“You’ve never done a hard day’s work in your life!” – THE MAN (to whom I try to stick it… figuratively)

Not true. I’ve done several. I’ve been a paid writer since I was 19 – although tell people that sitting on the couch thinking is part of “the process” and they’ll give you the stink eye. Trust me on that one.

I’ve also done the 9-to-5 thing a few times. Once, as a bright-eyed, apple-cheeked youth, I was a law clerk. I’d wander around the city all day “appearing” in courts. To my great sorrow I never got to shout: “OBJECTION!” or finish off a beautifully phrased summation by saying something the jury would GASP at, then casually intone: “Your witness…”

I’ve worked in call centres, video shops, adult book stores, I was a truckies assistant for one day (so there’s that one day of hard work, thankyou very much, THE MAN!) although both the driver and I were fired at the end of said day, a strip club (behind the bar, they didn’t let me stink up the pole) and freelanced for various magazines, not to mention writing screenplays, one of which actually got made – Angst with another on the way…

Truly the most nightmarish 9-to-5 experience was when a magazine that I did occasionally freelanced for actually wanted me full time. It was one of those tabloid, “lad’s mags” – and I spent three years in those trenches. I left, or was rather “encouraged” to leave by a chap who I suspect is clinically insane. Now, yeah, I know EVERYONE IN THE WORLD thinks their boss is crazy or an arsehole or dick… but let me tell you a little story:

I was a writer, or word-janitor, on the magazine which meant I put the little squiggles no one reads between the pictures of celebs getting fatter, cows with two or more heads or monster trucks exploding and so forth. Believe it or not this mag actually took the writing quite seriously. Hell, we had Walkley Award Winner, Jack Marx on the desk. We were the fanciest “stick book” in all the land.

So the boss – we’ll call him ‘TR’ – came to me with a job brief – on a single piece of A4 paper – instructing me to bang on about the merits of French femme fatale, Eva Green. Believe it or not, working on a weekly tabloid can get really hard. There are only so many times we can talk about Lindsay Lohan going to rehab or watch Britney Spears implode, blitzed out on goof balls, before readers get bored and do something disastrous like read a book or play with their children. Point is, there are only so many stories one can do. I realised we’d actually ALREADY DONE a piece on Eva Green’s (point of fact I’d written it). No biggie, it was just a one-page-piece but I had to tell TR so we could run something else.

So, there I was thinking in the grand scheme of things this would be a minor blip, I found the back issue, confirmed that it had been covered, and handed back the piece of paper – the job brief. TR’s face turned the bright red colour of a baboon’s arsehole.

He started foaming at the mouth and began to shriek: “FUCK! OH FUCK! OH, YOU FARKEN MONGREL! FAAAAAAARK!” Okay, maybe there was trouble at home, I was certainly used to sailorish language at the magazine, God knows I’d written enough of it, but then TR started PUNCHING THE PIECE OF PAPER. Now, I’m no expert in unarmed combat – but holding aloft a single piece of A4 paper and beating it like it broke your telly struck me as a rather pointless exercise. TR obviously thought so too because then he put the paper on his desk and PUNCHED IT FURIOUSLY, repeating the “Faaaaark/MONGREL!” mantra.

I didn’t know if I should laugh, run or stand there and befoul myself. It was some scary shit. After a while TR stopped, knuckles a painful looking red, and glared, like me NOT punching the job brief, or perhaps knocking over furniture, was somehow disloyal to the magazine. Then it struck me: his job was his life.

He reacted to that in much the same way I did when they cancelled Firefly or NBC screwed Conan O’Brien – Firefly ruled and Coco was an important part of my day and now both are gone.

Now you might think it sad and shallow to get pissed off over the shabby treatment of Joss Whedon and a tonight show host… but I didn’t beat up any STATIONARY over it. After that incident I was on TR’s shit list. Big time. He started keeping a file on me. My mum would call, I’d pick up the phone and hear tappytappytappy – the sound of covert typing. Then, sporadically, I’d be presented with pages of my file, containing things like: 11:17-11:23am – Anthony took a non-work-related call (GASP!). Or 3:32-3:50pm – Anthony took an unusually long bowel movement (I’m not making that up, by the way). So in the end I left. Because I could see myself becoming a paper-puncher. One of those folk who live to work, not work to live. No, I choose to concentrate on the important things:

• Being able to do a passable Christopher Walken impression (not quite there yet) actor Kevin Pollack does a good one here.
• Watching clawsome movies… and some crappy ones
• Finding the perfect beanie
• Playing video games
• Finding a really nice girl or a whole lot of nasty ones
• Reading comics
• Writing scripts, and this next one’s a horror movie (wooot!)
• Getting to actually meet director John Carpenter
• Writing a blog for people like me, AND
• Try to decrease the domestic violence against paper

The world is full of paper punchers. Do you guys have any stories of boss horror like that? Send it in. The Claw wants all. Have a look around, let me know what you think of the place. It’s a work in progress so feel free to giz suggestions on how it could be better. Oh, and that stain… you don’t want to know what that is… ugh.