Thanks to a recent YouTube recommendation, I have rediscovered the delights of Derek and Clive aka Dudley Moore and Peter Cook. One infamous recording, ‘The worst job I ever had’, is a harrowing account of the nocturnal collection of Winston Churchill’s bogeys – bogeys which, it transpired, were actually HMS Titanic. If you haven’t heard it, you’re in for a treat:
It led me to recount my own, eccentric career history – for I have been many things in my time: supermarket gopher, pancake flipper, juggler, teacher, gigolo (albeit unpaid)…the list goes on.
I’ve had some good jobs too, the best one being the one I’m doing right now – just me, you, a cup of tea or more often than not, a generous scotch – and our customary, one-way conversation. My relative absence from the literary airwaves can be explained by an expected foray into the world of full-time work – a world I have not frequented for many years, and may well never venture into again.
As many of you will know I am based in South Korea, and while I would dearly love to return to Blighty, the fight for custody of my daughters makes this an impossibility – at least in the short-term. Having worked in education (in one guise or another) for over a quarter of a century, I was bizarrely and randomly offered the post of Director of a prestigious nursery school. I have run my own school before, but this was another thing entirely – the top end of the market: private swimming pool, fencing, golf, and violin all standard on the curriculum, and school fees in excess of my annual salary.
I had my reservations, certainly. I’m a grumpy bastard for starters, and not getting any better with age. I’ve also never been much of a team player – no doubt the reason writing suits me. However, with divorce still the most expensive relationship I’ve ever committed to, needs must. This job would ensure I could feed my daughters and keep the lawyers off my back without difficulty. So, I said “Yes”.
One thing I’ve learned over the years is that three letter combinations invariably spell disaster: “CID”, “IOU”, and “RIP” springing most readily to mind. But never could I have predicted that “YES” would be almost as costly as the “I”, “D” & “O” I had naively uttered a decade prior. While it is most men’s dream to be surrounded by females, Sean Connery’s account of what it was like to play James Bond is worth a reappraisal. As a (very, very) poor man’s 007, I can testify that there is something in what ‘Big Tam’ said.
To be fair, I had been forewarned. A friend of mine was working at the school, and had told me about the level of gossip, infighting, backstabbing, and conflict between the (almost exclusively) female staff. While I told her that this alone was more than I had experienced in all my previous jobs combined, she assured me that this was ‘normal’. I chose not to listen to my gut, but from the second I walked through the door I wished I had.
Reluctant as I am to blow my own trumpet – but with no one else willing to undertake such an egregious punishment – it is fair to say that I am something of an authority on schools, having worked in over a thousand of them over the years (long story). There is a certain ‘feeling’ in a school, which has nothing to do with money, catchment areas, or the socioeconomic status of the parents. It is imbued by the headmaster or mistress, and is perhaps the most important factor determining a school’s success. I know this, because the best school I’ve ever been in was poor, crumbling and underfunded – yet every single member of staff was happy; consequently, so were the children.
By contrast, the place I was now charged with running was a circle of Hell Dante never envisaged. Of the twenty or so staff I now had ‘under’ me, the three in positions of authority would almost certainly have been typecast as Macbeth witches had they delved into amateur dramatics. All three spent every waking moment screeching down the corridors, berating their charges and colleagues alike – ruthlessly trying to surpass each other in their hatred of the children, the school, and presumably life itself. Each one of these fishwives was supreme in their ability to wring the last drop of misery from otherwise happy childhood memories. I’ve often mused on the etymology of the term ‘face like a smacked arse’, but now I’m convinced it has its origins in schools.
What I could never have known, was that all three were jockeying for position, vying for the top job, and had absolutely no intention of taking orders from a man – let alone a foreigner. They refused the simplest request, and seemed to find it comical that such a request was even being made. Not content with that, they spent the first few days attempting to instruct me in the minutiae of my job – an error they were disabused of early on in the proceedings. Sean Connery once famously recounted being chased into the toilets by female Japanese journalists. While that didn’t quite happen to me, at least not in a sexual context, the stark reality of finding oneself the only man in the room is that he is invariably surrounded by premenopausal harridans, desperately trying to out-cunt one another.
There were other issues at the school, certainly. There was the usual Korean fare of doing everything at the last minute, but this place was with the lid off. As an illustration, the two-hour winter concert – the flagship event, designed to showcase the school, was run by…you’ve guessed it, me. Preparation time allowed? Ten minutes, with a script mistranslated into English which I’m convinced made no sense in Korean either. Somehow, it went off ok.
Then there was the customary aversion to organisation, the refusal to discipline the kids (“Do you know who the parents are?!”), the meanness – staff were supposed to wear hand-me-down uniforms (please don’t think that stretched to me), no printer paper, no pencils, teacher training that didn’t exist, and an infamous ‘Google drive’ no one was allowed access to. Ironically, the kids were adorable as they so often are – even the naughty ones.
I’m not knocking schools by the way, or South Korea, or female teachers. What I’m knocking is a certain kind of woman, and I think, a female-dominated environment. The wonderful Helen Andrews has argued scientifically on this point, and suggests that ‘woke’ is simply the over-feminisation of the workplace. I have to say, on my recent experience, I think she may have a point.
Working a 70-hour week isn’t for everyone, and it’s hardly my usual routine. But working a miserable 70-hour week can do significant damage. Up at 5:50am, home after 7:00pm, weekend work – barely enough time to eat dinner, share a bottle with Mr Daniels – and lights out the minute your head hits the pillow. The health consequences were alarming too: blood pressure through the roof, stomach and skin irritations, the feeling that I was only ever an inch away from a heart attack, and the flash of a suicidal thought; not doing it you understand, merely the internal observation that this was the appropriate territory. There was no time for sex either, and I’m a man who likes to get his leg over occasionally. In fact, there was more chance of a bunk-up in the nick – with much less stress involved.
In all sincerity, this whole experience bore a remarkable resemblance to prison – and I know which one I preferred: music blasted through the walls at an ungodly hour, telling you to get up and be happy! Trustees running around screaming at you; stupid rules for the sake of it; constant nagging if you didn’t finish your lunch – and no chance of a reprieve. The teachers in my school would have made ideal prison warders. I’m not sure that would work the other way round; prison warders might be too compassionate to teach nursery!
During my fortnight in jail (for telling the judge what she could go do, having ignored the abuse of my children), I once tried to calculate how much one would need to be paid to volunteer as an inmate. The figure I settled on was 10 grand a day – 100 times what one ‘earns’ inside. This job wasn’t quite as bad, but it was close. I lasted just shy of a month.
Ps: I wrote this piece on Friday night. In the ensuing weekend, a wave of resignations has been triggered following my walkout; it is an open secret that the school is to be sold to the competition – which most likely means our wayward sisters will either be out on their ears or made to toe the line (small mercies); and most astonishingly of all, I have just had a phone call offering me a higher salary to run an alternate branch of the same franchise. Sometimes, you can’t even make this shit up!
Frank Haviland is the author of Banalysis: The Lie Destroying the West and The Frank Report, which you should probably subscribe to.
If you enjoy The New Conservative and would like to support our work, please consider buying us a coffee – it would really help to keep us going. Thank you!
Probably not a wise move to write an article like this if a potential or future employer sees it. Staff have been sacked for mere ancient tweets. I suggest you delete this now before it haunts you.