Day Ninety-one - A question of time

My first order of business as soon as I settled in London was to get a job. I have no idea how it is like there now, but every single time I lived there getting a job quickly was an easy thing. So obviously I made that ggravest of mistakes : I immediately found a job, and a low paying, soul destroying one at that and I barely found the will to find another better job - I tried only once, and failed miserably. But that's a story for the near future.

So what did I end up doing? I ended up working at a bloody Starbuck's. And why did I end up working at a bloody Starbuck's? Because it was just across the road. And I do mean this in the most literal sense - it was just a matter of getting out the house and cross the road. I worked some twenty seconds away from where I lived. And just how did I get this wonderful job? Well, it just turned out that Carla would go there every morning and get lattes for the girls she worked with, and in that process she got to know one of the managers there, and she used that as an in to get me started. I went there, had a chat with the manager, did maybe two or three days of working experience, busted my ass off doing a damn great job of it, and then got an offer to go work there full time. Screw it, I'd already spent most - if not all - of the limited pocket money I had, and a job was a job. We got paid every two weeks, and it was such a measly pay that I was out of money usually within days of getting paid. 

And one of the main reasons for that was that I was surrounded by temptation. You see, right next to where I lived there was a second hand comic and book store, and they sold all kinds of shit on the cheap that I bought a metric ton of stuff literally every time I got paid. I became such a regular, that the guy on the counter started giving me stuff for free. Or rather, the cheapest stuff he just wouldn't add to the total. And even worse than that, there was a similar music store just around the corner. I was sure to drop a few quid there as well. And then, and then there were the other stores - HMV, Virgin, WS Smith - that had plenty of DVDs to keep my appetite well and truly whetted. And this was just in my very near vicinity... in the central part of London, there were the Virgin, HMV, and Tower megastores. There were the Waterstone's bookstores. It was just an abundance of everything, and I never wanted less than anything. So it's no wonder that in the end I saved no money, I accumulated crap that I'd end up selling yeara later for a fraction of the price. One could say that there was a pattern to be seen there.