Blog Flurry #20
Thursday, October 26th, 2006Dear Eloi
So for the last few weeks I have been working not one, not two, but THREE jobs. Oh yes, I work hard for my money. Or not. But I do get to the point of working for it. Job number three came to me in the good old fashioned “know the HR manager” way that jobs so often do. “Want to come work in the stores for three weeks?” they asked “yes.” I said. “Come in for a meeting with the head of sotres.” they said, “don’t worry about coming in to see me. Just show up for work on Friday” the head of stores did. And so I did. Net profit to me: one job.
Score.
I was employed by the hotel formerly known as the Park Royal to fill in for a dude going off to get married. So….
When stock (such as milk, vegetables, various meats etc) arrives at the hotel it comes to the loading bay which is located at street level. The delivery guys take it out of the truck, we check that they have given us the correct stuff and place it on a our trolleys. (think pallet jacks, but without the jack) and then we take it wherever it needs to go. Usually to either the dry goods store or to one of the numerous fridges. The thing about these locations is that they are not on street level – they are up a floor.
So we jump in the lift with our goodies and ride the slowest lift in the world up one floor. The lift itself does not travel slowly, oh no, that is not its problem. Its problem is that it takes a very long time to close the doors prior to commencing lifting. And it has no “close now” button, and sometimes, just for fun it closes the door halfway, then aborts. Thinks about what it may or may not have done wrong for sometime before tentatively going about closing the doors. It is sucky. And everything I did in that job involved the lift. OK, not everything but most things. All food and other stuff, except alcamahol, had to go up in the lift, and whenever I went anywhere it involved the lift. In the first hour of a day I rode up and down in the lift over ten times. I was the lift master.
The first hour of the day it should be noted, was 0800 to 0900, and that was a suck. Finishing at 1400 good, starting at 0800 bad. I found that if I wasn’t in bed by 0030, then getting up and making it to the 0721 bus to town was significantly more sucky than really should have been necessary.
On the upside, upon getting to work there was free coke. Bottomless free coke. Now that is my kind of employer. Also free food. An entire cafe of free food that changed daily. Which was nice. Not the best in the world, but good, bad, free + free coke was super.
On the downside was the environment of the Morlocks. For truely we dwelt in the swers of the building. Not the actual sewers, but certainly the Steam Pipe Trunk Distribution Venue. Which was not really as bad as the height of the roof. Low. Not even a nice genuine low roof where everything is low, but the more annoying breed of low roof known as the “surprise” low roof. This is the type that randomly unleashes low door frames, pipes or light fixtures at your forehead.
To protect my frontal lobe I developed a hunchback loping walk that allowed me to avoid all attacks until the fourth shift. The fourth shift attack was a tricky one. I was in the beer fridge which has a lower roof than the rest of the “tunnels” but I was aware of that, and looking funky. That was until I stood (still in semi crouch) up into a big old fashioned light, that made the low roof even lower. Suck. However, there was not labotnomy and I live to fight another day.
So, a standard day involved showing up and getting into my nicely drycleaned uniform and heading down to Morlock central. Usually when I arrived the milk delivery (inc. yoghurt and butter and stuff) would be sitting waiting (possibly in wait) for me. So I’d take it up to the fridge an unleash the milk. Then back to the dock for me. My partner in crime and I would then head back up the lift to the dry goods sotre and take whatever the kitchen had ordered the 40m or so it was from the store to them. Apparently only Pastry is organised enough for this system to work properly, and it did seem that way to me. They ordered heaps of stuff, and got it daily, while the other sections got a few things occasionally. Once this was done the booze needed distributing. A lot of it. All over the show.
By now it was probably 0930, maybe 1000, and the vegetables would arrive. Up to the firdges they went. Then that was about it for the day.
Yup. From then on, it was just accepting whichever deliveries we happened to get and putting them away. We did get a bunch of orders every day, juice, various meats and seafoods as well as misc stuff. Sometimes it came all at once, which was good as it kept us busy, sometimes it came every so often which was good as it left me time to read my book, and sometimes it came not very often at all. Which was better as I got to read my book even more. This was especially true when others were on their break, or delivering stuff or out and about. As we always had to have someone at the dock incase something showed up. And often it was me. So I read my book. Speciffically I read Deception Point by Dan Brown who wrote The Da Vinci Code. It wasn’t as good as that, but once it got over its slow start it was pretty cool.
Back to the working…
Palm Sugar.
Crayfish.
And now for something completely different:
Fark headline of the day:
Spacewalker upgrades ISS, heard complaining that he wanted to go to Toshi station to pick up some power convertors.
Aha. Amusing. Also, pointed me to toshistation.com which I must say is a thing. A is indeed for Ackbar.
Originally drafted 06 September 2004 @ 19:24