Chapter 21: New Round, New Plans

Right... Plan for the future! I wish those woolly sheep would be so kind to vacate my cranium and let me think clearly. 'Yes, Baaahh to you too! Shooo! This is important, you know... And take those cute little lambs with you. I don't need cattly distractions.'

That sorted, I remembered some of my fellow students were considering a bridge-year before going to study for a degree. Though it sounds like an inviting prospect, I wonder, knowing myself, if it won't turn into a dive-headfirst-into-a-ravine-year instead. Let's first give it some thought. To go and discover the world like my peers aspire, it might have been a good idea to have started saving money some time ago. Now the alternative is to start working for that money first. How hard could that be?

After two minutes of research, I subscribed to three of the local commercial employment agencies, just to see what kind of work was available for someone as skilled as me and what they would be offering to pay me for that. Sorting by hourly rate I scanned the first few entries.

Loading live chickens in a truck for them to get slaughtered. Incremental rates depending on how long you hold on to it / survive. Nah... I don't want to become a henpecked man just yet.

Garlic powder factory worker... Probably not good for my social life.

My vertigo might prevent me from working as a Roofer.

Let's reset the filter and see what comes up.

Weird... All three agencies have the same manufacturing firm as their top-of-the-list job. This can mean two things. They are doing very good and need a lot of people to work for them, or they are doing things really poorly and burn through their workforce at an alarming rate. Maybe I should give it an academic try to know which one it is. Since I have no lessons the next few days, I might just as well try it right away, to see how the working life fits me. Now I just have to throw the dice to pick which agency is going to send me there. Oh, wait, one is offering a higher rate. No dice needed...

That was the day before yesterday. Now my sleepy head is lugging my lunchbox to the slightly faded receptionist to make my presence known.

'Oh, another one...' was what the woman said, after she finished painting her eyelashes black in an attempt to unfade herself. Points for team 'poorly'.

The cigarette-smoke-stained guy that came to pick me up, led me to a corner of the big production hall. My job was to turn timber into EURO size pallets, by means of a large crosscut saw and an air-driven nail gun.

I quickly went to work, making sure to wear my hearing protection and safety shoes. For a country with strict gun laws, this nail gun definitely impressed me, sending 8 cm nails into solid wood at the pull of the trigger, the nail heads stopping several millimetres below the wood surface, the recoil moving the heavy gun to the next spot. Cool. Points for team 'Great!'

Then someone on the other side of the hall started cutting aluminium profiles with a bandsaw. Even with hearing protection it was past annoying. I saw a lot of other workers without hearing protection. Team 'poorly' took a major leap!

I had one scary moment when the rebounding nail gun came down right on the edge of the plank I was trying to fix. The safety pin was still pressed in as usual, but the nail failed to hit the wood, flying to the concrete floor below, instantly bending into a half circle before flying back up in the air at high speed. Luckily, nobody was hit, but it did temper my enthusiasm a bit. It left me wondering whether my steel-toed safety shoes would be able to withstand a direct application of the nail gun. Not something I'd like to try. (apparently someone had a similar idea before me, judging from the holes through the steel dustbin).

By the end of the working day the foreman guy came to look at my progress and to tell that tomorrow they would need an entirely different type of pallets. Given that I had worked through the complete stock of timber just for today's type, this appeared to be a problem. He told me I wouldn't have to come back. Clear win for team 'poorly'. Academic research project completed!

When I called the agency to tell them of my experience, they told me not to worry. Just for this company, the collective agencies had a 'don't ask' policy in case you got fired. Anyway, I did manage to complete the full working day... Off the record, they told me that people who managed to stay on at that company, usually were the ones that got rejected anywhere else. This was just what I needed to hear.

Caiman Raptor Elk

03.06.24 Front Page

Back Issue Page