Working Again.......the joy

The smell was distinctive. A ready made vegetable soup drifted through the air. A clatter of plates in the backgroumd. It was twelve o'clock in this small office. This smell seemed to act as a prompt for others. For twelve o'clock was down pen's time, a rest bite for thirty minutes from the boredom of this office life. There were no shops to browse, no lunch room to reside in. Joy.


I last worked on January 15th this year. And now it was back to reality. In the few jobs I've had in the past, there have been some interesting times. The time I woke up at 4am, drove thirty miles in the snow, to a plastics factory. My skilled job was to pull apart pieces of plastic from an outer shell of plastic. It was'nt the mind numbingly plastic pulling that got to me. It was the people who worked in these places. I got crazy doing the job after five minutes. They had been doing the job for forty years and clearly, they were, without putting it mildly, zombies. How anyone could pull bit of plastic of other pits of plastic for forty years, was beyond me. But I stuck at it for for a week. If anything, it taught me, studying for your exams may be worth it after all.

I had been with my last company for five years. And now it was finally time to go somewhere different. After two months of 'leisure' time, in which I was 'recovering' from six months of travel, I finally plucked up the energy to go to the employment agency. And against my wishes, they phoned me.

Monday morning. Combined with the first day of school feeling couples with cripling road works, it did not get off to the best of starts. The company was a small family based one. The sort of company which spreads rumours and spreads marriage. The sort of company where everyone has been for fifty years sinmply because it is too homley to leave. And to make makes better, I was to sit with the I.T team. "Yeah, I know it's a bit sad, but I've been programming since the age of twelve". This was going to be a long week. This was followed by a number of computer code words, 'The three finger salute' being the favourite expression.

So I spent my first two days looking into space. I was setting up with p.c's which was fine. But part of this was watching a blue bar go from 0 to 100%. In twenty minutes. Never before had I been transfixed so much by the computer clock. It's amazing just how time can stand still when you look at clock for long enough.

At least there was half an hour for lunch. Maybe a walk across the industrial estate and a bananna for lunch. Now did I really say I was looking forward to routine again when I was travelling? Whoops.