subscribe
/ Sign Out

The middle class guide to talking to your supermarket delivery man

UNSURE what to say to the working class man, or occasionally woman, who brings your massive supermarket delivery round? Try these convincingly matey conversations.

Take a weird interest in their working day

Handy if you’re not sure what to say to the plebeian on your doorstep. Find out when their shift ends, how many deliveries they do an hour, and so on. Don’t worry that it’s a bit strange and you’d never ask, say, an HR person to outline their entire working day in mind-numbing detail.

Assume they’re going to the pub afterwards

“Off to the pub later?” shows you have the common touch. There’s no way a delivery person could be offended by the suggestion that they start hammering the booze the second they finish work.

Pathetically mention your own manual labour

If you’ve been sitting at a desk all day while they’ve been lugging heavy crates around, randomly mention some physical task you’ve recently done yourself, eg. digging up a shrub. It will make the conversation confusing, but will stop you feeling like an effete office weakling.

Swot up on working class pursuits 

To help you converse with your class inferior, make a mental note of any important football games taking place that day/evening, and ask if they are watching them. Here are some other things that working class people love: Coronation Street, pub skittles, chips with curry sauce, Love Island, hare coursing.

Kick up a fuss about a minor substitution

Ruin all your earlier good work by going ballistic when there’s a minor change to your order. It’s all very well attempting to bond with the lower orders, but there is no damn excuse for bringing you ordinary artichoke hearts in water when you asked for organic ones in oil with a hint of parsley.

Boris Johnson's guide to coping when your dream job goes to shit

HAS the dream job you spent your whole pathetic life angling for turned to shit? Here, speaking from experience, the prime minister tells you how to cope.

Avoid it

Once you get down to it, even a dream job is just a bunch of boring meetings. Yawn. Spice things up a bit by dodging them and watching disasters escalate whilst you relax at your country residence. This is especially entertaining if the meetings are COBRA ones.

Pull a sickie

This always looks shady, so try to come down with something contagious and incurable so nobody asks any questions. Not only will you get time off but everyone will be super-nice to you when you return. Well, for a couple of weeks at least, until you f**k things up again.

Go on lots of holidays

If you haven’t signed an employment contract you can really rinse this one for all it’s worth. And if you’re clever you can schedule it for when all the really difficult work’s due. Put your ‘out of office’ on, trek to a remote Scottish cliffside, and don’t answer your phone.

Get someone else to do the hard bits

When people start realising you’re doing a terrible job, bamboozle them by making stuff up and giving it a cool name, like ‘Moonshot’. Then force an underling to sort out the impossible details of your insane idea, like I have with Matt Hancock.

Try to get fired

Can’t quit? Don’t worry, just do your job so badly that you’re forced out of it. You might have to go to desperate lengths like breaking the law or something, but it’ll be worth it in the long run when you’re writing your memoirs on Mustique and all this hard work bollocks is just a distant dream.

Next story ›