My first day at work I arrived bright and early, eager to learn the ropes and make new friends. I was told to sit and wait in reception until the manager had had a chat with me.

I sat. I sat and waited for almost two hours before the manager could be bothered to find ten minutes from his busy schedule to have a word with me. Lovely start to my career I thought.

Eventually I was summoned into the Great One’s presence and offered a seat by his secretary who then left the two of us alone. The manager was reading my application form, slouched back in his comfortable leather chair his feet up on the desk pointing in my direction – very, very rude that in Middle Eastern circles. A bit like telling somebody you think he is scum. I think the manager was aware of this too. He didn’t speak for some time.

When he did speak it wasn’t the “Sorry for keeping you waiting, welcome to the team”, speech that I was expecting.

Instead he sat bolt upright in his chair, his feet coming down heavily on the floor.

“Bloody hell. You’re a Left Footer! What the fuck are we doing giving jobs to Left Footers!” These were his first words to me, on my first day in my new job, and I quote verbatim.

I had no idea what a Left Footer was that it should make him so upset – I had never heard the expression before. At one of the interviews for the job I vaguely remember being told that the Bank had a sports fund intended to encourage team spirit and interaction between the branches. Each region had its own football team and they competed against each other in a Sunday league. I took a wild guess and assumed he was talking about football.

“ Actually that is a mistake,” I said even though I had no recollection of putting it in my original application Then again it is hard to recall all the bull shit that I wrote in an attempt to get a job in a time of rising mass unemployment. I certainly had not been vice captain of the University chess team for a start. Nor had I actually read all the published works of Isaac Azimov. I still haven’t.

“Yes that’s definitely a mistake,” I confirmed. The manager looked visibly relieved.

“So you’re not a Left Footer then?”

“Actually I am embarrassed to admit that I’m pretty useless with my left foot other than for walking or running around on. No, I am a right footer and can play in defense or midfield, but I prefer midfield.

“Oh bloody marvelous,” he looked unaccountably upset by my information. “Not only is he a Left Footer but he thinks he’s a bloody comedian to boot. Just what I bloody needed.”

“At least I won’t have to give you a lift to the Lodge meeting every month”. He carried on reading.

“Jesus Christ you’re Irish!” I thought he was going to have a seizure. “Is this some sort of bloody joke?”

His facial expression read ‘the doctor has told me it’s malignant and I have only days to go’.

“Okay. I’m a man who likes to call a spade a spade. So I am going to tell you straight how it’s going to be.”

I hate that expression. The people that use it try to justify themselves as being completely honest and open, when in fact they are usually just bloody rude and uncaring of other people’s feelings. This ‘Good Old Boy’ was a classic example. The manager then went on to tell me he didn’t know why they kept sending him graduate trainees every year. They never stayed the course. So why do they keep sending intelligent people here on suicide missions, I thought. What a waste of everybody’s time, money and talent.

“Anyway,” he went on, “I don’t expect you will turn out any different.”

Perhaps he was the reason why I stuck the job for so long – he got my back up and I wanted to prove him wrong.

My new bigoted boss gave me the rest of the good news. “I have been sent a two year training program for you from Head Office. The office manager will be in charge of that. You get one day off a week to study for the Banking exams (I didn’t – we never had enough staff to cover for me), other than that you will keep your nose clean and do what you are told. If you don’t like it, you know what the alternative option is. I joined the Bank 23 years ago and I started right at the bottom. Just like you are going to do.”

And that is precisely what happened. For the next six weeks I made tea and coffee twice a day for twenty-five people. The rest of the time I filed. I filed index cards, loan applications, correspondence, and memos. I filed every possible type of paperwork.

I was bored fucking delirious.

I eventually discovered that being a Left Footer meant being a Roman Catholic, even though I was now essentially an atheist and hadn’t been inside a church for years, it didn’t matter. The records at Head Office said I was a Left Footer. It felt a bit like those people you hear about who can’t get credit anywhere but have no idea why, and eventually discover that they have been accidentally put on a computer credit card blacklist. Once you are down as either a bad credit risk or a Catholic, it’s a bugger trying to get people to change their opinion.

It was even more of a problem in the Bank that I was with. They actually had their own Masonic Lodge for like minded White Anglo Saxon Protestants, membership of which was difficult to achieve for red haired freckly Irish Catholics. If you were not in the ‘Club’ your career was taking the slowest of slow boats to China. So I was a little confused as to why I was given the position in the first place – it just didn’t make sense.

I found out some time later how I had managed to slip through the net.