Tea Coffee and Me

Ch. 1 of 3: David has no option but to opt for option two.

Mrs Hilary Harper, businesswoman owner and manageress of Harper's Conference Catering, soon realised she'd landed on her feet when I landed at her feet.

Or - and more to the point:

At the feet of her exclusively female clientele.

***

To most people, in town about their daily business and routines, it was just a Thursday afternoon much like any other.

But not to me.

Pedestrians, though, who glanced my way as they passed by, could have no inkling as to my overnight transformation.

Of my new status.

There were no outward, visible, giveaway signs of change; nothing that anyone could put their finger on, and then point that same finger at me and say to a companion: Hey, look - he's different!

But, different, I was ...

It was the occasion of my eighteenth birthday, and with it came the abrupt culmination of my education.

As suddenly as that, the 'best days of my life' were behind me.

At eighteen I had reached adulthood, and with said milestone maturation had attained for a male what the UK's Authoritarian Female Party government termed 'Serviceable Age'.

And so it was, that on that Thursday afternoon with their Letter of Notification in my pocket, it was with the trepidation born of a lowered sense of place and a heightened sense of vulnerability that I turned up for my Career Classification Assessment at Brighton Job Centre.

As implied by the title, the CCA interview was for the Job Centre authorities to categorise my employability standard, and to then decide the direction my career path should take - I would have little or no say in it. My assessor, whose decision would be final, was empowered to decree my fate.

Before I entered the building, I took a moment to look at the latest poster messages in the windows, appealing for in-work male volunteers to help, in their spare time, to man some of the AFP's most critically undermanned female-friendly facilities.

AFP Prime Minister Caroline Flynt herself was pictured, pointing her forefinger in a Your Country Needs YOU!-style depiction.

More like a demand than a petition, more a command than a plea, the times of crisis-style posters cajoled rather than coaxed: 'Spare Time Is Wasted Time!' and 'Days Off Are Days Lost!' and others adjured: 'Sign-Up Here - Now!'

Not only did Prime Minister Caroline Flynt hold the top political job, but there was no question that she was also the AFP's best recruiting sergeant of non-enforcible auxiliary help.

Upon signing up, most volunteers admitted when filling in the attached questionnaire, that of all the AFP's leading-light Cabinet Ministers it had been Ms Flynt's influences and not least her personal appeals to them on AFP TV that had persuaded them to go along to their local Job Centre and sign on the dotted line.

Why did they do it?

While I, myself was neither impervious to Ms Flynt's charisma or immune to her charms, I was not one to be lured, summoned, tempted, or seduced - suckered and snared - into the AFP's Venus's flytrap.

I could only suppose that those sorry signatories who foreswore to fritter away their leisure time in the maintenance and furtherance of female-friendly facilitations, vacancy-filling the AFP's frivolous follies in their voluntary downtime servitude, were trying to ingratiate themselves with the Authoritarian Female Party.

Perhaps, misguidedly, they thought (or were slyly given the impression) that the gift of their freely offered precious downtime would not be forgotten - that their valuable self-sacrificing contributions to the female-friendly cause would be remembered and duly rewarded.

Perhaps, naively, they assumed (or were cleverly led to believe) that their ongoing volunteered services would not all ultimately be for nought - that they would be racking up and storing away a few credits for when almost inevitably they would be needed.

But I wasn't buying it - I saw it for what it was.

It was all a cunning, callous, carefully contrived con.

The AFP, users and abusers of their downgraded and downtrodden male citizenry, would be laughing up their sleeves - tickled pink, at the naivete and the soft-headed gullibility of so many of their menfolk.

So easily misled, so easily misguided.

Or rather: Deceived, taken in - hoodwinked.

The lingual latitudes of the AFP spin doctors, casuists, and sophists - their double entendres, clever misdirections, subtle sleights-of-tongue - all going right over the heads of woefully uncomprehending or lamentably overtrusting males who, in their almost wilful state of denial only heard what they wanted to hear.

The AFP's silver-tongued line spinners were making false promises and offering fake rewards - unredeemable inducements.

And the shortfall shoring, auxiliary helper in-work volunteers were falling for it.

When, almost unavoidably these dupes haplessly fell foul of the AFP, unintentionally or perhaps even unknowingly infringing one of the many rigid rules and regulations as applied to males under the all-female government's Constitution, there would be no in-the-bank credits for volunteered downtime services rendered.

No indemnity. No mitigation. No reprieve.

And no leniency.

Instead, there would be another cruel twist.

Informed by a Letter of Notification, they would then be put on a Placement Rota and forced, not just to continue to step up to the plate to fill a gap and to provide the same, relatively female-friendly 'light' services that previously they had voluntarily sacrificed most of their free time to facilitate. But also to perform some of the other, diabolically demeaning, grievously demanding, highly disagreeable functions and facilitation of a decidedly more submissive, servile, and subjugative nature.

It was, well documented, though, that more and more men were 'Coming Out':

Authoritarian Female Party sympathisers - seeing the way the political wind was blowing and, from every indication, was going to prevail for some considerable time, growing in confidence enough to nail the AFP's quartered red, green, blue and yellow flag to their mast.

Dedicated feminists - coming out of the closet to declare their wholehearted agreement with and unreserved passionate support for the AFP's female-friendly Utopian ideal.

Stating publically via social media outlets not just their avowed categorical allegiance to the movement's all-female membership and particularly to its exalted Cabinet Minister and MP leadership. But, many of them, supplying along with their female-rule/female-power embracing ideologue 'resume' their names and their phone numbers and offering also to local females their permanently available summonable services.

For in-work males who answered Ms Flynt's clarion call by signing up at the Job Centre reception desk to pledge their free time to help facilitate or to provide as required one or more of said advertised unremunerated or otherwise materially unrewarded female-friendly 'light' services, their willingness would be noted and recorded in their files.

I'd made sure to arrive early.

To miss a Job Centre appointment without a checkable justifiable reason would have serious consequences.

But just being late for one without good excuse would not go unaddressed either; would incur a sanction - perhaps a 30-Day Community Service Order.

60-Day penalties were not unusual, though, even for a first offence, if you happened to catch your interviewer on a bad day.

Come to that; even 90-Day Orders were not unheard of - in fact, I knew of one.

It all depended, upon the critical factors.

The 90-Day Community Service Order I knew about involved Eds - Eddie Edwards.

Eddie, a fellow Seagulls (Brighton and Hove Albion Football Club) fan and former school chum, had abruptly left full-time education a year earlier on the occasion of his eighteenth birthday. And like me, he had graduated with the same inadequate academic accomplishments - atrocious educational accreditations, that ensured his scraping the bottom of the job option barrel.

But as it turned out, it would be six months before Eddie's Career Classification Assessment took place and a Job Centre interviewer gave him a 'real' job.

Monday to Friday 8-5 and with the option of Saturday morning (8-1) as overtime with pay at time and a tenth, Eddie was still working for the AFP's minimum wage in Brighton council's recycling shed - which also served as the renewables hub for another dozen or so local towns.

Alongside other such unfortunates, Eddie spent his workdays standing in front of his designated conveyor belt, stripping and peeling the paper and plastic labels from the relentless flow of tins, bottles and other containers that both his fellow and nearby townspeople were either too lazy or uncaring of renewable and environmental issues to do themselves.

Less than jubilant at listening to the less than attractive recycling-plant worker's job description, Eddie, in the respectful lowered tones of his newfound reverent attitude towards females, had meekly asked if there were perhaps possibly please any other employment opportunities that might be open to him.

But his stony-faced hardhearted (Eddie's words) Job Centre interviewer had told him flatly and uncompromisingly that his "self-determined" circumstances were such that she was not prepared to sit there and listen to "the likes of" him bicker and complain. It was the recycling shed, or she would assign him to a Placement.

Well, apart from his humiliating verbal slapdown, at least it hadn't hurt to ask.

But as it was, even the dispiriting prospect of peeling off and scraping away stubbornly glued-on labels in the drab and depressing environs of Brighton City Council's smelly and noisy and draughty recycling shed was such a considerable upturn in Eddie's fortunes that he considered it nothing short of a blessing.

Because before that, for those intervening six months since he'd left secondary school, I had acted as Eddie's confidant and 'shoulder to cry on' as, miserably reliving his more memorable (haunting) household humiliations, he recalled and reflected upon some of the worst of his housebound belittlements.

Eddie had told me many times, as the weeks went on and turned into months, that he was struggling to cope; that he couldn't "go on".

That he was becoming so down and despairing, so dispirited and demoralised by the daily diabolical domiciliary demands - the torments and traumas of what, to magnify his misery, he had come to see as his self-inflicted misfortunes and self-imposed misadventures - that he was close to "breaking point".

Eddie told me that was it not for my sympathetic ear he didn't know how he could go on enduring such wretched, nightmare-inducing travails.

Eddie needed to let it all out, to let off steam - to rant and rave against the AFP machine.

But he couldn't tell just anyone about his abominable afflictions occasioned in the commissions of his Council-enforced, CSO-designated domestic drudgeries.

The Community Service Liaison Officer had put Eddie on attachment to the Domestic Work Detail.

The DWD was one of the AFP's female-friendly schemes, administered and overseen by the AFP's female 'foot soldiers' - the Community Service Officers.

Eddie's hours of Social Servitude: 08:00 - 18:00, or until finished. And for seven days a week until the completion of his 90-Day DWD Order - or until he had served any add-on penalties, served concurrently.

Eddie admitted that housework wasn't his forte, that his talents lay elsewhere.

But he swore that whenever he crossed the threshold of yet another residence, in the face of often appalling difficulties and sometimes abominable challenges, beset by the lady/ladies of the house he worked his albeit inexpert fingers to the bone, always doing his damnedest to deliver with distinction in the dreary domestic discipline.

But, for all of his albeit self-interested and self-protective commitment to housecraft assiduity, during his 90-Day DWD Order, he had nonetheless accumulated another three months' worth of such add-on penalties, resultant of complaints and allegations rightfully lodged or bogusly alleged by dissatisfied or otherwise disgruntled housewives or female house/flatmates.

Some, for valid reasons and so justifiable (but others, malicious and purely for cruel-minded amusement), seeking appropriate redress (or malevolently wishing to add injury to insult) they had demanded as per their AFP Constitution entitlement (or asked for the fun of it) that in their presence Eddie is Standard-Sixed.

Or even that they, themselves be allowed to pull down his community servant-style elasticated-waist white work shorts and administer the customary on-the-spot summary chastisement personally.

A not uncommon request, Eddie had said, his bottom lip aquiver.

And that usually, with an indifferent shrug or a nonchalant nod or an indulgent smile, such petitions to bare his buttocks to perform the Standard Six punishment penalties personally were also customarily approved and granted by the cane-wielding CSOs.

Assignment to the Domestic Work Detail involved being dropped off at a given number of residential addresses throughout the day; the two-man work teams delivered to the designations of their Social Servitude penances by CSOs in their AFP vans.

(The sister-detail, the BWD, predominantly served female-staffed office-based businesses, but also had presences with Placemented or drafted-in as required 'units' in many other female-staffed workplace environments.)

The organising into pairs of the 100-strong squad of two-man DWD work teams and the drawing up of their residential allocation worklists was decided and ordained at the arbitrary discretion of the supervising CSOs.

Equipped with fully accessorised rechargeable cordless vacuum cleaners, carry-trays of spray-bottle and aerosol cleaning and polishing materials, sponges and cloths, and some rubbish bags, DWD teams reported respectfully to the residences of housewives or female house/flatmates who had applied to the Community Service Liaison Officer for the free-for-the-asking services of the DWD.

As required by the housewife (or the female house/flatmate/s), in addition to the Standard Valet Service the two-man work team would unfailingly oblige and carry out whatsoever extra household chores and tasks as specified under her (or their) supervision as per her (or their) instructions.

Failure to obediently comply and to diligently perform any and all additional requirements would be to provoke a Standard-Sixing or risk an add-on penalty or receive both.

Assignment completed, on the AFP-network mobile phone issued to them, the two-man DWD cleaning crew would then contact the Community Service Liaison Centre.

Reporting in that the housewife or female house/flatmate/s had now dismissed them after having made her/their Performance & Attitude notations and remarks and signed and timed their worksheets, they would inform the CSLC that they were now waiting outside the residence to be picked up and taken to their next job.

Sitting in the back of the AFP van en route to their next Standard Valet Service assignment, they could plug their vacuum cleaners into the van's adaptor for a power boost and from onboard supplies replenish as necessary their spray-bottles.

During their thirty-minute mid-shift meal break back at the council yard, they could leave their vacuum cleaners to recharge more fully, while they topped up their spray bottles and replenished their cleaning sponges and polishing rags and retrieved and binned in the skip the morning's residences' filled-up rubbish bags from the parked AFP vans.

The two-man, mutually reliant cleaning crew had better have done a good job, too.

If the housewife or the female house/flatmate/s were not entirely satisfied with the housecleaning results, she/they needn't just passively leave things to run their normal course and get her/their satisfaction in absentia.

If she/they had a complaint (or any other issue) with either or both of the albeit non-pecuniarily procured pair, she/they needn't suffer her/their critical and dissatisfied Performance & Attitude notations and remarks on the DWD work team's worksheets to be noted and acted on in due course. She/they could state her/their grievance/s to the CSOs who came to pick them up and insist that her/their issue/s be addressed and settled immediately.

As alluded to, as female citizens dissatisfied with the quality of the services or unhappy with the attitude of the male or males provided to them by AFP authorities to serve whatever purpose, under the Female-Friendly Act they were entitled to request the administering in their presence of the Standard Six bare bottom caning penalty.

In the case of a two-man DWD team, the norm was that not just the culprit at fault (or out of favour) but both members of the housecleaning duo would receive the Standard Six penalty.

The not easily won exceptions/absolutions to this, were if for some reason one of them was let off the hook by dint of a female citizen invoking her rightful prerogative to decree either an 'Expressed Exoneration' or a 'Special Exemption'.

'Expressed Exoneration':

A housewife or female house/flatmate might feel moved to exercise her constitutional privilege to invoke this pardon, in token appreciation of her housecleaner's exemplarily diligent and uncommonly compliant application to and scrupulousness with his cleaning and polishing efforts on her behalf and at her behest.

'Special Exemption':

A member of a two-man DWD work team might also escape the cane, by the reprieving mercies of an otherwise favourably disposed housewife or female house/flatmate, for ... whatever reason.

Hence the two-man DWD work team's reliance upon each other to do an excellent Standard Valet/additional-extras job for the housewives or female house/flatmates they were sent to serve.

And the critical factors, in Eddie's case?

Eddie had reported five minutes late for his Career Classification Assessment interview; could provide no valid excusable reason for his delay; was not profuse or abject enough in his apologies and expressions of remorse to his interviewer, and exacerbated matters still further when he had seated himself without awaiting her permission for him to do so.

Eddie had told me that his interviewer had put him on notice, there and then, informing him that she would be referring him to the Community Service Liaison Officer, Miss Delia Dilmot - who was also the Authoritarian Female Party representative for Brighton.

Eddie said his interviewer terminated his interview and sent him home, pending the results of the inquiry she was initiating. His belated profuse apologies and expressions of abject remorse fell on deaf ears.

And that two days later Miss Dilmot - the higher authority to who these more egregious/multiple-offence infringements and transgressions were forwarded to and judged - evaluated Eddie's tardiness and his non-adherences to standard female-friendly protocols and awarded the 90-Day Community Service Order sanction she felt best befitted his string of insolent misbehaviours.

Hence my own, perhaps seemingly over-precautionary, but still nonetheless highly advisable half-hour early arrival at the Job Centre for my Career Classification Assessment interview.

And so, with a bit of time on my hands, I looked at the job vacancy boards and read the other prominently displayed urgent appeals for in-work male volunteers until when, at precisely two-thirty, a no-nonsense sounding female voice called my name over the PA system: "David Manners! David Manners, report to Job-Seeker Interview Desk Five."

I made my way over to Interview Desk Five, at present the only one of six that was vacant.