claim in and again two weeks after that,” she said, studying the case notes. “We’ve also left telephone messages on three separate occasions. They haven’t bothered to respond to any of them either.”

“I wonder what they are hiding?”

“Your guess is as good as mine, or maybe better, but whatever it is, it works out to be to your benefit,” she said smiling.

I stayed in Manchester for a while, mostly in the library looking up case histories. It appeared that Gazelles was in a lot of trouble if it was ever to go to tribunal. Either that or they were going to have to tell a lot of lies.

Back home, I found a message on the answer–phone.

“It’s Tod Bexley, Mr Rush, at K. K. Gazelles,” it started. “Er, my telephone number is Manchester 549 1351. I’m telephoning you at three thirty because you appear not to have turned up to the meeting that we had arranged, which Mr Snaith wrote to you about on the 9th of February. Under the circumstances, I shall now proceed fairly swiftly with dealing with your case. I’m just very sorry that you didn’t get in touch with us to tell us you couldn’t attend or indeed attend, because I think if you had attended, it might have been in your best interests. We’ll never know. I’ll be writing to you. Bye.”

I decided to keep the answer–phone recording just in case so into the filing cabinet it went along with the others. Snaith must have lied through his teeth about his disastrous telephone call to me. It wouldn’t have surprised me if he had put my letters in the bin.

At about half past four, there was a knock on the door. It turned out to be the security man who had escorted me off the site. He handed me an envelope, saying that he couldn’t see the point in sending somebody all the way out here to do just that. The letter was from Bexley and it just repeated the message on the answer–phone. They should have called him the human waste director.

The following day, there was another knock at the door. Once again, it was the security guard. Again, he apologised for the distress he was causing us by having a uniformed security guard turning up on our door step and handed me another envelope. It was from Bexley who was clearly losing his mind because with the letter, dated 17th February 1994, he had enclosed, what was obvious from its appearance, a photocopy of the original of the first letter dated 10th February but curiously, he also enclosed a photocopy of the envelope that had carried the reminder a week later. I read through it but there was no comment about the reminder. He was weaving a very tangled web. It was a good job that I had taken the precaution of keeping copies of all of my correspondence with him.

I telephoned James and told him that I was not prepared to tolerate Bexley’s attempts to intimidate us. I also asked him if he had any ideas about the nature of the meeting. He said that he hadn’t.

* * *

On Saturday, we received yet another letter from Bexley although this time, it was sent through the post, by recorded delivery. It went on about a meeting on 25th February and how important it would be for me to appear at it. I wondered if they had planted something in a password protected file and were planning to get me arrested, getting me out of the way on false pretences, or perhaps, falsified pretences.

I telephoned James and we came to the conclusion that it must be an appeal. He said he would be getting in touch with Rachel to get her ready. I decided to record this one as well, just to be on the safe side.