Free I'm All Right Jack by Alan Hackney

life.”
    “Not at all, Mr Windrush,” said the Appointments man, wincing a little. “That’s what we’re here for.”
    He put two letters of complaint from the personnel managers of Spindley’s and Bumper Bars into Stanley’s file.
    “It’s been an experience meeting you,” he said.

CHAPTER 8
    I T MUST not be supposed that Stanley Windrush was an idle shirker. On the contrary, the Ideal Of Service had been very firmly dinned into him at school, and he had always been consciously dedicated to it.
    Unfortunately, schools like Stanley’s proceed on the assumption that their products, imbued with such an ideal of service, will equally develop a superior degree of reliability and competence. Alive to the facts of present-day life, these schools now teach a great deal of science, but this was not the case in Stanley’s day. A mild spell of reading English Literature at Oxford after the war had set the wrong seal on an already futile process. Stanley was the last true dim gentleman.
    While cleverer contemporaries of his at Oxford were now becoming, understandably, the angry young men of literature and the theatre, or were joining the queues at emigration offices, Stanley—who had never felt the sting of ability frustrated—looked cheerfully round for some occupation to fit his vast incompetence. The flamelike ideal of serving the community still burned in the dim hollows of his mind.
    Sensibly following the convenient principle of going where there was a crying need, Stanley looked round for an efficient-sounding industry within reasonable travelling distance of Eaton Square. He had seen the place called MISSILES LTD several times from the train, only a few minutesout of Victoria, and about eleven o’clock one morning, having decided to give them a trial, he called at his local Labour Exchange. This he found in rather a dull street five minutes away from his aunts’ house. A number of actresses were coming out of the women’s section, fiscally fortified for another week of chancy auditions.
    Inside, the man first thought he had come about a passport, but Stanley disabused him.
    “No, it was for a job,” he said. “Employment,” he added in an explanatory tone.
    “Yes,” said the man. “Sit down, but you more than likely want the place in Tavistock Square. They deal with all the higher appointments there. People with professional qualifications.”
    “Oh, but that’s very far from what I want,” said Stanley. “I’ve been having shots at that sort of thing, but I’ve taken advice and I’ve been told I’d be far better off as an Ordinary Worker.”
    “I don’t quite understand you,” said the man. “For instance, you say Ordinary Worker. What do you mean by that? The ministry publishes a complete book of classified occupations, hundreds of pages. Every time there’s a new edition you get a funny article on it, so-called, in the papers. And you’ve probably seen What’s My Line on the television. Well, there you are. There are thousands of different sorts of what you call Ordinary Workers.”
    “Yes, well, when I say Ordinary Worker,” explained Stanley, “I mean I’d like to try an ordinary unskilled job at Missiles Limited. A friend of my Great-Aunt’s tells me that’s just the sort of firm, you know—all teed up to give the chaps working there a big encouraging wage packet. It’d take too long to explain why I want to go there particularly, but I do. I imagine this simplifies things for you?”
    “We don’t want things simplified like that, thank you,” said the man a little huffily. “Our job is to help people find the employment most suitable for them and their employers, and often enough it’s not an easy job. What are your qualifications , and what was your last job?”
    “I was at the Foreign Office,” said Stanley. “I suppose my real qualification was I knew some Japanese.”
    “Ah,” said the man, seizing on this. “Now, vacancies in interpreting. Let me see.” He