Saturday, July 26
Rubbish Rain
You know when your alarm clock goes off at 6.10am that it's going to be a long day. A long day with an early start, no less. Actually, it wasn't my alarm clock that woke me up, my Mum took care of that. She is a total control freak, especially concerning this sort of thing, and she came into my room at 6.05 saying "Come on, it's just after 6. Get up quick, you'll be late." I sort of moaned a "I know..." and she buggered off back to bed.
I managed to make it to the designated place to get a lift into where I was working for the day, and we got there just after 7. "We" being myself and my mate Matt (See, i can do alliteration just like all of the literary greats...). I think I mentioned in Thursday's post that the job was going to be emptying big corporate-esque bins. You know, the ones that are like the big recycling bins.
Alas, no. It was in fact being a binman, going round housing estates picking up bin bags from the kerb. I had my hopes raised at the very start, when the boss guy told us that he only needed one of us. Both of us need the money, but both also wanted to go back to bed, so we tossed a coin to decide who would go home. Matt won, and was pretty pleased about this, but the boss guy then changed his mind and said he could use both of us. Oh, the tension!
We got issued flourescent jumpsuits, ending up looking like we were going to be carrying dangerous chemicals around or some shit, and then we jumped into the dustbin lorry to be driven to the first housing estate. The guys we were working with were alright, pretty chatty, but it was only in the cab of the lorry that you had time to talk, since it was hard work tossing the bin bags into the back of the lorry. No wheelie bins for us!
Add to this the fact that it was absolutely pissing down with rain and you get the idea of just how shit this job was turning out to be. I was drenched from head to toe, and my boots were full of water, which meant I squelched on every step. Not good. We eventually finished just after 1 in the afternoon, and went back to the depot to get changed into our normal clothes. I wrang my socks out, and they were dripping loads of water. A big puddle soon developed on the floor where I was standing, not from pissing myself or anything stupid, before you think that...
Anyway, by the time I got home I'd dried out, but my Mum was wetting herself when I told her what I had been doing all morning. She's a nice, sensitive person is my Mum... Actually, getting home wasn't 100% pleasant. Me and Matt were picked up by our employment agency's minibus, full of other workers from a factory called Hygrade. I've worked at Hygrade before, and it is the lowest of the low. It makes packets of sliced meat, and is a godawful place to work. The people on the minibus all seemed to be those who wouldn't get hired by a supermarket because they were such gimps and so backward. Not that I'm at all judgmental concerning this sort of thing...
