fulfilment
One year I discovered the meaning of fulfilment.
I discovered it in the course of Job Number 123.
I was working for a telephone fundraising company, which is still going strong, and which took over my life for a little bit longer than it should have done. I took the job because, as Morrissey said, I needed one. It paid £4/hour. In 1995. The company raised money for many of the largest charities in the UK, as well as the (new) Labour party, which at the time was still in opposition.
Off the back of the phone calls made, donors and supporters were sent a letter and a form, thanking them for their support, and requesting that the form be sent back in the enclosed prepaid envelope.
All of this - the letter, the form, the prepaid envelope - needed to be inserted in an 'outer' - a white, outgoing envelope. This was what the job entailed. I became an envelope stuffer.
It was a small department. We were expected to stuff upto 100, or was it 50 000 envelopes an hour. A supervisor counted them, checking that the address was properly aligned in the window of the envelope and that the form matched the letter. Out of every batch of a hundred envelopes, at least two were usually wrong, prompting dismay from the heirachy. They called us all kinds of incompetence, which was accurate as most of us were graduates who lacked the noose to earn a living in any better fashion.
Each completed outgoing letter was known as a piece of fulfilment. The department itself was known as 'fulfilment'. I worked in a blizzard of fulfilment. It was frequently hellish. Many was the night we would stay on until nine or ten, stuffing envelopes in a deranged fashion, fighting off an ever growing mountain of impending fulfilment.
I might have stayed in this unsatisfying position for a lifetime, had not Phillipe rescued me. One day he came upto me and asked if I wanted to be a Data Processor. I told him I knew nothing about computers. He said that didn't matter. I could pick it up. Let's face it, anything was better than being a fulfilment junkie for the rest of your working life.
I discovered it in the course of Job Number 123.
I was working for a telephone fundraising company, which is still going strong, and which took over my life for a little bit longer than it should have done. I took the job because, as Morrissey said, I needed one. It paid £4/hour. In 1995. The company raised money for many of the largest charities in the UK, as well as the (new) Labour party, which at the time was still in opposition.
Off the back of the phone calls made, donors and supporters were sent a letter and a form, thanking them for their support, and requesting that the form be sent back in the enclosed prepaid envelope.
All of this - the letter, the form, the prepaid envelope - needed to be inserted in an 'outer' - a white, outgoing envelope. This was what the job entailed. I became an envelope stuffer.
It was a small department. We were expected to stuff upto 100, or was it 50 000 envelopes an hour. A supervisor counted them, checking that the address was properly aligned in the window of the envelope and that the form matched the letter. Out of every batch of a hundred envelopes, at least two were usually wrong, prompting dismay from the heirachy. They called us all kinds of incompetence, which was accurate as most of us were graduates who lacked the noose to earn a living in any better fashion.
Each completed outgoing letter was known as a piece of fulfilment. The department itself was known as 'fulfilment'. I worked in a blizzard of fulfilment. It was frequently hellish. Many was the night we would stay on until nine or ten, stuffing envelopes in a deranged fashion, fighting off an ever growing mountain of impending fulfilment.
I might have stayed in this unsatisfying position for a lifetime, had not Phillipe rescued me. One day he came upto me and asked if I wanted to be a Data Processor. I told him I knew nothing about computers. He said that didn't matter. I could pick it up. Let's face it, anything was better than being a fulfilment junkie for the rest of your working life.
posted by maldoror at 5:32 p. m.
5 Comments:
I had a 10 week stint in that dept. joy.
10 weeks! that's not even long enough to learn how to lick an envelope properly! no wonder you seemed so un-fulfilled in them days.
fletch - who are these anonymouses? anyone you like? or is pointing out their poor grammar acceptable?
ms H tis not like you to be reticent - of course it is acceptable!
well I was worried it might be you, putting on a mockney accent...
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