Work stories

[Spike]

Back in the summer of 97 me and a mate signed up to an agency for temp work and got a job working 4 days at a distribution warehouse in the sticks, somewhere between Nantwich and Chester.

 

We'd turn up at the usual stupid time and wait in the early morning sun for the minibus that would drive us hungover zombies to work.

 

We get out, herd in, and are on arrival taken to be split up into working packs.

 

Luckily me and Hayd ended up on the same truck port.

 

The thing was this. Forklift gets pallet, we wrap pallet in giant f*** off clingfilm wrap to stop it's goods from spilling during the journey to wherever it was going.

 

Basically one of us held the pallet and it's goods in place whilst the other went round doing the wrap and you had to hop out of the way so you didn't get wrapped up yourself.

 

To cut a s*** story less s*** we weren't too great at it - mainly because it took us longer to find where the clingfilm thing started than the amount of time it took to do the wrap.

 

It was a 14 hour shift on a f*** of a hot day and we had a 15 minute break through all of it.

 

Early in the day we were finding out our own rythmn of the wrapping but the c*** of a forklift driver would always have another crate ready before we were finished. not long into the day we had more pallets packed up waiting than we could wrap. Made worse by the complete lack of drinks considering the heat, and the fact that it was a bad way of getting rid of a hangover.

 

On the next port there was this lad who lived for this s***. He took his shirt off and was covered in all sorts of fecking scars. We joked that he'd sold every organ he could have to stay away from this kind of s*** and had hit bottom.

 

Anyway, by now we'd named the f***lifter 'Jobbo' and it became our mission to get slower and slower so that he would have nowhere to put the pallets and then perhaps he'd f*** off to another port. We even started morris dancing, singing songs and swapping the wrap as we went round the pallets.

 

Bless old jobbo, rather than simply tell us to f*** off there and then he would get up on the tail of the truck and show us how to wrap. After a short while we realised that the more inept we were the more he'd share his techniques and not before long he'd end up doing about a third of our load that day.

 

Good old jobbo. An expert in his field. If only he'd have gotten out of there.

 

We did after a day.