Child Labour
At the age of 15 or so I was working in Maplin Electronics in Bristol. I was earning the earth-shatteringly huge wage of £2.25 an hour. I can't believe I stood in that sweaty, baking hot shop for hours and at the end of the day only took home about £60 a month.

The worst bit was the customers. In it's current state Maplins has turned into a kind of mini-Argos selling cheap Chinese tat, so you get all sorts in there (mainly people who don't know any better). However when I worked there it was far more focused on obscure little electronic components - which attracted three very distinct types of customers - the Spod, the Granddad, and the Rudebwoy. The rudebwoy was after neons for his car and 18" subs for his stereo and was probably the least offensive. The Granddad normally wanted a new fuse for his kettle or a doorbell battery and apart from his hand shaking far too much when counting out the pennies ("*sigh*, give it here, for fucks sake, I'll do it") wasn't that bad.

The worst people by far were the Spods, who would quiz you for about half an hour about a single component before deciding whether to pay 47p for it (in hindsight, I'm beginning to understand the reasoning behind the £2.25ph wage) and come in telling us about their project to connect their toaster to their PC.

We did have a variety of mad customers including "Crow", who never wore a shirt and insisted his name was just "Crow", no Mr., "Angry Man" - who I think is fairly common in Bristol and would get hassled by stock ("Damn PUSSY-claart TV!") and Richard, who would buy anything so long as it had lots of flashing lights.

But come on, £2.25 an hour?

First post, so no apologies for length I'm afraid.
(BrizzleDave, Fri 17 Feb 2006, 14:27, Reply)