Our editors sit down with writer and performer, Leah Mueller, to discuss her plethora of life experiences. Inspired by the likes of Don Marquis, Charles Bukowski and many more commentators of the underside of the American dream, Leah brings a great wealth of tales, from the crazy to the tragic. From working as a ‘sales clown’ in 1980s Chicago, to a short lived stint as a topless dancer in New Orleans, Leah’s writing takes in all aspects of American daily life, from the dead-end jobs to the humanity in mundanity.
Apart from the obvious crime of stealing employee time, Brian Brehmer, retail worker extraordinaire, talks about the weird and wonderful acts of theft that he has seen while working in retail.
Brian Brehmer is back with another crazy tale from the world of retail. In this episode, a female customer attempts to breach store policy by returning some condoms.
In a new series of interviews and reviews, the editorial team at Talking Soup kick off a new series of podcasts. In this pilot episode our digital editor, John Smith, takes a look at the issues surrounding students in a time of the Covid-19 pandemic. Should they stay or should they go? If you want to take part in the podcast, then please get in touch.
Our resident factotum, Brian Brehmer, opens up the oeuvre of his work experience. This time he recounts the inherent joys of working as a field tester for agricultural machinery firm, Briggs and Stratton.
I was verbally abused by a Tudor pedlar at the weekend. That is not a sentence I ever expected to write but I write it now in a fit of pique.
Brian Brehmer tells the inside story of 11 years of selling shoes in that most American of institutions, Kmart. Expect exploitation, pointless management, poor pay and a nod to the death of an American ideal.
Bisbee, Arizona. Leah Mueller talks of family, loss and going back to what you have always known.
Nick Sweeney returns to Talking Soup to bring us a story of a job working with disabled children. Fundraisers, misunderstanding, unbearable ignorance and the misuse of the word ‘rewarding’, ring any bells fo anyone?
‘To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a state of rage almost, almost all of the time — and in one’s work. And part of the rage is this: It isn’t only what is happening to you. But it’s what’s happening all around you and all of the time in the face of the most extraordinary and criminal indifference, indifference of most white people in this country, and their ignorance’ – James Baldwin.
Wet, half-sober, tired and bored. The meaninglessness of Saturday night for a disillusioned thirty-something.
Life is full of changes, and with younger folk are ever-more trapped in a cycle of work and rent, Fulvio Milesi joins us to give us his take on leaving a job that appealed to the mind, but not the heart.
In a powerful piece, Ramona Long reflects on her mother’s death from Covid-19, and looks back at her relationship with the beauty shop, one of the few all-female spaces in a male-dominated world.
As his mother-in-law’s mental health deteriorates, Jim Ross finds himself faced with the difficult tasks of looking after a loved one with dementia.
Brian King, who has worked in the flooring and carpet-fitting industry for 30 years, joins Talking Soup to talk about the Christmas rush for carpets and flooring and the toll it takes on the workers.
Robert Locke, a temporarily unemployed travel company representative, woefully disregards government quarantine regulations and takes to the streets in his adopted home of Malaga, only to be arrested almost immediately.
In a new series on parenthood, Yvonne Hardman, 45-year-old mother of three teenage boys, gives us a stark but witty warning about what is in store for any potential parents.
As part of a new series on parenthood, Dee Caples takes a look at the huge perspective shift from childhood to adulthood, and debates what parts to keep and what to throw out when we raise our own children.
With the onset of the Coronavirus pandemic, John Smith looks at the fickleness and falsehoods that underly the outpouring of public solidarity.
In our adversarial society where politics seem to triumph over personal connections and even common sense, finding old friends seems almost anachronistic. Historical relationships provides the promise of glue that keeps us joined to our own lives. Connectivity offers hope in an uncertain world.
The dance that night was in a converted cinema. We sat in the front row seats and watched the natives giving it, like it was 1919. Country and western was big in the hinterlands back in the day. Sugary sweet songs of the poor emigrant Paddy in his bed-sit in London, pining for his golden haired girlfriend and his silver haired mother while he drank himself into a stupor.
I finish my £8.30 pint and head for where I used to live. Why? I’ve started writing now, I might as well go. It’s an ex-council block. East London thick brick. Rubicon cans on the stairwell, faulty lifts. A kid called Abdi that tries to sell you weed every time you see him, even though you tell him that you don’t smoke weed. It was him that I thought I saw walking past the pub. He’s got a dog. He told me that it is was rare for a Bengali to have a dog. I wonder if he’s still here?
My vacation condo’s washer/dryer combination is tiny and inefficient, so I launder my comforters ten miles away at the decrepit Maple Fuels Wash-a-Ton. The old-school machines don’t take credit cards, only quarters. It takes a lot of quarters to wash a pile of gamey comforters. Since my mortgage and HOA fees are high, I have to rent my place to overnighters through Air Bnb. The guests are often careless, spilling wine and body fluids willy-nilly on the bedclothes.
He slashed at me a few times – I can’t say for certain how close he got, but when you can feel the air move because of the swipe, the blade is too close – but mostly he stood in place making these hesitant jerking jabs. He kept saying, “Come on, I’ll stab you. Come on”, as if it were somehow my responsibility to move closer to him. Perhaps that’s the way things work, I don’t know, this was my first knife fight, and frankly it was a bit unfair, I didn’t have a knife.
