Generation RX

My Dear Princess,

I am tired today, but it is so worth it. Our conversation from yesterday put me in a good mood as always. I would gambol about like a Spring lamb. If I were a lamb. And it was Spring. And I knew how to gambol.

I always wonder afterward what we spent most of our time talking about. I seem to recall we tackled subjects as diverse as intimate piercings and vajacials. 

Come to think of it, those subjects are not so diverse.

But I also spent a fair amount of time trying to describe Bokhara to you. A task doomed to failure, to be sure. He's a hard man to describe. It occurred to me afterward however, that to really understand why he will always be one of my closest friends, you really need to understand what was going on in my life at the time. You need to understand the milieu* in which we moved. 

So come back with me, back, back... It is 1995 and I have just started my 2nd contract in Scotland. Standard Life, 5-15 Thistle Street. 

They sat me in the most miserable spot. I had Aardvark to the left of me, Gavan to the right of me, and Chris Pearson opposite me. How to describe the three men?

Aardvark - Early 60's with glasses and bad breath. Had a dental plate that he flicked UP and DOWN with a saliva CL-ICK when he was thinking. He had the air of an expert about him, but if you asked him a question, the conversation would go like this...

ME: Would you mind taking a look at this, the Assembler code keeps abending and I don't know why.
AARDVARK: Hmmm... pull up a rat, dear boy.... Oh yes, yessssssss... you wouldn't chuckle.... Register sixteen isn't being addressed correct-ly. I'd have thought THAT was apparent. Franjipani. Aardvark. Bum bum bum bum bum**. 

Then he would swan off with a supercilious chuckle. He always left me more confused than when he arrived. Meanwhile, conversation with Chris went like this:

ME: Chris, this routine of yours...
CHRIS: WHAT?!
ME: This progra-
CHRIS: I'm INCREDIBLY BUSY and STRESSED!! F*ck! F*ck! F*ck!
ME: Oh never mind.

Then there was Gavan. At least he was a friendly chap. A Kiwi, you know. Unfortunately, he swung TOO much in the other direction.

GAVAN: You're looking a bit stressed there.
ME: Oh yes, I'm very busy..
GAVAN: I'd better not distract you then. I hate it when people distract you. You know, when you're busy. It's awful isn't it? Isn't it? Awful? Yeah, I remember I worked next to this guy once who just didn't know when to shut up and would go on and on about things and kept on distracting me when I was trying to work and it just made me even more stressed a bit like you right now, hey did I tell you about my daughter Olivia? Did I? She loves to going skiing at Hillend and you'll never guess what...

I was UTTERLY miserable. I felt stupid and useless and I would look over at where Mad Dog sat. He always seemed to be having such fun and here I was, sat in Loser's Corner.

I'm not sure who started first after that. It may have been Auslaender or Bokhara. All I know is that Auslaender raised my spirits and Bokhara gave me confidence. I think I was aware of Auslaender first. He had worked with Soozle at John Menzies, and was notable because Soozle would come home and tell me about this bloke. This chap. This HILARIOUS fellow. 

"It's like working with a cross between Eddie Izzard and Billy Connolly," she told me. Then she said he was leaving to take a job at Standard Life and maybe I would end up working with him.

I snorted. "Do you KNOW how many people are employed by Standard Life??" I said. 

So anyway, he started work in my department about a week later. Un-snort. Sorry Soozle.

I think that was the ice-breaker that got us talking. "You know my missus." And from there we were off. I knew we were kindred spirits when Auslaender named all of the Osmonds and then competed with me in a Creamola foam contest when we should have - technically speaking - been working. Every day with Auslaender felt like unwrapping the best present ever. Or working with a puppy who was also your best mate and recommended the best things. It was Auslaender who introduced me to Horatio Hornblower, Archy and Mehitabel, Bloom County, kd lang, Ben Harper, Tampopo and Cerebus The Aardvark (no relation).

I remember he then got moved to another team and I grieved. My world had become miserable and more Chris Pearsonny again.

"Piss Chrearson?!" a voice rang out. "Mr. bloody Tefal-Head? Oooooh Symon, Mr. Peter-Piper-Picked-A-Peck-Of-Pickled-Parsons! You don't want to listen to 'IM!"

This was Bokhara. A force of nature. A whirlwind. He took one look at my confused, jumbled code, misinformed by Aardvarks and squinted at it disparagingly.

"Oi! You!" he would say, addressing me. "You are 'AVIN' A LARF. This is DARKNESS! Ooooh it's all just TOILET. Honestly! Kids! 'Oo'd 'ave em!?"

I'd sit at his desk while he corrected everything. And I do mean everything.

"You haven't EVEN lined up the bloody DECKLEGEN fields!!!" he would exclaim, outraged. And he would carefully ensure that every line of my code was carefully aligned. If this sounds pedantic and stupid, let me say this; it made total sense. Once my code was easy to read, it was easy to fix. And Bokhara would get stuck in! He coded like a whirlwind! He didn't give a shit! I learned so much sitting with him. 

"Now then! This TOILET needs to go - SHA-WING! - it's gaaaawn buddy! Then this moves here - nice shoulders luvlee boy show 'em off, show 'em off. Then, Sir Bedevere tell me again how we may use sheep's bladders to predict earthquakes and then you'll be larfing all the way to lat lere Leeds lere!"

If that sounds like gibberish, it totally was. Bokhara communicated mostly by means of catchphrases he had collected over the years. But while they were issuing forth, he'd be correcting code while slouched at his desk, eating Bombay mix or crisps drenched in hot sauce. He made it look easy and fun. And FUNNY. 

And he DELIGHTED in taking the piss out of Piss Bloody Chrearson and the Aardvark. He didn't even refer to The Aardvark by name. He'd just tap his teeth and pretend to flick a dental plate up and down. Then he'd make a noise that sounded like this:

WWaaaAAAAANG-AHHHH!!!

Bokhara also loved:

- Pretending to be French
- Going out on the lash
- Really bad jokes - which were so bad he'd insert his own fake laugh which sounded like a turkey gobbling, "Put on the kettle Symon - no it won't fit - blululululululuuuuuuu!!!"
- Spoonerisms - every time he went to the drinks machine, he would announce he was going for, "A tight wee - would anyone else like one? Blulululululuuuuuu!!!"

As it turned out, Auslaender had been assigned to a manager with the initials FWH, which we were reliably informed by Mad Dog, stood for "F*cking Work Harder". It was not a meeting of minds. FWH did not understand Auslaender's sense of whimsy. It is likely she didn't understand humour at all. Or humanity at all. 

Standard Life managers. They seemed just to BREED them that way.

At that time, the big boss was Jim, a very grumpy fellow who seemed to feel the need to be the archetypal dour Scot. He would stomp around the floor with his hands behind his back. 

"MORALE'S LOW!!" he would bellow, to motivate us.

On one occasion Gordon, a very affable and likeable chap, dared to take a day off sick. 

"OFF SICK????" bellowed Jim, when Gordon returned. 

"I had a cold," Gordon confirmed.

"A cold? A COOOOOLD???" Jim echoed in disbelief like a huge male Scottish Lady Bracknell.

"I knew one bloke who cam in here - cam IN TAE WORK - and I had to send him HAME. Do ye know what he had? Do ye? DYSENTERY! DYSENTERY he had and cam tae work!!! So unless ye're SHITTIN' IN YE'RE PANTS I expect to see you at ye're desk! Do ye UNDERSTAND???"

So he was bonkers. 

And replaced soon after, by an oily toolspank of a character. One of those managers with a sharp suit and a shit-eating grin who would cruise the desks after-hours for single women employees to impress with his high rank. Mad Dog nicknamed him "Goat Boy" and it suited him all too well.

We were all on the receiving end of such management, but fortunately Auslaender got reassigned from FWH to our team. And suddenly everything just CLICKED into place. We all found that our mutual senses of humour made all the managerial malarkey bearable. 

Bokhara would keep things surreal, Mad Dog would skewer stupidity with his on-the-nose sarcasm and then Auslaender would drop in just the right joke at just the right time. I'm not entirely sure what my contribution was to all this, but they liked me enough to invite me to the pub. 

I didn't drink at the time. I didn't trust myself enough around it. And Soozle never drank. But gradually, over the course of a few sessions, the lads twisted my arm. We would go to O'Neill's pub quiz on a Wednesday and I learned a lot. I mainly learned how to relax. I think I was a very clenched, very tense, very judgey person back in the day. I didn't like myself very much. I wanted to be more like Mad Dog, Bokhara and Auslaender. They were funny and cool and they knew things. Auslaender was a treasure-trove of knowledge about books and food and films and music. Bokhara has a love of history, adventure and travel. Mad Dog was more political and biting, and the books he recommended satirical and funny. And towards the end of the evening, after we were through making silly jokes, we'd talk about films we loved, or favourite memories, or things that made us sad.

You have to remember that relationship-wise, things were going utterly ratshit for me at the time. That sort of thing kills your confidence and bottles you up. But the lads taught me how to relax and they gifted me a life outside of Soozle. I started to like me more around them than at home. Our times together expanded. As the RX project went on and on and on and ON and things got worse and worse at work, our social lives exploded. We started going to the pub every Friday at 12 - stayed there until 2:30pm, then leaving again at 3:45 to go BACK to O'Neill's with no idea of where we'd end up. Or in what state.

Around this time, Bokhara decided to leave. He'd just got married as I remember and he wanted to work closer to home. He got a grand send-off of pranks and jokes for about a month. I drew ridiculous cartoons of him and left them everywhere. We sabotaged his keyboard so it said "ARSE" every time he pressed the space bar. I bought a load of ping-pong balls, drew his face on them, and set up his locker so they went everywhere when he opened it.

(People were requesting "Bokhara Balls" from me for weeks after).

We were sad when Bokhara left. I remember clearing out his desk and sadly finding 50 bottles of hot-sauce in his pedestal. But as a Bokhara-shaped door closed, a Saranna-shaped one opened. 

Saranna was the perfect addition to our circle of friends. She had the best Scottish snort I have ever heard which would appear often in team meetings. "Oooch! It's piece o' nonsense!" she'd whisper in a really not whispery way. She also had a gift for accidental Carry On moments. She was always "having a man in" to do something around the house. 

Around the time that Soozle and me separated, it was this circle of friends who stopped me from turning in on myself. They just wouldn't let me. It was Auslaender who fixed me up with both a flat and a lifelong friend in Pickett. It was Bokhara who invited me down to sleep on his living room floor for a weekend in Carlisle. It was Mad Dog who would dance with me in clubs and share all my secrets. And it was Saranna who would commiserate and INSIST that ooooch Soozle was an "eejit" and that I was a "fanny-magnet"***.

And, of course, it was Auslaender who would put me on the path to meeting Cazza. The last piece of the puzzle in helping me turn from that uncertain little man that I was into the completely unjustifiably confident eejit that I am today.

You'll meet friends all your life. I know that. But there was something special about the friends I made at Standard Life between 95 and 99. Maybe it was the shiteyness of the project, the rubbishness of my life at the time, maybe they were all just AWESOME. It's probably a combination of all of the above things.

But the fact of the matter is, I love all of these people. I have a bond with all of them that will last me forever. And the years 95 to 99 will always be - to me - the years when they helped me figure out who I wanted to be.

S.

* French for "pubs".

** I'm not making this up. I wish I was. But that's Aardvark to a T, or more appropriately, to a WTF.

*** Which of course, I so am. Shut up.

p.s. Here is a list of Bokhara's catchphrases, as compiled by me at the time...

"Sha-wing!!!"
"Raaaaaand the back"
"Slim Jim to Stardust Lil"
"I am smoking a faaaaaag"
"You are having a laaaaaaarf"
"You'll get such a slap in a minute"
"Ho Ho - bubum"
"Tintintin"
"It's a paper 'at"
"Toilet"
"Darkness, it's all darkness"
"Go and change your armour"
"Go and boil your head"
"...even if i come and get 'im"
"He's gawn buddy, but look on the bright side - he's GAWN buddy!"
"Glinn Lamb - tin to tin"
"Smokin' dee herb, in Jamaica"
"Chocolate teapot, that is"
"This runs like a pig on stilts"
"This is as much use as a one-legged man at an arse-kicking contest"
"Kids - Oo'd 'ave 'em?"
"Plonker, Rodney!"
"That's easy for you to say"
"Enshallah"
"This one 'ere - as Van Gogh used to say"
"Did I not want to do that"
"Oo! Oo! Mr. Peevely!" (from "Help! It's the Hair Bear Bunch")
"Well I'll be a suck-egg mule"
"It's long and thin,
 It's covered in skin,
 It always gets me burpin'
 But the thing that I like most of all
 Is a great big pickled gherkin"
"Lat lah thing lah"
"...however, comma"
"John Gillespie is a squirt
 He wears lipstick and a skirt"
"Oh, I hate it!"
"Your mother's a lavatory cleaner
 She cleans them all day and all night
 And when she comes home in the evening
 She's covered all over in shite"
"Hold on thar big fella"
"Your muzzer is an 'amstair and your fazzer is an elderberree"
"There can be only one..."
"Babararacucudada!"
"Sharp as a sponge"
"Toytown"
"Oh, Clifford!"
"I 'ate you Butlah!" (from "On The Buses")
"Bonjour, my leetle Pompkeen"
"...with a melon?"
"What're you twining about?"
"Ey up, me duck"
"Super, smashin', luvleh - let's see what you wud've wun"
"Luvlee luvlee luvlee" (in a Welsh accent)
"Ye can tell him he's from Yorkshire, but ye can't tell him owt else"
"...and Steve Cram opens his legs and really shows his class!"
"I've only been wrong once, and that was when I thought I was wrong,
 but I was right"
"No, but I've got a sister in the WAAFs'
"Eeaw, eeaw, 'e always says that"
"Wind yer neck in"
"...and the ladies on the left do the wop bam boo"
"lash-ind = 'Y' "
"arsed-ind = 'N'"
"Mumpkin"
"Yimpkin"
"Oo barda bocra"
"Hum dilly lah"
"Learn to swim young man, learn to swim"
"I put it to you..."
"Bend it, bend it, double it and send it"
"Gook of the gobble"
"Come by Shep, come by"
"and Robert is yer father's brother"