Milkman
Joined: 13 Mar 2008
Posts: 27
Location: UK
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 Posted: Sun Jan 18, 2009 7:09 pm Post subject: Th evil of Dfs |
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I once did a stint as a casual worker for Dfs. It lasted a few weeks and was quite boring. A few days later, I was mulling over the weirdness of it and the following 'totally serious' piece is the result...
| Quote: | It was whilst I was working at DFS that I first noticed the strength of presence Linda Barker there. Wherever I looked there was a huge icons bearing her graven image, from the corner of my eye there she was. It was unnerving to say the least.
One day I ventured to ask a more senior colleague as to why of all the other designers, she was featured so obsessively. He just laughed at my question and quickly changed the subject, but not before I caught the haunted look in his eyes. He was scared, scared of Linda. I said nothing more for a while and just went on doing my job, and did my best to resist the will of the Sofa Queen.
So it went the day to day rigmarole of selling sofas, filling in financial documentation etc. I knew there was something not quite right about DFS but I was too bored to really care. Until people started to disappear! Well not people, more like tape-measures. A potential customer approached me and asked me reasonably enough for such a measuring device so that he could decide whether or not a sofa that had caught his eye would fit into his flat. So I went to the sales office and asked the manager for a tape-measure. For a moment there was silence. The strip lighting flickered as though struggling to suppress the maelstrom of homicidal energies that had suddenly flared up in the office. Then carefully choosing his words he said; “I’m getting tired of those tape-measures.†He scowled like a mad man and stared angrily out of the window and realising that I was still there he quickly added; “they just keep disappearing.†His face was calm enough but he must have been a little worried lest I detect his innate dislike of any device which could help a person to choose a sofa on the basis of individual free-will. He quickly gave one of the salesmen a meaningful look and ordered him to go out into the retail wilderness and return with several tape measuring devices purchased with the coin from his own pocket…if the not the blood from his own body. Terrified, the salesman departed at once. The manager seemed sufficiently appeased and so I made my escape.
Later on that day a senior colleague and personal friend of mine approached, an air of deep soberness emanating from him. He place a heavy mass of plastic into a hand I don’t remember proffering. Then staring intently with that serious gaze of his, he warned me gravely not loose this tape-measure. At which point I realised that’s exactly what the plastic artefact in my hand was! Then he added, “It was paid for from the salesman’s own pocket.†Leaving the words to hang ominously in the air, he took his leave of me and my new tape measure. The next few hours passed in the drug like haze that comes from hard-core tape-measuring. No doubt there was much a do about inches and dimensions, but sadly I cannot recall much of that period. It seems to me that it has been wiped from my memory, perhaps for my own safety…perhaps not. All I can say for certain is that by the end of the day I’d lost the tape-measure, so I took someone else’s and handed that into the sales office as my own.
This was not the only strangeness taking place, there was also the matter of the incessant ‘staff announcements’ recalling salesmen to the sales office…
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