Imagine working in retail, in a shop, over the six-week 'Festive Season'.
Imagine that the soundtrack to your twelve-hour days of 'f*** I need the overtime, this is the only way how shopworkers get to *have* Christmas and still make rent' is...
The soundtrack is 'Greatest EVER Christmas Favourite Hits'
On a sixty-minute loop.
Relentless, pervasive, there is a tinny loudpeaker playing festive overdose-with-xylitol multimedia-projectile-diarrhoea that seeps into your ears and makes you feel like you shat yourself and have been made to wear it all day, and smiling is *compulsory* all day, and the smiling happy, Happy Christmas Muzak is in every working space you can ever be in, including the twenty-acre car park.
You cannot even escape it in the bog: there's a nasty, tinny little loudspeaker in here, too, keeping you company with All The Happy.
It is your *job* to smile, on the shop floor, in the Festive Season.
And there is happy festive music everywhere, to help you do that.
You will be Written-Up to HR, if you do not smile, on the shop floor, in the Festive Season.
Your supervisor is Setting An Example of the Happy Festive Christmas Smile, because she lives in a haze of amphetamines and antidepressants, and she saves up all her money for cosmetic surgery that makes her smile like she's sucking a saucer.
The Store manager is Setting An Example of the Happy Festive Christmas Smile, because he is a psychopathic sadist and he loves his little cruelties: and he is watching you, immersed in the happy, happy happiness of 'Greatest EVER Christmas Favourite Hits' and you know that he wants to see you smile because he loves you very much.
And you are wearing the Happy Festive Christmas Smile, all day at work, because all free will and human dignity has been extinguished utterly and you need the f***ing money.
And each and every sixty seconds, of each and every minute, of each and every hour, every working day, you face the sick and loathing certainty that Greatest EVER Christmas Favourite Hits is counting down to another nauseating repetition of The Cliff Richard Christmas Carol.
Spare a thought for nonessential workers, this Christmas...
Imagine that the soundtrack to your twelve-hour days of 'f*** I need the overtime, this is the only way how shopworkers get to *have* Christmas and still make rent' is...
The soundtrack is 'Greatest EVER Christmas Favourite Hits'
On a sixty-minute loop.
Relentless, pervasive, there is a tinny loudpeaker playing festive overdose-with-xylitol multimedia-projectile-diarrhoea that seeps into your ears and makes you feel like you shat yourself and have been made to wear it all day, and smiling is *compulsory* all day, and the smiling happy, Happy Christmas Muzak is in every working space you can ever be in, including the twenty-acre car park.
You cannot even escape it in the bog: there's a nasty, tinny little loudspeaker in here, too, keeping you company with All The Happy.
It is your *job* to smile, on the shop floor, in the Festive Season.
And there is happy festive music everywhere, to help you do that.
You will be Written-Up to HR, if you do not smile, on the shop floor, in the Festive Season.
Your supervisor is Setting An Example of the Happy Festive Christmas Smile, because she lives in a haze of amphetamines and antidepressants, and she saves up all her money for cosmetic surgery that makes her smile like she's sucking a saucer.
The Store manager is Setting An Example of the Happy Festive Christmas Smile, because he is a psychopathic sadist and he loves his little cruelties: and he is watching you, immersed in the happy, happy happiness of 'Greatest EVER Christmas Favourite Hits' and you know that he wants to see you smile because he loves you very much.
And you are wearing the Happy Festive Christmas Smile, all day at work, because all free will and human dignity has been extinguished utterly and you need the f***ing money.
And each and every sixty seconds, of each and every minute, of each and every hour, every working day, you face the sick and loathing certainty that Greatest EVER Christmas Favourite Hits is counting down to another nauseating repetition of The Cliff Richard Christmas Carol.