Life and Laughing_ My Story - Michael McIntyre [93]
The next nine months were my first experience of real life. It was tough. Kitty got work as a nanny with horrendous hours, and I sold mobile phones for a telesales company. I worked for a company called Dial-a-Mobile, maybe you’ve seen their adverts in the back of newspapers. I sat in a vast call centre with my headset on surrounded by hundreds of other sales people all nattering away about free minutes, off-peak call charges and free in-car chargers.
I took it remarkably seriously, unlike when I was working at Partizan in my gap year. I desperately needed money. I don’t know what happened to me. I think I became slightly hypnotized by all the jargon and rhetoric from my Dial-a-Mobile supervisors. I became obsessed with selling mobile phones. I went from living my life for laughs to living my life for sales targets. The pay was appalling, but the more mobile phones I could sell, the more money I could earn. I was like a robot.
About a million times a day, I would pick up the phone at work saying, ‘Hello, welcome to Dial-a-Mobile. Are you calling about the new Nokia 3310, with 600 free minutes per month and free weekend calls to landlines?’
After a while I started picking up the phone like that at home by mistake. ‘No, Michael, it’s your mother, what are you talking about?’
It was embarrassing, although I did sell my sister Lucy a phone that way.
Our flat was unfurnished, so Kitty and I would spend most weekends browsing the showroom of IKEA in Wembley. I spent countless Saturday afternoons clutching my IKEA half-pencil and paper tape-measure, discussing the relative merits of beech veneer and birch veneer surrounded by couples having similar conversations.
Everything looked such good value in the IKEA showroom. I would constantly be amazed by the price. ‘Forty quid for this Aneboda coffee table – wow, that’s unbelievably cheap!’
Then I’d get downstairs to the warehouse and the Aneboda coffee table turned out to be just a pile of wood and some Allen keys.
‘Forty quid for this? Are they joking? They may as well have given me an axe and directions to a forest in Sweden. What a rip-off!’
My first man drawer contained about a thousand Allen keys. Who is Allen Key? I bet he’s amazing at self-assembly.
My favourite trip to IKEA was when we were looking at beds and the sales assistant asked, ‘Have you decided whether you want the bed?’
And I said, ‘I’m going to sleep on it.’
Neither Kitty nor the sales assistant laughed, but I found that hilarious.
‘So you don’t want it?’ asked the sales assistant.
‘No,’ I said, ‘but can I interest YOU in a new Nokia 3310, with 600 free minutes per month and free weekend calls to landlines?’
Apart from IKEA, Kitty and I also searched the classifieds in the local paper for bargain furniture. We found a sofa bed for £50 belonging to a gentleman in Highgate. We went round to his flat, spending most of the journey convincing ourselves he was a murderer. He showed us into his office, and we both sat on his for sale navy blue two-seater sofa bed for about ten seconds before agreeing to buy it. If only we had sat on it for longer, because after thirty seconds it starts inexorably to turn itself from a sofa into a bed. You would sit on it and gradually lie down until you were flat on the floor.
It was the early days of eBay, and I found a gorgeous sofa at the unbelievable bargain price of £20. ‘Perfect condition … As new’, the blurb went. The photo made it look stunning. The sofa arrived a week later, in a jiffy bag; it was for a doll’s house. I put it opposite the ‘sofa that turns itself into a bed after thirty seconds’ with the Aneboda coffee table in the middle, and our living room was complete.
Our bed was Kitty’s old one from her parents’ flat. The good news was that the bed was King size; the bad news was that the bedroom was Queen size. The bed only just fitted into the room and had to be wedged at a slight angle, meaning each morning Kitty and I would wake up squashed against the wall. You know the popular expression, ‘Did you get out of the wrong side