I don’t have a horrible boss – I’m my own boss (and quite pleasant when I give myself jobs to do). The financial rewards may not be great but at least I don’t have a horrible boss.
I guess I’m rather lucky because I’ve only ever had one horrible boss and that was when I took my first summer holiday job at fourteen, working for a very mean and bossy Italian landlady of a guest house. During weekdays I had to wash and iron the sheets, and on Saturday mornings I had to help the chambermaids make the beds and clean the rooms. Okay, I didn’t have to wash the sheets against rocks on the banks of a river, and it wasn’t a little Victorian iron that required heating on a stove, but it was hard work; however, I did not mind the hard work, what I objected to was my boss following me about the guest house, shouting at me to “Hurry up”, not because I was slow (perish the thought), but because she enjoyed bossing me around and she didn’t see why she should pay for me to walk from room to room when I could run. The day she told me to iron her husband’s underpants and pyjamas was the day I gave in my notice.
But my personal horrible boss story is by-the-by, I would like to tell you about a film Chris bought last week from the £3 DVD section at Tesco supermarket: in fact, he bought two films – “Horrible Bosses” and “The Tree of Life” – neither of which I held out too much hope for (from past experience of the £3 shelf) but which I thought was worth giving a go because “Horrible Bosses” was said to be “Jaw-achingly funny!”, whilst “The Tree of Life” starred Brad Pitt and won the Cannes Film Festival a year or two ago. However, I’m always slightly suspicious of films I have never heard of.
“Okay, let’s give it half an hour,” I said to Chris when he suggested we try out our new, “Jaw-achingly funny”, comedy DVD.
Ten minutes or so into the film – when the plain, dwarfed, male dental nurse was being blackmailed into having sex with his boss, an attractive, sex-crazed female dentist who looked like a dark-haired Jennifer Aniston – I turned to Chris and asked, “Do you find this jaw-achingly funny?”
“Would you like to watch ‘The Tree of Life’ instead?” he asked.
“Perhaps tomorrow, or in a few days time,” I suggested (one disappointment was enough for one night), “Let’s watch a ‘Place in the Sun’ for now”. (You know where you are with property programmes.)
Two days later we were wishing my nephew, John (the master of face-pulling) a happy fourteenth birthday when his mother informed us that he had seen recently the same film, “Horrible Bosses”.
“Did you find it funny?” I asked.
John, suspecting it was a loaded question, just smiled and his mother stepped in to answer:
“He did, but he knew you would have hated it because of the bad language and lewdness.”
Later that evening Chris and braced ourselves for a viewing of the second of our cheap videos.
“Maybe we should give it more than ten minutes – it was an award winner,” said Chris.
“Half an hour then,” I agreed.
Perhaps ten minutes in, after the charming scene of a young woman holding a butterfly, “The Tree of Life” burst into a very lengthy, arty and somewhat weird ‘creation’ scene with whispers that you could hardly hear. Unwilling to endure a full half hour or more (we guessed, as it seemed to be heading that way) of ‘creation’, I resorted to the fast-forward control, stopping now and then where it appeared to be interesting (the benevolent dinosaur bit was sweet but unfathomable); how strange then, that after the ‘creation’, the film became compelling. The quiet film is about a man contemplating his life and death, and it’s brilliant. I was reminded of my own childhood and I found myself crying, even though the ending was upbeat. Chris loved it too but we both felt we had missed things.
“Of course, we’ll have to watch it again,” Chris said.
“I know,” I answered, “next time without fast forward.”
“And with subtitles… for the whispers.”