I’d just sent out ANOTHER round of bills to errant payers in the hope that some of them might just realise that having a newspaper delivery actually costs money and isn’t a free service at the behest of yours truly. This is the conversation I had on the telephone with one female customer who had just received her third bill:
Customer: I just got this bill. It’s over £50. I can’t understand why it is so high?
Shopkeeper: Have you been into the shop and paid your bill recently? Maybe it was a mistake on our part?
Customer: No, I haven’t paid anything.
Shopkeeper: Well that’s probably why your bill is high. Let me check it on the computer. Yes, you have an evening newspaper six days a week, at a weekly cost of £3.06. We’ve been here for about seventeen weeks now so that brings your bill to £52.02.
Customer: But why is it so high?
Shopkeeper: Because you haven’t paid anything since we took over the shop in September?
Customer: It’s too much. I’ll have to cancel my papers.
Shopkeeper: OK. Will you be settling your bill? We can do it in instalments if you can’t afford it.
Customer: I’ll come into the shop, but cancel the papers immediately.
Shopkeeper: OK
And so you have an example of extreme idiocy in action. Action and consequence has no place in this woman’s world, neither does the satisfying slap of an evening newspaper hitting her mat signal the fact that she owes me money with every delivered issue. It needn’t have been like that if she’d had the wherewithal to actually pay her bill in a timely fashion instead of ignoring the bills I sent out.
Experience of being a shopkeeper has taught me a lot about people. It is a social science, if you will. The majority of folks are honest, decent and timely bill-payers, but there seems to be this small percentage that thinks it can run up a bill without any consequence. One guy was having two newspapers saved for him daily on account. He was a regular who did pay in those first few months, but then I noticed his bill spiralling upwards. I sent a bill, I sent another – both ignored. Eventually The Missus decided to give him a call about his bill and was told flatly that he had no money and couldn’t pay us. So why let the bill run up. Oh well, today he got a threatening letter and a demand giving him 14 days to give us some cash before I set my solicitor on his ass.
Am I hard and unfeeling? No, I just need the money to survive. The margins in the newspaper business are small and I face weekly newspaper bills of up to £2500 – all the while, at any one time, there can be up to £5300 being owed on the home news delivery rounds. So there you go.
Remember folks, if these defaulters tried the same thing on with the gas or electricity company, they’d end up cold and in the dark. With me, they just have no newspaper. This is why we are always at the bottom of the list.
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Oh dear reader, have I been sick lately? Yes, very, very, very ill. The worse flu bug I’ve had since the one that pole-axed me on the way back from Los Angeles after my 30th birthday back in 2001. I spent a whole flight dying in my seat, sweating the sweat of the damned, only to have my bowels open as we made our descent into Heathrow. I remember begging the flight attendant not to kick me out of the cubicle as they forcibly opened the locked door as I was in mid-explosive movement. Shaking and distressed, I returned to my seat, literally empty and waited for the landing. When we left the plane, I asked The Missus to feel the fabric of the seat I’d been occupying. It was sodden as if I’d pee’d all over it, such was the forcefulness of my sweats.
Well a similar bug got me recently and I’d been struggling to fight it off ever since my mother had been in hospital. So for about a fortnight, I’d been struggling on and then whammo – it got me last Friday afternoon. Weekends are busy here, lots of newspaper bundles to lug and a multitude of inserts and unfeasibly dense sections to stuff. I felt like the proverbial “Death warmed up”, but I struggled through like a trouper. The 4.45am starts were a killer, but I kept returning to my sickbed after all the heavy lifting was done -to lie in bed, sweating and gasping and sweating and having numerous fever dreams.
In one such dream, I was still in the shop but the lights were out and I had to open up the shop again (for what seemed like the seventh time). Outside it was pitch black, but mothers were taking their children to school and they looked at me dead-eyed, zombie-fied. It freaked me out and in the dream, I left the shop in a hurry.
Anyway, after a couple of days sweating and suffering and dealing with the most terrible diarrhea, I am almost making a recovery and almost enjoying serving the great unwashed, one of whom I obviously caught this evil bug. Luckily, Baby Verity and The Missus have remained unscathed from such germ warfare.
With my mother out of action and this awful illness knocking me down, I feel like this is all become a test. The sick part of it is that I am enjoying rising to the challenge. And even though it is hard work, low paid and tough, I like to think it is bringing back the better qualities of my character and I’ve managed to drop some of my other, more destructive traits.
In between running a busy shop, raising a baby and still writing my little bit of freelance work, I am still managing to record some tunes. When I’ve knocked them into a suitable shape, I’ll post some clips here soon.
Daniel Hoffmeister-Thrill asked:
I take it no more Debden based madness for you now?
What is this Debden of which you speak. It seems like a lifetime ago, a world away. My ex-corner of the Universe is now a barren worksite – all mud and bricks. The tree marking Chez Lock, cut down and removed. They call it progress, I call it man’s folly.
But where am I now? I am living on a main road in a village about one hour forty-five minutes from that there London. There is an airport approximate one minute’s drive away that claims to be an international airport, but I can’t see it myself. The nearest city is a mere three miles away and is one of England’s historical centres. I kind of regret leaving Loughton because the majority of people around here are a bit, ahem, simple. But that’s what happens when you move to a small village – we’ve swapped one lot of inbreds in Debden for another lot.
The best bit is getting up at five in the morning and lugging bales of newspapers into the shop in all weathers. If this doesn’t make me a man, I don’t know what will. I’m still poor and we are still struggling, but at least my working-class heart beats out a proper day’s work and so I sleep with contentment, too tired to worry about how we are going to pay the bills. Bliss…