How to get fired - retail store edition

It was 1996 and I was 18 when I moved from Johannesburg to London. I had high hopes of walking into a great job in the music industry (having just completed matric with no tertiary education), and spending my nights partying and maybe even DJing. I had work experience - a stint on the sales floor on weekends at Edgars Fourways Mall, a stint on the restaurant floor at the Keg & Lion pub, and a few key DJing moments at some raves in Joburg and Cape Town. Not the longest CV. But with that CV I pounded the pavements of Soho, introducing myself to receptionists, asking kindly for a job. Any job. There were no jobs for work-permit-holding, 18-year-old South Africans with pretty much nothing to show for experience. Until I walked into the streetwear store in Covent Garden.

The actual store name is the murkiest of memories, but what I think it might have been is High Jinks, the cool streetwear store that made me think of MASH on Oxford Road. I was hired as a shop assistant and could start in a few days' time. That night I went out to celebrate and spent the last of my converted currency on a couple of pints.

On my first day at the job, the manager who hired me introduced me to the rest of the staff and showed me around. I saw the back rooms where stock was held, was shown how I was supposed to fold clothing, and told to make sure the racks were always neat. It was not rocket science, I would learn as I worked. I was positioned on the lower level. A staircase greeted customers as they walked into the store. Upstairs for the best bits, downstairs for the rest of the stock.

As the morning progressed I straightened piles of clothes, spaced hangers across the clothing racks and looked around, feeling nervy but also excited at being in this job in London. How had I managed to land such a great job? It paid (relatively) well, it was cool, and now I would be able to embark on phase two of my plan - to start going out to clubs every night.

I was feeling chuffed. The shop floor looked good. There were no customers yet, and I had a good view of the staircase leading downstairs in case someone walked in. So I sat down on a desk in the corner.

It must have been no more than five minutes and I noticed someone coming down the stairs. As I slid off the desk, he was looking directly at me and stopped in his tracks, mid-staircase. He didn't look pleased. And he didn't look like a customer. He turned and walked back up the stairs. Two minutes later I was called up by the manager who was now standing next to the mystery man. What was I doing sitting down?

I needn't have replied.

The words were something along these lines: "It's not going to work out, get rid of 'im."

And so with a brown envelope in my hand, containing perhaps a few coins, I found myself on a sunny London morning, standing in the street in Covent Garden, stunned and wide-eyed. Sacked. Fired. The job that lasted no more than a few hours. Blimmin' 'eck.

Maybe that's what set off my life-long lack of patience for rubbish shop assistants. Maybe now, when I walk into a store and see the staff with bent necks staring into their phones like drugged-up zombies, I have to fight the urge to shout out loud - get the eff off your phones!

London didn't turn out that well for me. After a long search for a job, I worked for a few months in the kitchen of a sandwich shop in St James', making chicken mayo, coronation chicken, bacon butties, and frothing a few hundred cappuccinos, before I resigned from the job and resigned myself to having to leave London and head home, battered and bruised.

One mid-'90s morning in a cool London clothing store, a young man sat down, and had his ass fired.