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The Manager.
I know several betting shop managers for the big bookmakers and they all say that middle management in their firms is obsessive about creating a friendly rapport between the cashiers and the mugs, sorry, punters.
So it amused me yesterday to find myself in a betting shop, owned by one of the big three and managed by a man who pushes rudeness, incivility and contempt for customers to the limit.
I was familiar with shop, but if I am in that area of North London I usually use a nearby shop, owned by the same company but much smaller, where the manager is friendly and obliging. The friendly manager said to me a few months back: “Dunno what he’s doing round there, but all his custom comes round here now.”
I knew what he was doing, that was why I’d stopped going in there.
Yesterday, caught in the rain, I decided to go in the other shop. It was huge and empty, bar two Albanians playing the roulette machine. Dog racing and the early prices at Yarmouth and Lingfield were up on the screens. The notorious manager sat behind the glass at the far end, feet up on the counter, watching daytime TV. Behind him in the back room I could just see his young female assistant sitting at a table eating something with a spoon. The view almost – almost, I say – had the epic banality and numinous profundity of an Edward Hopper painting. The smell of her lunch had wafted through the shop: a gross admixture of oxtail soup and pot noodle.
I’ve made a little study of the manager before and it struck me that he is the epitome of a certain type that infests betting shops and racecourses. He’s about 50, thin, with the face and eyes of a man who has been smoking, bullshitting, crust-swiping and ****-stirring since he was a small child, in other words a sort of hairless monkey (as opposed to naked ape). His hair is cut like a teenager’s, and is dyed the colour of brown Kiwi boot polish.
There’s nothing he doesn’t know about racing and about ‘having it off’ on the horses. This is, presumably, why he is managing a betting shop for a poor salary at the age of 50. He has total contempt for his customers, except for the coterie of degenerate gamblers, violent small-time builders and football-obsessed morons that constitute his social circle.
What he really admires isn’t winners – he pays out with a furrowed brow and his attitude suggests that your winnings are coming out of his pocket (I dare say his employers operate some arcane bonus system). I won a 200 quid in there one Sunday afternoon on a mad 16/1 shot and he looked furious. No, it’s big losers he admires. Men like him and his friends reduce absolutely everything in life to a sort of virility test. Betting is no exception. He therefore admires the sort of men who walk in, pissed, after a week’s toil on a building site, and, after staring at the screens for three minutes and breathing heavily through their mouths, stick fifty pounds on a dog or a horse, lose it, swear uncontrollably, and then do it all over again and again until they stagger off home to the wife with a score to last them until next payday, muttering about how ‘that dog had **** in its eyes’.
He admires the sort of jack the lad who lumps two hundred quid on an evens favourite to win. Conservative betting is what he despises. I have come to be a largely conservative bettor, on the grounds of personal experience, current financial woe, and by having American writer and horse racing fanatic Damon Runyon’s famous aphorism never too far from my mind: ‘All horse-players die broke’.
I wrote out a 2.50 double and took it to the counter. Slowly, he took his legs off the counter and dragged his eyes round to meet mine. I pushed the slip under; he picked it up. The manager studied it briefly. He regarded it in the way he would if he discovered he had inadvertently got some faecal material smeared on the palm of his hand.
“Can I have the prices on those, please?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he said disagreeably, and knuckled down to the intense hard labour of looking up two prices and writing them on a betting slip. “Not much of a pick-up if they win,” he observed.
“Fifty quid’s fifty quid.”
“Put a cockle on, then you’ve got a proper bet,” he advised with a sort of avuncular contempt. I replied in a flash: “Why would I want to give ten quid to you on a stupid bet like this?” I said this in an unpleasant tone.
He seemed to realise that it was time to let the customer be right. He pushed the processed slip back under the glass and said nothing. I looked at him. He grunted by way of thanks.
I walked away, and said, ‘stroll on,’ in the manner of Michael Caine in Get Carter. I looked at the screens for a bit while whistling ‘Hey, Big Spender’, then left the premises.
Both horses in the double came fifth.Glad I opened this thread, thanks bettingboy.
I hope ‘III’ means there are two previous incarnations of this type of post!We got there in the end:
A roundabout way of saying that you like me dislike rude shop staff.Worthwhile, cliche free,non indulgent story telling is really difficult to do and I am no good at it either but I strongly agree that regardless of hair colour and dietary preferences it is time to get back to basics:
Please,Thank you,Excuse me and Sorry still go a very very long way in this world and work particularly well on both sides of the counter in a betting shop or any shop or public interaction I think.
I don’t particularly want to be mates with betting shop managers or staff but it would be nice to have a please and/or a thank you and my slip and or change not slammed on to the top of the counter in silence which happens no less than 9 times out of ten these days
Can’t help thinking that rude customers are an integral part of the cycle of decline in basic good manners though.
An interesting read for any that haven’t step foot in a bookies for years…
Bettingboy, have you ever had an original thought in your life…
We got there in the end:
A roundabout way of saying that you like me dislike rude shop staff.You’d say at the end of Hamlet: ‘we got there in the end – man kills his uncle cos he killed his father.’ Tip: you don’t like reading, so don’t keep doing it.
Worthwhile, cliche free
,
And the cliches were?
Can’t help thinking that rude customers are an integral part of the cycle of decline in basic good manners though.
I hold my hands up here – when I wrote it I thought readers would notice that I’d said at the top of the piece that the man had driven his custom away – including me – through rudeness. Dunno about you, Bob, but I stop being civil when people are repeatedly rude to me. You’re not from Yorkshire are you?
Oh bettingboy, I’d love to see the look on said managers face if I went into his shop to place one of my 25 pence ew ante post bets!
"The view almost – almost, I say – had the epic banality and numinous profundity of an Edward Hopper painting"
Oh, bravo bettingboy – worth reading for that alone !
Thanks, Monksfield.
I should add a final thought in reply to Mr Wharton: the piece was journalism, not fiction (Mr Wharton seemed to have the idea that it was supposed to be a functioning piece of popular fiction, with a strong narrative drive and a twist in the tale), offered as a ‘by the way’, a mere side-bar column, nothing more.
We journalists have a terrible and vain impulse to inflict our writing on the world. See George Orwell’s essay ‘Why I Write’ for the most honest explanation of why we do it.
You are putting this ‘journalism’ out there Bettingboy and not appreciating it is just as valid as appreciating it in my opinion…..its out there for everyone’s consumption.
Opinions are just opinions good or bad but for me it is boring,unoriginal and formulaic in style…………er not really bringing Orwell or Shakespeare to mind for me……………I stopped reading the Sea the Stars effort after the first predictable tired sounding what- can- I write- to- fill- in- the- space- that- sounds- clever- description………keep it real buddy,words should just come not be forced………….but if it matters to you,you have plenty of people who like your stuff so keep them coming and make them even longer maybe but I for one won’t be reading them.As for manners,I understand what you mean about repsonding to rudeness with rudeness etc etc but although its hard not to it definitely creates the downward spiral that we are now in where not being civil is the default position……………in my opinion of course.
I’d love to see an Arab looking chap, all kitted out in an expensive suit, sparkling shoes and a leather briefcase, not to mention the sunglasses, walk into his shop. Of course he’d have to get out of a Limozine first in full view of the manager. He could then stroll in like an oil tycoon, and ask to speak to the all important manager. Where upon he opens his leather briefcase, and asks the fat narcissist if he accepts big bets. The manager would then ask, with a beamer of pride in his all important face..how much ? then the arab withdraws a chequebook from the case, and proudly says " two quid each way in the 2:45 at Newbury mate".
Graeme – ha-ha!
Bob Wharton – you have every right to dislike it. Good luck to you. You are on far more dodgy ground when you allude to cliches. I did ask you what these cliches are but you have declined to reveal them. I’m curious, you see, because as far as I know English literature is almost devoid of writing about betting shops, so I need you to tell me where all these cliches have been aired before. Being the eloquent and incisive literary critic you are, you ought be able to tell me.
One final question, do you come from Yorkshire?
Cheers!
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