Thursday, August 14
Thursday Part I - Events
A two-part post today, there's a few things I want to seperate and explore at different times.
Another bastard 5am alarm clock ring woke me up this morning. Or rather, it got me out of bed. My body clock has this weird thing where it wakes me either 20 minutes before or after I'm supposed to get up / the time my alarm clock goes off. By after, I mean I'm completely and utterly useless for a good 20 minutes or so after I get up. Not today though. I would have thought that a 5am start would have meant me fully waking up after the alarm, but I was wide awake way before it went off. Stranger things have happened.
Got to work, in a different department from the one I was in last Friday. This time it was Soft Cheese. You can laugh out loud if you like... The job I was given was even more mind-numbing than stacking pots of cream. Today I had to clean out these big metal cubes-on-wheels, which transport the cream stuff around. They're a piece of piss to clean, just hose them down, then put them in an industrial-sized dishwasher. I'm not talking about the pretty big ones that you find in a restaurant kitchen; nope, this one was the size of a fairly large room in an average house. And all to wash one flipping "dolly." That's what they're called. They're only about a yard in each direction, not exactly massive. Wasted resources anyone?
As I said, the job was mind-numbing, but it was also deafening. The machines all around were fucking loud, so I got given some ear plugs to wear. This is as well as the hairnet... Fucking hairnets! The earplugs were brilliant, completely blocking out around 90% of all sound. You could stand right next to someone talking to you, and be forced to lip-read to understand what they were saying. This silence, coupled with working on my own, gave me plenty of time to let my mind wander. And wander it did, hence Part II of this post.
At the first break, I was sitting in the canteen, chatting away to some guys and munching a fried breakfast, when this figure walked past. I didn't really see her properly, but thought "Pretty lady, looks a bit like Michelle." A couple of minutes later I was doing my usual thing of looking all round the place I'm in, seeing what's going on, when I saw Michelle. We both did a double take and said "What are you doing here?!" Weird. I didn't really have time to chat to her then, since I had to go back to work fairly sharpish, but I met her at lunch and we chatted for a while.
Michelle is one of my friends who is gorgeous, but doesn't believe it when you tell her. She's also the nicest, friendliest person ever. I swear if Satan ever walked this Earth, Michelle would end up chatting to him and not finding a single fault in him. Anyway, she had just got her A-Level exam results, and was really made up by them. She's off on a gap year, then probably a gap year. Whilst I was chatting away, I was making a conscious effort not to talk about myself. I've noticed recently that when I meet people that I haven't seen for a while, I end up talking about myself far too much compared to how much they talk and I listen. Arrogant and self-centred? Me? I think so.
Straight after work I had to dash to the dentist to get a filling. I don't have a problem with the dentist, it doesn't bother me at all. The only painful part was the injection to numb the tooth and surrounding area. It felt like the needle he was putting in was about an inch across rather than less than a millimetre. Now all I have to show for it is a mouth which is totally numb on one side. Completely numb. It feels so weird. I was drinking from a big bottle of lemonade earlier, and all I could feel was the liquid going over the left side of my lips. I couldn't feel anything at all on the right side, even though the logical part of my brain was telling me that something was happening there. Meh, more strangeness for the day.
The final thing to mention is just how bad my hands smell right now. I think it's a mixture of cream and sweat from these plastic gloves I had to wear at work. I've washed them a whole load of times, and they still smell. I feel like Lady Macbeth (Out, Out damned spot). Hows about that? I'm so learned, I can throw in Shakespeare references all over the place...