As a child, I was a precocious jebend. Between snogging my poster of Lee from 911 so much that he no longer had a mouth, and moulding myself enormous tits and a beard out of Matey bubble bath, I found time to cultivate an adult friendly persona of myself as ‘clever’. Aged 9, this was not some subtle Machiavellian plot, it was pretty straightforward: I started telling everyone that when I grew up, I was going to be a brain surgeon (spoiler alert: I’m not).

The reaction I got was pretty much a universal “that’s great! If you work hard enough, you can do anything!” Don’t get me wrong; I recognise the extreme privilege of an upbringing laced with Ashley Banjo style aphorisms, but it comes at a price.

Shortly after graduating, I went to house party with the depressingly appropriate fancy dress theme “when I grow up, I want to be a…” Dressed in surgical scrubs, wired, drunk, and redecorating my friend’s bedroom with Red Stripe, I noted with a flicker of painful lucidity the contrast of how I was dressed, with what I had actually become: a production runner.

For those who don’t know anything about production, the runner is essentially everyone’s bitch. This often means emptying bins, doing lunch runs, dropping hard drives from one side of London to another. It’s hard, low-paid work done with the understanding that in moments of ‘downtime’ you will get training from your superiors, and everything else you will surely learn by osmosis. It can be fun, stressful and mind-numbingly boring, and like any job that offers ‘training’, certain employers will exploit you to fuck.

Here’s a list of fantastic tasks my friends, colleagues and I had the pleasure of completing as runners:

1. Princess Leia and the Gold Bellend.

“Hey, you, can you pop out and get me and my wife fancy dress costumes for that party that you’re not invited to tonight? It’s Star Wars themed, here’s our sizes” handed a post it “Nothing shit or cheap, want nice stuff, proper stitching, and it needs to fit well obviously. Take £200 from petty cash. Need them by 4pm.”

“…”

“Well on you go! It’s already 2. Oh, and on your way back, can you pick up 30 beers for the office? Has to be bottles, no tins. And limes.”

2. Violet Beauregarde II

“Can I get you guys a drink at all?”

“A blueberry smoothie please”

“Sure, so like bananas, blueberries and apple or something?”

Stony, unsmiling face.

“No. A blueberry smoothie. Just blueberries”

I went out and sourced a pint of blueberry pulp. It cost about a tenner, and was the texture of wallpaper paste.

3. Hula-Hell do you think you are?

“Hey, can you pop out and get me some ready salted Hula Hoops and some cheddar?”

“Sure, no problem”

“And then can you use the Hula Hoops to cut cylinders of cheese that fit perfectly within the potato rings?”

“…Sure. No. Problem”

4&5            The worst man I have heard of IRL

It’s 6pm, and my friend who was at that point 11 hours into her ? hour shift, gets called into an edit suite by an older male client.

I will pause here to tell you that this friend is extremely attractive, and was at that point, only 21 years old.

She walks into the room, and with a smile asks how she can help. The client leans back luxuriously into the sofa, and replies:

“I want a toffee apple”

“Oh, okay. I’ll see what I can do”

Dutifully, she spends an hour exploring all supermarkets, sweet shops and newsagents within a 1.5 mile radius of Soho.

She returns to the client empty handed, apologising profusely. Is there anything else she can get his Highness?

“The thing is. I really want a toffee apple. Improvise”

She cuts an apple into slices, drizzles it with honey, and brings it to the fucking Roman Emperor. He laughs, waves her away, and eats it.

The next day, this same misogynistic thumb of gristle summons my friend to his aid.

Having pictured him experiencing all manner violent deaths in order to get to sleep the preceding night, my friend then had to take a deep breath, put on a big smile, and ask once again:

“What can I do for you?”

“I’d like ten Mojitos, please”.

“Ten Mojitos?”

“Yes please”.

“Just want to be sure: you want ten whole Mojitos” (He is alone in the room, baring the editor who is busy working, feeling uncomfortable at the exchange, but also unable to contradict the client)

“Yep”

She goes out, purchases the wherewithal to complete the task, and comes up with a tray of refreshing minty cocktails. She sets them down in front of him, and he LAUGHS IN HER FUCKING FACE.

The Editor told her some time later, that before mission Toffee Apple, the client had eyed up my friend and said:

“I want to see how far I can push this runner”

Did you just shiver? Thinking about it shrinks my vagina.

In your first steps to forging a career in any given industry, you should expect to have to work hard, and start at the bottom.

But what you shouldn’t expect, is to be routinely performing skilled labour at minimum wage and on zero hours contracts. What you shouldn’t have to take on the chin, are comments like “you should be grateful you’ve got this opportunity” from people on 10 times your salary. And you certainly should never have to endure humiliation at the hands of people in a position of power over you.

I am optimistic that this monstrous breed of fuckwit is dying out in my industry: my current employers do not enable the kind of behaviour listed above, and I can’t ever imagine any of my contemporaries being such fucking cunts. But the culture of employees being exploited by their employers doesn’t appear to be going anywhere.

So, if I am lucky enough to one day grow a human, sure I’ll tell them ‘”dream, believe, achieve”, but I will caveat that with “organise, strike, resist”.