Pete Ashton's Weblog

So I'm going through the cat and mouse game of getting temp work - takes me back a good eight years or so - with P&D. What with it being August all the students are also looking for temp work and the suspicion of bad timing on my part is starting to look justified. Still, early days. The thing with these agencies is you start at the bottom of the pile and keep pestering them till they move you up and give you a job. Usually takes a couple of days.

My phone is my alarm is my phone. The pholarm goes off at 7.00am and re-set it for 7.30. Since I know I'm going to do this I always set it an hour before I want to get up, the idea being I'll have made the long journey from sleep to able-to-get-up-ness in that time, and for the last few months it's been working. However, because of the heat (see every other UK blog, especially those in London for news on this remarkable event) I was extra tired and slept on past that one. At 8.00 it went off again and I reached over to turn it off, cutting off the incoming, caller withheld, phone call. Thinking VERY sharply for that time in the morning I immediately phoned P&D to innocently ask if they had any work for me and, yes, they were currently calling me on the other line! What a co-incidence!

Just to keep those of you interested informed, I'm going to be a chambermaid tomorrow (Sat) morning for a few hours and then next week I'm a cable puller. I'll leave you wondering about what a cable puller is until Monday. Any guesses in the comments (although hardly anyone's leaving any bloody comments here at the moment. Highest stats ever and barely a squeek. What can you do?)

Well, the novelty of temp work is still just strong enough for me to blog it. Today I was at a pub/hotel being a chambermaid. First question: "Sorry to have to ask you this but do you know how to make a bed?" Apparently a fair few temps have never done this exercise before. Viva los duvets! I can make a bed, though I suspected my bed making was somewhat on the "can you sleep in it? Then it's made" variety. Seems I was nearly there - to make a bed properly you just have to be slightly more anal about the whole tucking in thing. Since at this time of year most sensible people will throw all the blankets on the floor it's just all about appearances. Though I didn't say that. Okay?

Right, my first day as a "cable puller". Though I didn't actually pull any cables. I carried a few boxes of cables to the van though. And I screwed in four (count 'em) socket boxes. And that was it. For this I will get paid, before tax, about £45. Which is nice. Or would have been. Let's start at the beginning...

Well, I did some work today, which was a relief. We're fitting "dados", a term I'd heard before but never known what it meant. In this context it's the skirting board-type plastic box that runs around an office holding all the power and data cables. I guess dado is as good a term as any.

Tomorrow I'll be working the bins in Bicester (prn. 'Bista'). I haven't been a bin man for, ooh, 12 years, so it should be interesting. I suspect hanging off the back of the truck won't be allowed in these Health and Safety conscious days. Anyway, 6.00am start and, I've been warned, non-stop heavy lifting. So I'll be knackered then.

So far this week the bins are not proving to be a nice job, but I'm heartened that all the other experienced binmen are also hating it. A new recycling system has started, adding plastic and tin to the paper yet we still have the same number of blokes and wagons... Longer days, more work... And I'm knackered.

Still, I managed to cook dinner tonight - stir fry as expected - so brownie points all round here!

Yesterday, after a week of waiting and false starts, I finally got some work out of the temp agency. The lack of work was really a blessing as I've been able to play dogsbody for Lucy and Jeff about the house but it did also feel good to be off earning again. Only the shift was from ten to six. That's 10pm to 6 am. Night shift joy awaited. Luckily I had some advance warning so, after visiting Isobel and Lucy at the hospital with new step-grandma April in the afternoon, I caught a couple of hours kip before setting out.

Feeling quite sorted at the moment. As well as having my own room in the house (I was expecting to be on the sofa until the weekend but the old tenant was able to move out on Wednesday) I've also managed to get paid employment of the full time variety until January. Go me!

And so to work. My instructions were to go to an address on the Coventry Road leading out to the airport (and Coventry, naturally) and after an hour on the buses in and out of Brum I walked up and rang on the bell of an office block only to be told that Tony, my contact, didn't work here, the admin office - he worked at the airport. Which made a stunning amount of common sense given the nature of my job (Stock Controller). So I phoned the agency and the sense hit home there. They phoned ahead and I started walking the three miles out to airstrip land.

An absence of posting, indicating a reluctance to put things in words due to an inability to fully comprehend said things.

I appear, somehow and without intending for it to happen, to have aquired myself a career. I hadn't shaved for a few weeks and was going to work in jeans and t-shirts but still my boss asked me if I wanted to stay on until the new year. I turned him down twice due to the commute, the fact of another job lined up and the general sense of brain melt derived from data entry. He asked again and I rather cheekilly asked what was in it for me. He told me. I related this to my brother in law, a worker in the computer programming industry, who implied I'd be a fucking moron not to jump at this opportunity. So the next day I said yes.

Finally succumbed to the coldy thing that's "going around", as they say, resulting in a day off work yesterday, losing me £45.00 before tax as I don't get sick pay. Something of a wake-up call, this lack of benefits lark, but there you go. This actually follows a pattern - whenever I start a new job I tend to get ill within the first few weeks as if my body is having trouble adjusting to a new regime and needs to be pushed to some kind of edge to get the hang of itm, and since this is my first desk job it makes sense. It does feel a lot less alien now I'm into my fourth week, though I do have to sort out some kind of exercise regime soon.

My job has changed for about the 10th time, which isn't a problem apart from giving me something of an identity crisis regarding airport security. Currently I'm processing invoices which is just like at the bookshop in that there's no standards in invoicing and no hope of finding any. Fun!

Wow, a week without posting. Even with my current blogapathy (if you didn't notice it then I'm obviously just being self conscious about it) that's pretty bad.

Fact is I've been working for the first time since quitting the airport job a month back and while the job isn't so bad (stock picking food for M&S in a cold storage warehouse) and only lasts a week, it's in fucking Thatcham, between Newbury and Reading. Yes, I'm still living in Birmingham. I get picked up from the centre of town at 8.00am, work from 10 to 6 and get dropped off again at a little after eight. Add on my bus journey to and from home and I'm away for a little under 14 hours a day, every day since Friday. The pay is reasonably good (should net £345 before tax for five days brainless work) and tomorrow is the last day but right now I'm fucked. Six hours a day traveling is not good, especially as I find is really hard to get comfortable on coach seats. Moan moan, bloody moan. All ends tomorrow, then Xmas joy (major family stuff for nearly a week!) , then a nice short period of no-work, then back on the temp wagon again.

Here's a question. I know I've got a small band of loyal readers out there. What do you want me to write about? Do you want tales of surreal temp work? The minutiae of my daily life? Strident but ill-thought-out opinions? Diatribes on the role of the outsider-non-artist railing against but dependent upon modern consumerist society? More of those tutorial thingies I started dabbling in? More photos? Brutally honest dark moments of the soul?

This is kinda important to me as I've been losing my way with this blog since moving to Birmingham. Actually, since stopping the Farmblog really. I've toyed with splitting it into multiple blogs, stripping it down to an LMG style linklog, starting up a new, anonymous diary blog somewhere or even just scrapping the whole thing and starting again, but I think the best thing to do is just keep going only with a better focus on what I'm doing this for.

When I read a non-specific mish-mash blog like my own I tend to read it selectively. skimming through some posts (for example ones on poetry) and dwelling on others (for example ones on music) and I imagine people do the same with mine. So, please let me know what aspects of this blog you actually read, either in the comments or, if you prefer, by email.

Thanks. (And sorry for rambling. I'm very tired...)

Great course at the London Consortium entitled Shit & Civilization:

Our societies are, quite literally, founded on shit. Civilization means living in cities and cities are confronted, in a way more dispersed settlements are not, with heaps of garbage and ordure.

The point being that to become civilized the population of these cities have to band together to deal with all the shit they produce. This rings pretty true with me. When I was a bin man for a couple of weeks last summer it definitely felt like one of the most important jobs I'd done in a long time, and also the most egalitarian. Everyone has garbage and it all needs to be collected. Certainty, some people have more garbage than others and there's a qualitative distinction between the garbage of different class stratas, but at the end of the day it all goes in the same truck and then into the same land fill pit (or recycling centre, depending on how forward thinking your council is). The same would apply to sewage - some may shit in plastic loos while others in toilets plated with gold but at the end of the day it all mixes up in the same place. Think about it next time you're driving past a sewage treatment plant - here we are all equal.

No wonder people don't like talking about it.

(link via Boing Boing)

Friday morning, 7.30am, and I'd been up all night on the computer nocturnal style. The phone rings. It's the agency with the first offer of work so far this year and even though I've been up for 14 hours I say yes. After all, it's not likely to be particularly taxing on the brain and I quite like the idea of getting paid when I'm not at my most alert. It's your basic £5ph lifting job and it's in Rubery, about as far south of Birmingham as you can get while still staying on the A-Z, 12 miles from my house via two buses. Start as soon as I can get there and finish about five-ish.

Monday morning, the phone rings and an hour later I'm working at a bank. There's a kind of Special Forces reservist feel to this lark sometimes: "Help! There's something really menial that has to get done by close of business today! Who shall we call?"

So I'm currently working in the mail room at the offices of a high street bank. I had a vision of walking around a massive office with a trolly dispensing envelopes to all and sundry like Michael J Fox in The Secret of My Success, but this is the 21st century and email has kinda put paid to that sort of lark. The only stuff sent by post these days are legal documents and junk mail, a frightening amount of which was returned to sender, covered in pleading scrawls begging for it not to be sent again.

Here's a thing. Say you're in debt to a bank and you can't pay them back. The bank brings in a debt collection agency to send you threatening letters and negotiate a repayment plan. Did you know that these "outside agencies" are actually part of the bank? They'll use a different trading name and a PO Box address but it's essentially just another department. Makes sense from a PR point of view but I wonder how many people realise these demanding missives are actually coming from the friendly bank that happily gave them the overdraft/loan in the beginning. Apparently debt collection and debt counseling is the largest growth area in the financial sector - I hope the 80's Thatcherites are proud.

Part of my job was opening and sorting into piles letters sent to the PO Box and it was quite the most dispiriting start to the day I've ever had. Lots of cheques, most for sums under £5.00, and lots of letters, some angry, some begging, and some poignantly matter of fact. One that stuck in my mind read (paraphrase from memory) "I cannot pay £xx a month as I had a baby but he died. I will be working soon" scrawled in a gap on a "financial status" form. Every other envelope told another story of woe and there were hundreds of them.

Two things struck me about this. The first was the semi-literate, naive nature of the letters implying these are some of the least educated, least switched on members of society, often on income support or some other kind of benefit. It's not hard to imagine then seeking the promised happiness of buying stuff on the never-never and are now reaping a misery that wasn't mentioned outside the small print. The second was how much this process costs. As I said, most of the cheques sent in were for nominal amounts, quite frequently just £1.00 a month, as negotiated between the bank and a debt counselor (often the Citizens Advice Bureau). With all these people employed and all these bits of paper flying around I'd have to wonder how much money is left at the end of the day. Of course if the intended result is to punish then it's succeeding.

I've seen a small glimpse of the underbelly of our consumer based society and it's not nice.

Funny thing about these temp jobs - once I've been in one for a few days I lose the ability to write about it. I really wanted to document the cold storage job before Xmas but never did, and now the same is happening with the mail room - wrote a bunch last night but it didn't go anywhere. So I'll try again.

I'm still there for the second week even though the person I was covering for is now back at work. This was really odd yesterday as there is now not enough work to do so I'm spending most of the day sitting around reading my book (Jonathan Lethem's epic and quite wonderful Fortress of Solitude). When I get in there are envelopes to open for an hour or so and then nothing until about 3.00pm when the outgoing post arrives, and even then it's stop-start. While it doesn't bother me in the slightest (I get paid to read and I don't even have to write a review!) it's definitely very puzzling indeed. When it emerged that I'd be back again tomorrow I asked how long I'd be working there. Turns out it's 'til the end of the week, the reason being the boss is doing appraisals in the afternoon and needs me to cover for him, except all I do is answer the door for deliveries every 20 minutes or so. And drink lots of tea. And read.

My writing muse has vanished leaving quite a few half-written blog posts sitting on my hard drive, so here goes in point form:

Had a lovely evening at Matt and Anna's in Moseley on Saturday, which was needed as I was getting a little stir crazy. Matt has a mad collection of undergroundy French comics (or Bandes-Dessines) and it was something of a Hicksville moment being surrounded by loads of comics I'd never seen before. Was quite taken by the publisher Freon along with Flblb who published two of Matt's books. Strange that a Texan cartoonist living in England has only been published in French. But there you go.

Last week I was back at the NEC for a second job. I think I might be spending a lot of time there over the next few months. However, tomorrow I'm working for Birmingham City Council Environmental Services which means I'm on the bins! Well, I'm probably street cleaning but that's just as cool! Hopefully I'll be driving around in one of those little invalid carriages with big brushes ploughing through obstinate commoners as they wait for their bus. But as ever I will have no idea exactly what I'm doing until I'm doing it.

Finally got in touch, in a roundabout way, with an old Uni mate on Friday - told him to Google me for my email so if you're reading this James...

And that's about it.

Ah, the Environmental Services! Sounds like some kind of eco-army and in a way it is. This week, and probably next, I'm a bin man and I'm pretty happy about it. Riding around small streets in a big truck lugging stuff into the back of it - who could be happier?

Currently I'm on Clearing, which involves removing the large piles of rubbish you often see illegally dumped about the place. An Environmental Health Officer goes around the city taking photos and doing risk assessments (presence of rats, asbestos and urgency of removal) and then a team of clearance operatives, well, clear it. As you can imagine it's pretty dirty work but I actually find it more enjoyable than a factory or warehouse job.

The last couple of days I've been working with Mark, an ex-squaddie and ex-grave digger. He was in Gulf War part one where he drove over a mine, and he quit the graveyard after having four bereavements in close succession making his job a little too subjective for comfort. He has a rather manic look about him - scrunched up face and a very low gravelly voice - and when I was first introduced to him I'll admit to being pretty wary. But it's all turned out rather well with him being probably the most interesting and open guy I've working with since starting temping. Wednesday it was just the two of us in the truck and I felt comfortable enough to talk about all sorts of stuff. Usually I keep my brains in disguise which means I tend to come out of a week's temping desperate for an intelligent conversation, so it's nice not to be on guard so much this time.

Okay, here's a day on the truck with Marc. Leave the depot at 7.30am. Drive to the first job. Have a fag. Start picking at about 8.00am, depending on how long it took to find the place. At 8.30, regardless of having finished the first job or not, go for breakfast, arriving at the cafe at quarter to nine-ish (stopping on the way at newsagent). At some point between 9.30 and 9.45 leave cafe and return to job getting there at about ten-ish. Finish first job and move to second job. At 11.45-ish (regardless of having finished the second job or not) return to depot for lunch. Have lunch in cab of truck as it's more confortable than the rest-room. Half twelve, return to finish second job if need be then move to third job. Probably have a wee break in between. Do third job. If third job is finished before 2.00pm go and check out next job, perhaps picking a small amount. If third job is finished after 2.00pm spend a while driving around before getting back to the depot not before 2.45 to tip.

And that's a busy day. In fact that was today and when I got home I was knackered, which is odd because when you deduct all the breaks and driving around I'm probably doing no more that four hours work a day, usually three. It could be this phlegmy cough I'm still trying to shake off, it could be the extra effort of doing manual labour while wearing four jumpers, it could be the bracing fresh winter air after months of warehouses and offices, or it could be that this is actually quite hard work.

When I start a temp job I try and remain inconspicuous, keeping quiet in the corner and not drawing too much attention to myself. You never know what kind of people you're going to be working with and what kind of mood they'll be in. So far I've been okay, against my expectations to be honest, but I still play the quiet game. Fact is I'm pretty much a stereotypical middle class kinda guy and while I'm not particularly well off or well qualified (I still have only one A level at grade E and an Access course certificate to my name) I have been to University and most of my working life has been in the rarified environment of Waterstone's. I am not your typical unskilled manual labourer. Generally people assume I'm a student, partly because of my youthful good looks (I'm actually 31) but also, I think, because why else would I be doing this kind of job?

So I always find it a slightly momentous occasion when I openly read a broadsheet newspaper at work. Usually this happens after a week when I'm pretty sure I won't get the Waffle Waitress response and when I feel I proved myself, kind of a "look, I can do this job as well as you without complaint and still read the Guardian - if you have a problem with that then fuck you". Again, I've never had to actually say this, though during my white-van-man experience last August I did get a bemused "so you don't like the Sun then?"

When I got up this morning and saw the "different light" shining through the bathroom window my heart sunk. According to the weather forcast it wasn't supposed to snow in Birmingham today. Usually I greet snow like a small child on a sugar rush but this was the first time I'd actually be working in it. Turned out I was wrong to be concerned. It was bloody great fun! Not only did the baths slide nicely along the ice but we were able to piss about in the knowledge that we weren't really expected to do quite as much work today, what with most of the litter being covered in snow all morning. And it being a Friday. Still managed to get a good couple of tons though. Anyway, here's photos!

As I walked up to the wagon this morning Andy said it was our last day, as we'd kinda guessed having not had a call on Thursday as usual, but that boss-woman Pam had said there'd probably be a job for us in a fortnight, but that he couldn't tell me about it with the others around cos it was a bit hush hush. So I took him round the side of the truck to explain in his mumbly Castle Brom voice over the rattling sound of the engine. An 18 month contract clearing Aston along the same lines as what we're doing now only working directly for the council rather than through the agency. Starts in a fortnight.

Hmm. Not sure. While the work and hours are good (I'm really liking getting home by 4.00pm every day) it would mean no weeks off other than statuatory holidays and I'm really not sure about 18 months. Then there's this whole aversion to having a full time job that I've got going on. I put it to the back of my mind during the day assuming that I'd turn it down.

End of the day comes and we go and get our time sheets sorted. I ask Pam about this job and it starts to sound more interesting. Firstly there's the pay factor. At a minimum I can expect to clear £240 a week after tax which is £100 more than I'm clearing at the moment. Depending on the job it could be more. If I keep the my current spending, which shouldn't be a problem, there's a real chance of saving some real money for some project or other next year (Travel? Long term farm? Full time comics thing?). Work wise there's a possibility of working on the barrow (as shown on Dave's poster) which quite appeals as it would mean really getting to know the area with all the writing / photography potential that entails. And if I'm not on my own I'll probably be working with Andy, which is cool.

They're going to call me in the next couple of weeks to confirm. The funding has been approved (project: Aston Pride) and management have agreed with Pam that Andy and I are suitable for the job so we're just waiting for the logistics to settle into place.

Of course, I can quit at any time though I'd probably give it a good 6 months through the summer. Do I go for it?

Normally I don't mind being on standby, leaving the phone on all night to be woken, or not, by an urgent call from Kat or Louise sending me off to a far flung industrial estate for a loosely specified job of mystery. I jot down the details, check the A-Z, figure out the bus route, give an ETA, make my sandwiches and off I go on my mission. This morning, however, I kinda minded.

Funny how to the half-awake male mind the prospect of working with "female sanitary products" immediately brings forward images of nastiness. As you'll know by now I have a tendency to assume to worst with standby temp jobs and my assumption was it was going to involve processing those blue disposal bins you find in ladies lavatories, especially as the words "cleaning" "carrying" and "supplies" were mentioned.

Of course it wasn't that bad. This week I'm working at a tampon factory in Alum Rock. Whenever I'm waiting for the number 33 bus home at least three number 14's go past proudly displaying Alum Rock as their 'via' destination. I've always though it improbably romantic, as if there's a giant stone monument in suburban Birmingham, catching the sunset in a glorious display of delicate browns as native Brumies perform ancient rites from the industrial revolution. So it was with great anticipation that I finally boarded the mythical number 14 and went on my journey to the Rock.

I've been in the tampon factory for nearly two weeks now, which is the longest I've ever spent working in a factory, and generally I've found it quite exhausting. The work itself isn't that bad, although it's surprising how tiring repetitive stuff can be (pick up boxes, push into shrink wrap, press buttons, repeat). The people there are also fine - not particularly stimulating but nice and friendly. The commute is about an hour door to door which isn't bad considering I get two busses. What's doing me in, it seems, is the shift pattern. Last week it was 6.00am to 2.00pm. This week it's 2.00pm to 10.00pm.

Things seem to be happening. While intellectually I know that causality is an infinitely complicated thing and that I can ascribe very little to the patterns that appear, it's tempting as a fallible human to read too much into them. I think it's commonly known as not going mad.

Boing Boing points to a great photo-essay about Tibetan Buddhist Monks who build a mandalla out of sand grain by grain from dawn 'til dusk. Then when it's finished they pour it into the river as "a demonstration of nonattachment to the material existence." I wish I'd read about this a few weeks ago as it would really have helped me with a pointless argument I had in the front of a dump truck.

So I'm back at the Tampon factory on the late shift for another week, which was a bit of a surprise. I would have thought not turning up for work and not phoning in would have made them refuse to take me but it seems I wasn't trying hard enough. Despite even turing up 10 minutes late today (not deliberate at all - bus issues) all I got was a "feeling better then?" Turns out there was a guy there who actually wanted my job and who had jumped at the chance to cover for me, but an hour in he walked off the site never to return.

Today was actually not too bad. Having realised that a number of people there are pretty incompetent I started slowing down and slacking off and it made a big difference. I think I was tuning in to the rhythm of the machines or something which is not good. I heard somewhere (I think it from Sam's mum (hi Sam's mum!) via Sam) that Ozzy Ozborne was working in a factory and listening to the repetitive chunks of the machinery inspired him to 'invent' heavy metal. Today I thought the tedious tin-pot local radio station was playing Ballroom Blitz by Sweet, which would have been almost revolutionary for them, but it was just a tampon making machine going chunka-chunka at the right pitch with the news in the background.

And I find I have very little to write about. I think I'll have to quit this job for the sake of my blog. Thankfully Kat at the agency has agreed that I won't be working here after this week - there's no way I'm doing the 6.00am start again, at least not two busses away.

Anyone got a question about how a tampon factory works? It all seems very tedious to me but then I've been doing it for a while now. Actually, I have a question. Does anyone actually use an applicator? I've never known a lady who does but a hell of a lot seem to be sold. Is it just that some women don't like sticking their fingers up there or is there some more sensible reason for them?

Again with the anniversaries. A year ago I arrived on the Isle of Wight and started my three months working on a farm. (My diary of that time is here). Tomorrow I'm working at the Sea Life Centre entertaining the queue. I've been warned this might involve dressing up as a shark.

Here, then, is my CV for the last 12 months: farm worker, catering assistant, chambermaid, cable puller, bin man, car factory production line, data entry, invoice processing, food warehouse distributer, lugger-of-boxes, mailroom assistant, building a stand at the NEC, distributing furniture around the NEC, street cleaner, drivers mate, tampon factory packer.

Seeing it like that it just doesn't seem weird enough. I need more weird jobs. Hopefully the shark costume will come to pass.

Needless to say, this was quite radically different to my recent temp jobs, which verge on the surreal as it is. It was also a return to the wonderful world of customer service, and to be honest, that was the worst part. I'll push boxes of tampons through a shrink-wrap machine, pick up litter in a dog-shit filled alley, or build a fake house with French people, but please don't make me entertain the general public again.

Today I was employed to stand by the side of the road from 11.00am to 8.00pm. For this I was paid £6 an hour. It was worth it, but only just. I was a marshall for the British Heart Foundation Bike Show Ride 2004 though I only know this now having looked it up. Kat at the agency asked me if I was available on Sunday for a marshaling job near the NEC and having not earned a load of cash this week I said yes. Had it not been cold and wet it would have been a kinda fun day, if your idea of fun is standing still by a roundabout for nine hours.

I'm back at the tampon factory again, though I'll definitely be leaving at the end of this week. For sure. Last week the factory was closed for Easter (they close the whole operation at specific times during the year which I assume means no-one can book holidays outside that time) and had it been open I would have been on an early shift, which means I wouldn't have been there since I've said I won't work that shift again. This week it's the late shift so I'm there. But only for four more days. I mean, I've been in this job now since March 15th. It's time to move on.

As ever not much to report, though I did find the novelty of working in the warm quite refreshing (how tedious that today was really nice as opposed to yesterday when I could have done with it being really nice). Everyone asked if I'd worked over the break and the otter story went down well - even spread around the management a bit. People there still labour under the delusion that I'm a full time member of staff rather than a monkey-temp but I'll show them. Come next week they'll know how much of a temp I am. Oh yes.

I've never had to worry about tax before, or rather I've never bothered worrying about tax. Either I was working full time for one employer and it was all dealt with by head office or, from 1995-98, I was a student and paying no tax at all. Late last year it was pointed out to me that I would probably be able to claim back a substantial amount this year and so, today, I did.

When I was on the farm last summer I was earning no cash at all, trading my labour for food and accommodation for three months. In fact I lived on £500 for that entire period, most of which went on storage, travel and website hosting. This is probably why I'm now able to budget for the first time in my life. When I quit the farm I started temping and have done so ever since but never for more than a few weeks at a time and for various agencies. The end result is that I earned £5408 in the last financial year of which £947 vanished in income tax. Because I worked for six different companies in that time, some for only a few weeks, my tax codes were all over the place even before taking my three month gap into account.

Today my P60 tax summary came through from the agency so I took it and my pile of P45s to the Birmingham tax office After waiting about 20 minutes to be seen I explained my situation. The Ps were photocopied to be sent to Wales (where my records are held apparently) and I was told I should get a cheque soon. How soon is "soon" in tax terms? Oh, about 3-4 weeks - there's a delay due to the budget but it shouldn't take too long. Can I expect anything? Ooh yes.

Painless and lovely. I must reverse-engineer the government more often.

This last fortnight I've been back at the hospital working in the pharmacy department. Did I mention I was working there before? It was just before I went to hospital as an actual patient a few weeks back, which was kinda amusing when I left a message with the agency: "I won't be able to work at the hospital tomorrow as I'm about to go to hospital". Once my body was back to normal I did a bit of NEC work and the odd-job stuff before getting a call from Anna at the agency. Can I work at the hospital? The guy who's there currently has to go to hospital for a few days. I mentioned that the place was cursed and there was a beat as Anna figured out what I meant. I told Sam to expect another ambulance in a few days...

No work from the agency last week, as you might have noticed with all the tweakage on this site, and because I took Monday off I wasn't overly sure I'd get any this week. If I'd thought this through I would have secured some kind of long term work for the summer before all the students descended on temp-land. But I didn't so it's all going to be a little bit piece-meal until September, especially as my perception of my reputation is of someone who's happy to do the odd bit of work here and there but can't be relied upon to stick with a job for more than a few weeks. Which is a fair reputation. And who want's to be stuck in a factory in the summer? Not me.

That said, I got the standby call this morning, rousing me from a not particularly bad dream at 9.00am with instructions to head off to Perry Barr ASAP. Miracle upon miracles, I'm working down the road from where I live! Okay, it's still a bus journey but it's so short I almost forgot to get off. It's just a three-day job doing quality control at an electronics assembly factory. They'd been having a lot of rejects and wanted to blame the manufacturers, only the faults were found at the end of the line so the suppliers were not convinced it was their fault. My job was to check all the plastic cases (about the size of an electric socket box) before they went in and dot them with an incredibly camp pink marker to show they'd been inspected. After a few hours I'd found none wrong and the QC guys were getting a bit dejected. I could tell they really, really wanted me to find something and I was tempted to damage one of the cases just to please them and to remove any suspicion that I'd ben useless, when, in the last hour of the day, I found a bad one! Ooh, the relief on the faces of these gruff factory blokes was intense and they sent me home half an hour early promising to pay me extra. I'm back again tomorrow and Thursday to hopefully gather more ammunition so they can claim credit for the faulty boxes.

Then the magic of working close to home really kicked in as I got home before 5pm feeling none too tired, ready and able to do something. So I bought a small bag of compost and planted some carrot seeds. The cabbages planted last month aren't doing anything so maybe I'll have better luck with the orange. In the meanwhile, my potatoes, which are officially due to be dug up in a fortnight, are flowering. Does this mean I should dig them up now? Also, I really need one of those big soil-sieves though - the earth here is way stoney...

At work today (car-parts factory, cleaning glue off shafts, boring) I was chatting to a guy who asked if I was a student. Been getting that a lot these last few weeks probably due to the influx of real students this summer. I denied it and he asked where I was from with that posh accent. Not in a malicious way (the other guy there was from the Congo and we got talking about languages and origins - he was born in Romania but held Congolese nationality which caused all sorts of ID issues) but it did take me aback. I usually take chameleon approach with my voice, adopting the accent of the person I'm talking to but here I obviously wasn't. I thought it might have been that he was 2nd generation Jamaican, but listening closely the Brummie twang was overpowering any residual patois from his parents. Maybe I just wasn't bothering to fit in anymore and so my relatively "posh" accent (being brought up by a classically trained singer and then working in bookshops will do that) was coming through.

You'll have noticed I've stopped writing about the temp jobs and I think, barring some incredible fortune, I won't be writing about them again. It's been nearly a year and it's now become a tediously normal part of my life. This might explain the blocks I've been having this last month or so. Last summer I wrote about the farm, then I wrote about temping. Now I'm at a loss. I know it doesn't really matter what I write about and that it's not really that important from the blogging point of view, but I was really starting to get my teeth into something good, even describing myself as a writer in moments of unleashed ego. (And looking back at posts from two years ago I think I'm definitely a better writer if nothing else.) What now...

Work wise I'm just plodding along. It's been a quiet summer - I can't remember when I last worked a full week - so I haven't felt too pressured or cooped up. If anything I've had too much free time and have had to give myself jobs to do. That said, I'm encroaching quite heavily into my savings for the first time which isn't a major problem but is rather annoying (the wifi network I have planned for the house will have to go on hold, as will those new socks I was thinking about...). I'm thinking full time again, and I'm thinking bookshop. Chum Andy was bemoaning how it's all just till monkey work these days and while I would have resented that a year or so back it doesn't seem so bad these days. Most importantly I'd be working with interesting people I can relate to.

Anyway, I've got a couple of cash-in-hand jobs lined up and some web projects to finalise before I do anything rash and become a Christmas temp. After that there's always the option of doing 4 day weeks which would probably bring in as much cash as I'm getting now. Something to ponder.

So I'm working this 6am - 2pm shift this week at the car factory. After four hours sleep last night I do the shift and find myself pretty dead by the end, so I come home, watch a DVD and crash out at five setting my alarm for midnight. Around eight I wake up and doze until ten. Figuring that I'm not actually getting any sleep and I do have stuff to do (check out BugPowder for major postage from myself today) I get up and crack on. It's now getting close to 2am and I'm starting to feel a little tired but I can't sleep because I have to leave for work at five. Halfway through the working day I'm probably going lose it which wouldn't normally be a problem except this current job involved screwing cover plates onto engine motors and is somewhat precision dependent.

This has happened before. While I don't really have a sleep pattern I do tend to wake up in the evening no matter how tired I am. Conversely I tend to get sleepy in the morning no matter how much sleep I've had.

Typical really. I decide I'm not going to write about work anymore and I start writing about work. A few interesting comments today. Firstly I was asked, in a friendly way, if I was of Mediterranean descent, which was kinda flabbergasting. I'm not an expert on my family history in all branches but I'm pretty sure it's al tediously northern-European, at least for the last 4 or 5 generations. I'm not even that well tanned this year, having had few outdoor jobs, so god knows where the guy (north-African Arabic as it happens) got that idea from. Easy to chalk it down to basic fuckwittage but I've never really had my ethnicity questioned before. The factory is very multi-cultural and not in that subtle racist way I've seen where the white guys supervise the black guys - everyone's mixed in so I guess where your family is from, be it Nigeria or Sutton Coldfield, is a regular talking point.

Later, and again in a friendly way, it was pointed out that I didn't really belong there, the question being why was someone like me doing a job like this. This seems to be happening a lot lately so maybe I'm giving off some "I don't belong here" vibes without realising it. Doubly odd as I was thinking I could hack this job for a month or so (once I get used to the stupid shifts...). I rattled out the usual answer - I don't want a full-time job, I have no family commitments so I can live off less, I like being able to take time off when I want, that kind of stuff, but that just reinforces the fact that I'm really just passing through.

Finally, and in a departure from the usual "are you a student" line, I was asked if I was an artist because I looked like one. Bear in mind I'm wearing an old t-shirt and a pair of paint-splattered combats which I think make me look like a labourer. Maybe they actually make me look like an artist or maybe I'm just giving off some kind of bohemian aura. I was slightly chuffed at this, to be honest, but then I've dressed like this for years and tend to hang out with artists be they in comics or music. It'd be more interesting if I got this response wearing company overalls but they generally don't give them to temps.

This 6am-2pm shift is really doing my head it and it's not just me. The full-timers hate it too but it's probably the only way you can divide the day into three shifts, 6-2, 2-10 and 10-6, and still have people able to get to work via public transport. As expected I was knackered a few hours into work and the time dragged like an old dog. I felt as if I would fall over at times with sheer exhaustion just from standing there (no sitting even when the production line crawls to a halt) but made it to the end of the day. Then, on getting home, I kinda woke up a bit and did some emailing, finally crashing at 5pm. Despite only having had 8 hours sleep since Sunday afternoon I woke up at 9pm again because that's what my body does. Today (being Thursday, I think) is going to be nasty...

Observation at work in the car factory. While the majority of men there are of all shapes and sizes the team leaders can be identified on sight by the largeness of the shoulders. Not just big shoulders but thick necks and a large, puffed out chest. Seeing them all together in the office is quite daunting. I wonder if it's a pre-requisite to promotion?

There's something quite critical that never gets mentioned in the "file sharing is killing music no it's not yes it is no it's not yes it is" debate. If you work in pretty much any large factory or office in the UK there will be a person there who will sell you a DVD of a recently released movie months before it hits the shops for £3 and any mainstream music CD you want for a couple of quid, in a case with a colour cover. Now, given that there are rather more people working in these sorts of places than there are with broadband connections and a working knowledge of peer-to-peer networks, and that actual money is being made from the former while the latter are giving the stuff away for free (or sharing, as we like to call it), you'd think there'd be a bit more noise being made by the record industry, perhaps demanding that employers stop this illegal activity going on in their workplaces and getting the police to infiltrate the canteens and use CCTV footage to prosecute the dealers.

I've been wanting to write about this for ages but at first I thought I might be getting someone in the shit. Now I've seen it going on again and again in every place I've worked this year. This is bigger than the VHS pirates of the 80s, beyond the dodgy bloke at the car boot sale. This is utterly mainstream. If anything's going to hit high street sales this is it.

Maybe I'm missing something here, I dunno...

This week I'm working in another warehouse. Warehouses always fascinate me. They're basically really big metal tents erected in car parks which lorries drive into. The lorries, which thunder past you when you're cycling to work, suddenly seem really small. In fact everything seems really small. It's really hard to conceive of anything else being in a warehouse other than forklifts, pallets, wire cages and other miscellaneous things to do with the distribution of goods. I often look at a room and think how I might live in it or turn it into some kind of studio or gallery or something but a warehouse is just on such a massive scale that anything normal, anything to do with living, just doesn't fit.

Anyway, again I'm doing a job which sits on the periphery of the consumer society. This time it's the arse end of catalogue shopping where the returns come in and are sorted before going back to wherever they come from. The lorry's that make the deliveries come in with bags full of stuff from three major catalogues (and their subcontracted clients). These nicely correspond to three social stratas of society. The first is pretty lower class and accounts for the minority of returns. The second is kinda lower-middle and has a fair number of returns. The third is of the classy middle class high street variety, the sort where if someone said "where did you get that shirt" you'd say "oh I got it from catalogue" with a slight sense of pride. These accounted for the vast majority. Either this third catalogue has a massive market share, and to be honest I don't know but I suspect it doesn't, or its customers are quite happy to abuse the returns policy and game the system to their own benefit.

So the poor abuse the benefits system, the rich abuse the tax system and the middle class abuse the retail system. All are as bad as each other but the middles do produce a lot of waste (plastic packaging, trucks on the road, my time).

I'm loading a pallet onto the shrink-wrapping machine and the radio news catches my ear. I turn to the guy in the booth. You what? "Some people are going to be pretty upset about this" he says. Yeah, me being one of them. As Teenage Kicks starts it's unexpected stint as most playlisted song of the day I find myself slightly stunned, unable to compute this information. He'll never broadcast again. I'll never hear his show live again. Kids discovering music now and in the future will not have his guiding voice. It's over and it's too early, far too early.

I continued my work in a daze, making little mistakes and bumping my pallet truck into things, as it sunk in. I sent a couple of text messages to people I guessed hadn't heard and got bemused replies. Is this a wind up? A little later some guy is singing raucously along to Teenage Kicks obviously oblivious to why it's being played. That phrase, "some people are going to be pretty upset about this" is flowing through my mind. I'm probably the only person in this warehouse who's affected by the news.

I can't remember when I first heard his show. It was probably around 1989. I was 17, had just discovered The Pixies and was making up for some seriously lost time music-wise. Up until then my music taste had been pretty terrible, growing up in Croydon and listening to Capital Radio. As I moved to Winchester Radio One moved to FM and became my chosen station. At the time he was playing music in trios. A guitar track, a dance track, a world track, a guitar track and so on. I loved the guitar stuff, hated the dance stuff and was bemused by the world stuff, but I stuck with it. Soon I came to tolerate and eventually love the whole show, which is kind of the point.

Throughout the 90s I tended to be the only person in my immediate group of friends that listened to him. As time has progressed this has changed as when that identification is made one tends to have made a friend for life and this evening nearly every weblog I read has a post like this on it. I don't think he has fans as such or followers. Rather he made a certain frame of mind acceptable and this, I think, is his real legacy.

In fact I'll go out on a limb and say it's not really about the music. The music is a conduit for something else, something quite intangible which I think comes down to that fucked up sense of juxtaposition he imposed on us. He made having an open mind cool, which is saying something when you think about it. Once you'd accepted that you could listen to every form of every form of music and appreciate it on its own merits then you could apply this to everything else in life. Any form of creative endeavour is worthwhile. The fact that someone, anyone, is doing something different and interesting becomes vital.

On the whole fans (for want of a better word) of him tend to be sensitive folk who just want things to be nice, who feel beaten down by the relentless enforcement of mediocrity. He not only provided a place on the radio for us to retreat to, his spirit encouraged others to do the same. Every small club, fanzine, website, setup of any description that implicitly encourages people to just do stuff owes him a debt, and they know it. The generation, generations really, that grew up with him learned something important and it stuck with them. We're the ones who smile when we see enthusiasm, who know that there is so much more to life. We're the ones who get it.

John Peel, thank you.

This happened last Tuesday, but so did something else so I wrote about that instead. Even so, it's worth recording.

A year ago, when bluetooth was just breaking out into the mainstream I saw a truck driver with a wireless bluetooth headset clamped to his ear connected to his mobile phone. A few months before that, when cameraphones were just breaking out into the mainstream, most of the bin men I was working with had one, though they didn't really know what to do with the pictures once they'd taken them.

Today I was sitting in the canteen at work and I heard a baby crying, which was out of place to say the least. Looking to my side I saw a man and two women from the cleaning staff watching a home movie, with sound, on one of their mobile phones. And not just a 10 second clip - it went on for a good five minutes. It wasn't the technology that surprised me though. It was how utterly normally they treated it, like it was nothing special to have a digital video camera and television in the palm of your hand. You expect hip young urban professionals to have this type of kit and to make a fuss about it but when perfectly ordinary people are using this level of technology as a perfectly ordinary part of their perfectly ordinary lives then I suddenly become aware that truly I am living in the future.

Or that mobile phone companies are seriously fucking with people's sense of priority.

The dispute between Pakistan and India over Kashmir is, in part, over resources, namely a river which provides water to a significant area of Pakistan. Control over the source of this river is tantamount to control over the lives of millions.

From the same guy, living under a military dictatorship in Pakistan is not that bad and actually preferable to democracy. The political class has an international outlook and is more easily influenced by outside interests while the military is composed of ordinary Pakistanis who have the welfare of their country at heart. When they've dabbled with democracy life hasn't been that great. Concession that their dictatorship is a nice one and should a nasty one come along democracy might be preferable, but in a new country like Pakistan (only 40 years old) maybe they're just not ready for democracy.

From a different bloke, women just aren't to be trusted, and a woman told him this herself. They can't help themselves and don't realise they're doing it when they marry you for your money and take it all away. Case proven by his son, in his 20s, who isn't interested in getting a girlfriend because all his mates have been fucked over by their birds. Long story followed about him helping a mate with his HND maths module and when his mate passed his dad bought him a Porsche. Mate goes on holiday for three weeks and lends son the car as thanks. Son decides to prove something to his mother who's worrying about him not meeting girls and goes out with car bringing back three women over three nights. Announces to mother than they weren't interested in him, only the car and the assumption that he was loaded.

Cat Stevens was really popular before he went Muslim, not that going Muslim is a problem or anything, but he was. [The next day I'm presented with a CDR of his album "Remember". It's kinda shit.]

Car factories have closed and are in trouble because of a lack of investment which leads to inefficient practices like assembling a car in one place, adding a few final bits in another place and then bringing it back to the first place to dispatch it. The Japanese have the right idea. [I'm not sure what idea the Japanese have.]

Quality control is really odd but kinda makes sense. The assembly company, whose warehouse we're in, would like to do their QC in house but this would lead to them cutting corners to save money and their customers, the car companies, prefer that they outsource it to the company we're working for. It's in the interests of this company to be extra thorough and take its time in order to charge the assembly company more, which is why we're sometimes given 4 hours worth of work and subtly told to make it last eight, and we have to make it last as the supervisors of the assembly company are watching us what with their office facing directly at where we're working.

Some rugby player punched some football player and that was funny.

Like I said, things I've been told at work.

Over the last year or so of temping I've lifted a number of momentos including a wide range of gloves. I've stuck this composite photo on Flickr with explanatory notes.

After posting those photos of my gloves I went to a job assembling large metal doors where they didn't provide me with gloves and now my hands really really hurt a lot, which is kinda ironic I guess. Interesting observation - they had things that were powered by the wrong sort of source. A forklift truck was fueled by gas, in that it had a tank of the kind you find in a heater and the exhaust smelt, well, like a gas heater, and the electric screwdriver wasn't electric - it was powered by compressed air. All very odd.

This happened a couple of weeks ago and I forget to mention it. At work I was stuck with this annoying guy. He wasn't annoying in a really bad way, but I wasn't looking forward to working with him for another day. He had that inane chatty thing going on and after a while the desire to shout "oh, shut the fuck up!" was overwhelming. And it wasn't me being in a bad mood or anything - I'd been having a really interesting chat with this Pakistani kid about all manner of stuff - this guy was just a jerk. Towards the end of the day it emerged that he was from Zimbabwe so in an attempt to maybe have an interesting conversation I brought up the subject of Robert Mugabe. Bad move. He starts ranting about how all the Zimbabwean exiles and asylum seekers are "fakers" who are "lying". However, he offers no proof (or if he does it's garbled with incoherence) and a prejudice is settling in my mind. You see, I don't really have a strongly held opinion about Zimbabwe. I know the situation there is pretty fucked and that Mugabe is if not a bad man then certainly a certifiable nut-job, but in my limited experience of African politics these things are much more complicated than they first appear with many historical post-colonial factors and so on. However, what this jerk didn't know is that a while back I was working with another Zimbabwean who was in exile enjoying asylum in this country. Only this guy was not a jerk. We talked about stuff including his strong desire to "go home" at some point and when the job finished we went to the pub.

So, based on this limited experience I'm falling in with the opposition. I know this is somewhat glib decision on what for some people is a very important issue, but this guy was such a toss-bag, y'know?

All this email spam for Rolex watches is just so retro. They'll be spamming for 8-tracks next.

Had something of a the writers block this last week, which happens. Often. I did go see The Incredibles and recommend it to everybody for all the reasons you've already heard. Monologuing... Heh... And I got that fluey virus that just everybody who's anybody has been having of late which was kinda annoying because apathy, lack of motivation and a sniffle are just such unusual symptoms for me.

Agency work has been minimal - two days last week, one day this week - and it doesn't look like it's going to get better before the new year so I've taken the plunge and done a Hire Me page. I've got a couple of leads for some web design work and now I've got something to show them. This could prove rather effective as a week or so of web-work will garner the same cash as a month of temping and I'm sure, if it pans out, I'll look back and wonder why I didn't do it earlier. And then I'll remember the apathy and lack of motivation...

Anyway, let me know what you think of the page (by email rather than in the comments please).

When I wasn't virusing I bashed together Imagesmith, a little site for my mate Kath who's making a go of freelance photography. It was quite an interesting experience as she didn't like my original idea and I didn't like her idea and because she's a mate I told her so, but eventually we went with her idea, because it's her site, with a few of my ideas in the mix and I think it's worked out okay. The back-end was fun to play with, integrating Javascript rollovers with Movable Type. I'll maybe write it up later.

And also on the webmaster side I moved my mum's Yoga site over to a new domain because we'd been meaning to for a while but mainly due to her free OneTel webspace had become FTP-inaccessible for some reason OneTel can't figure out and the info thereon was getting out of date. The only problem is Google still loves the old site and despite indexing the new one hasn't ranked it so high. So if you have a weblog that Google likes and want to do my mum a favour...

I've been thinking a lot these last few months about all this temp work I've been doing for the last year and a half, usually in the form of "why the fuck am I still temping after a year and a half?" I seem to be in something of a groove at the moment - bills need to be paid so I temp, but to actually go and get a permanent full time job (or even a permanent part time one) just seems a leap too far. But I do think that's what I need for a bit. We'll see how this develops.

Today was, somewhat tediously, another of those "what the fuck am I doing here?" days. I was sent by the agency to a tyre warehouse in Aston to assist in the unloading of a large delivery of tyres. Interestingly they not only wanted someone who could physically unload tyres from a truck for eight hours (which I can, however unbelievable people who knew me a couple of years back might find that) but also someone who was a bit "switched on". This was odd because most of the other people who worked there were idiots. Utter morons.

And as I'm standing there watching these baboons exist in front of me, I'm thinking back to this time last Spring when I had a fair bit of temping under my belt, wondering if it's just me getting less tolerant or if I seem to be working in places where the full timers really are offensively stupid. And looking at it as objectively as I can, I don't think it's me.

Thinking about it a little more I remember that, on the whole, the agency didn't get me much work close to home for the first few months. I'd often be working in the centre of town or at the NEC or somewhere in the South or East that required two bus journeys. Then, last summer, I started getting work on the industrial estate near Perry Barr, which wasn't so bad as the people who worked there came from all over. Just lately though I've been getting work very close to home, and home, as you might well know by now, is Kingstanding, and for a quick primer in all that is Kingstanding I refer you to this and then this, with the rider that while it isn't actually that bad there's a hell of a lot of truth there. Okay, it is that bad. When the National Front sticker you noticed on a lamp post by the bus stop (so not exactly out of the way) is still there a week later perfectly intact, you know there's something ugly going on under the surface.

The difference between a factory in Banbury (where I worked for a bit in 2003) or the rest of Birmingham and one down the road is stunning. Only when you've been in the same warehouse as the miscreants who live around here for a day or two can you really understand the frightening truth behind the ever-so-amusing term Chav and realise that it's all true. All of it.

But I'm digressing, and meandering, and I apologise, unless you like that kind of thing, which I do when others do it, but I understand if you don't.

Actually, if you do like this sort of thing I heartily recommend Billyworld. He's a master, and I mean that in the best possible way.

But I have to get to bed. Got to be at a car factory in Solihull tomorrow for 7.30am. At least I know the people there won't be utter gits, which is something.

(Oh, the tyre warehouse was in Aston, which would invalidate my point were it not that when the biggest idiot of all asked me where I was from and I said Kingstanding he replied "Kingstanding's cool" and I knew, right there and then, where the day was going.)

Today I had fun exploring the minor specialist bus routes of Birmingham. This was not a planned activity - it just kinda worked out that way.

I'm currently working at the Land Rover factory in Solihull. I don't usually name the places I'm working at but given the size of this place to say "car factory" and "Solihull" and expect to remain obscure is pointless. This place is huge, about the size of a small town. Imagine the largest urban industrial site you can think of and triple it. This is bigger. And other than that I'm slightly reticent to talk about it. They have a quite aggressive no-photos policy there so I don't think they'd take too kindly to me rambling on about how the production line works online. So instead I'm going to talk about my bus journey.

To get there I usually take the number 57 which winds it's slow way up through Small Heath and along the Coventry Road. This morning, however, a bus was sitting at the stop in Moor Street with the number 850 on the front. I've not seen a bus numbered in the 800s before and other that being as curious as you can be about a strange bus at 6.45am having had only four hours sleep, I just assumed it wasn't for me. Then I noticed the destination, which of course I can't exactly remember now, but it was definitely "Works something". There are many strange place-names in Birmingham (Nechells, Washwood, Gilbertstone, Queslett, Tat Ban and the quite fruity Walmley Ash, to picks some at random from the A-Z) but nowhere called Works. Could it be a special service timetabled to coincide with the starting of a new shift at the Land Rover factory, rather like those extra busses that don't run in school holidays? It could indeed, and so I got on it (with some trepidation as the driver was visibly very tired and might have been just saying yes to get me out his hair before driving me to some other Works on the opposite side of town). The funny thing is, there were only four people on the bus. It took exactly the same route as the 57 only it stopped at the factory gates which are about a mile from the terminus of the 57, so I'm guessing a 57 had just departed taking everyone else on it. On the plus side it was a really old bus which meant it had radical things like leg room and relatively comfortable seats. I shall try and catch it tomorrow if only to find out what the destination is called.

The end of the day is always a challenge as you try and figure out where you are in relation to the entrance. Since the plant is basically a mile long stretch of huge anonymous grey warehouses (the largest half a mile long) surrounded by loads of roads that twist and weave, getting your bearings is kinda impossible and the last two times I'd been there it'd taken me a good 20 minutes to get off site. Today I got a lift from a co-worker, a genial chatty bloke, who dropped me and another co-worker off at the entrance. On the wrong side of the plant. A mile away from the bus stop. As the crow flies (remember the windy roads).

However, all was not lost. We spotted a bus stop and tried our luck, which appeared to be in. Here was another Works-specific terminus for the somewhat randomly numbered A6 service. This one is a bit more regular, running mornings and afternoons from the plant to Solihull then on to Kings Heath and was, again, a really old bus. It wound a long route through the housing estates around the plant before suddenly appearing in Solihull town centre which I'd forgotten was so close. Two more busses and I was home in a little over two hours. I do try to limit my working in Solihull as much as possible.

I've been thinking about basically ripping off Diamond Geezer and taking a ordinary but odd bus journey somewhere in Birmingham and this could be the perfect filter through which to do it...

That nice Mr Bagnall sent me a copy of his new comic today, which was super nice of him, but in the letter said "Happy New year! Though reading your recent blogs it doesn't sound that happy - hope things improve." Actually, it's been pretty good, or at least no worse that usual. The temping has been a little trying, but that was only a couple of days out of the ten we've had so far this year. I just wanted to get that Wankers thing out of my system.

Anyway, thanks to 5am wakeups for the Solihull commute I'm too pooped to write anything decent tonight. I'm taking tomorrow off to recuperate and maybe start a new project (though that's jinxed now I've mentioned it...) but in the meanwhile a brief anecdote.

At the Land Rover plant I'm doing a job that involves checking something electrical on the vehicles. On one of them the battery dies at an inopportune moment so I have to go get a supervisor. He comes out and confirms the deadness of the battery with the line:

"It's flatter that a witch's tit."

Which, given the tedium of my day, had my brain spinning for hours. Flatter than a witch's tit? Does that mean something can be as cold as a pancake? Do witch's generally have flat chests? And why are witch's tits cold anyway? is it a skyclad thing?

Thinking it through, as I was, excessively, he obviously wanted to say something crude about the flatness of the battery and "pancake" was blatantly not crude enough. There's nothing manly about comparing things to pancakes after all. So, in the spur of the moment he reached for the nearest metaphor and, possibly because it is rather cold out it being January and all, stumbled upon Wiccan mammaries.

So, if you wanted to comment of the flatness of something and wanted to be crude with it, what metaphor would you use?

Right, since I'm stumbling in blogblock land temporarily, time to dust off that story I promised you about the utterly absurd job what I did just before Christmas. It's a long one, I warn you.

Well, I had a full week of work all sorted, but then my back went, which is really annoying after weeks of not having the work I wanted. It's not the end of the world as I appear to have a full five days next week, but even so. I was trying to figure out why I suddenly had this not incapacitating but still rather uncomfortable pain in my middle back muscles given that on Wednesday and Thursday I didn't do anything particularly hefty. It was all rather puzzling until I realised it was because I'd been stretching in many different and unusual ways. On Monday morning I was at the shitty metalworks assembly place down the road stripping large sheets of sticky back plastic off large sheets of metal, which involved a pulling my arm from an stretched out position in front of me to one behind. When I do this movement now pain jolts painfully. On Monday afternoon I was then cleaning the residue acid off these sheets of metal (we're talking lemon-juice strength in case you're worried) with alcohol-soaked clothes with a sideways wiping action. On Tuesday I was back there cutting large pieces of, I dunno, spongy plastic sheets with a cottony-type backing I guess, into 6 ft long strips using a stanley knife, then gluing them onto large 6ft long pieces of steel. This involved a number of moves. First the cutting motion, then the lifting of the steel onto the table, then the application of the evil glue using a roller, then the lowering of the finished product back onto the floor. On Wednesday I was at the Land Rover factory doing an inspection job on the line which involved getting in and out of about 200 cars. Nothing too hard but firstly I'm not used to getting in and out of cars and secondly there's a fair bit of twisting involved, especially as I was never actually sitting properly, just perched there with one leg hanging out while I leaned over to tick a box on a piece of paper stuck in the window. On Thursday it was the same and I started to feel a little tired, like I was coming down with some kind of flu and my body was aching. On the bus home I couldn't get comfortable. Okay, that's not news, but every time I shifted the pain came. Today I was supposed to be working at an art print warehouse in Erdington, the same company I worked for in May last year only they've relocated. I was going to cycle down there, not out of choice really (having gotten caught in a torrential storm the other week I decided not to cycle again until the spring) but because getting the bus would take far too long, but when I woke up at 4am with the damnable pain I figured, nah. Lifting stuff just ain't the right thing for me to be doing right now, and cycling with a fucked back is just not a good idea. So I phoned in before the agency office opened and left a nice message.

So it's DVDs and AVIs for me today (did you know you can Torrent the Daily Show?) and a nice flat hard floor. I think it's just bruising, nothing more serious, and should be cleared up by tomorrow. And I just heard I'm going to the art-print place after all on Monday for a full week. Which is good as it'll be a little more civilised than I've been used to of late. The only thing that's worrying me is this time last year it snowed, really badly (remember?) and I'm going to be cycling about 10 miles there and back. Ah well!

Slept in a little bit not feeling too keen to phone the agency and put my self down for more work and a text came through asking me to call about a job in Perry Barr. I stagger downstairs and make the call. It's the council depot. I'm working on the street cleaning, flytip clearing, little picking again. For three weeks starting tomorrow.

Yay!

(If you don't get the Yay you're obviously new round here)

Weird thing is, I last did this job exactly one year ago. Odd that.

Update: Just had another call cancelling the job - they've transfered someone internally so don't need me. Cockteasers.

Had my first ever migraine today. Well, when I say migraine it wasn't one of those monstrous blindingly agonizing bastards that unfortunate people get struck down with but I did have the band of pain running from temple to temple across my eyes and while it was relatively mild I had a taste of what a migraine can be. Only a taste mind.

The funny thing is, it was a repetitive strain injury. I got an RSI headache.

This job I've been doing for what seems like months but is really only for days last week and three this week looks like lasting many more weeks, which is quite depressing as, as I've mentioned before, it's the dullest. Pick up thing, look at thing, put thing back. 160 things in a tray, three trays in a box, 32 boxes on a pallet, a little over one pallet processed a day, seven pallets to go.

What we're looking for is bad soldering. If you rip open your computer (not right now) and look at the larger things that are stuck on the circuit board, particularly those which are cylindrical, you'll see they're attached by two or more metal prongs. Where these prongs meet the cylinder there's a blob of solder. People like me make sure that solder is there. Aren't we great?

So I'm picking these things up and holding them close enough to check the solder. This involves focusing on the tray, then pulling into macro mode for the solder, and back to the tray again. And this happens, let's see now... 15,360 things per pallet with four of us working... I reckon about 4000 times a day. After the second day I noticed it was taking a little while for my depth of field to recover. Today I started getting the pain.

So I went home a little early (the pain was only there while I was doing the close-ups so cyling wasn't a problem) and called the agency to let them know that I might not be there tomorrow. To be honest I'll probably be fine but a day of rest would probably be a good idea. Plus I do have some things I need to do...

I'm worked with some strange characters over the years, but this guy took the biscuit. It started on Tuesday. Two of the regulars had called in sick, one with a toothache, the other with "swollen feet". One of the replacements was Keith. He seemed nice enough, if a little chatty, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. Because he was so chatty we got his life story, and here it is.

About 18 months ago Keith met a Romanian girl. I'm not sure how, but he did. They fell in love and she moved over here with him. Thing is, she was a girl of expensive tastes, always wanting jewelrey and the like and demanding to stay in expensive hotels. She also had a family back home - her brother and mother - who needed money because they were poor. A new bath to replace the tin they washed in, that sort of thing. Keith, because he was in love, obliged. A few months later he went over to Romania and was greeted by a lovely house with a luxury bathroom. Other things didn't quite add up and he went to the police. They showed him mugshots of the girlfriend, brother and mother and told him he'd been had. The brother was her pimp. They were sucking him dry.

A very quick one because I am very tired.

Back to temping today for the first time in months.

Office job on telephones. Haven't had an office job, let alone one involving telephones, for at least two years.

Job involves phoning people to check they still need medical equipment that has been loaned to them.

First stage is checking the database to make sure they're not dead already.

When phoning them they quite often turn out to be dead anyway as the database isn't that accurate.

Only in the wacky world of temping...

After three days getting up a 6am to catch a bus to Erdington to lug boxes around for eight hours before traveling all the way back to Bournville, I was, well, shattered would be a word for it. The job itself wasn't that bad - I quite like lugging boxes as a form of exercise, though the guy I was working with was a miserable bastard with a black heart so that was kinda exhausting. He wasn't a bad man, in fact he was pretty generous and his back heart was in the right place, but he was bitter and twisted and he liked me so I was stuck with him and his moanings, which made me all moany and complainy which is never good, especially when my defenses were weakened by the number 11 bus. So we shall speak of it no more.

On Wednesday night, having decided enough was enough and that I wouldn't be going back, I returned home to a big Amazon box. It was finally here. Once my tax rebate cheque cleared I'd ordered a Fuji Finepix S7000 from Amazon which had caused my bank to go into spasms as it was the largest sum I'd spent on my card since neolithic times which then led to my first experience of phone banking ("I'm phoning India and this isn't a problem... I'm phoning India and this isn't a problem... Christ alive, I'm phoning India!") to unfreeze everything, and here it was, all lovely and new and with a respectably large instruction manual which was digested with glee all evening, the bad vibes of the week to date suddenly banished.

This morning I'd arranged to meet Andy and Alex at a local cafe for breakfast at ten but the knackerdness of the past few days had caught up with me and I was woken at ten by Alex's text telling me they'd be a little late so I rushed down to the Last Chance Cafe in Stirchley on what was an uncommonly warm October morning. The greasy spoon was suitably greasy and full of men in hi-viz jackets. I'm at work, my sleepy brain said, and I ordered the Full English and waited. No sign of Andy and Alex. I ate my breakfast (not bad but nothing to write home about) in the slightly bizarre cafe (rockabilly theme with random kitsch on the walls in such magnitude it transcended mere kitsch and came out the other side) with still no sign. Breakfast finished I phoned Alex. They were in a different cafe on Bournville lane that I'd never noticed was there despite the massive "Cafe" painted on the wall. So I trundled over there for another cup of tea and to show off my camera. "Have you given her a name?" asked Alex. "I don't think it's a girl" said Andy as the somewhat phallic lens extended. For future reference their breakfast was judged better than mine.

We then wandered up to the deli on Linden Road and I continued up to Cotteridge to loop around back down through Stirchley to try out the camera. I'd noticed a load of interestingly crap shops from the top deck of the bus and they were indeed interesting even at ground level. By the time I got back to base I'd taken over 100 photos, 26 of which you can see here.

All of them were taken on automatic with no fiddling about. I did play with the zoom a fair bit because, hell, I've never had a zoom before. Zoom rocks the fucking bollocks! I was a bit concerned about camera shake but they all came out crystal clear, most astonishingly this leaf which was taken from about three metres away. I'm not sure I can give an honest review of the S7000 because my experience has been like moving from an 100cc moped to a Ducatti but I'm incredibly impressed with the handling and control it gives, not to mention the quality of the shots. It's also worth noting that while most of my photos with the old digicam have been carefully tweaked in Photoshop these hardly needed anything.

But what of the Nikon, you might be asking. Well, I got my first batch of slides developed and scanned about half of them in using a dedicated slide scanner and I'm not overly impressed. Yes, I know it takes time to get the manual exposure right, yes, I know I shouldn't be overly critical of my first attempts, and yes, I know it's a wonderful piece of kit with great potential, but it seems like a backward step with far too much hassle involved. Once I get some time I'll have a hack at the photos in Photoshop to see if any are worth making public and once I've had a play with the manual controls on the S7000 (yes, it does fully manual exposure and focus) I may return to film just to see. But right now digital rules. Enormous potentials have opened up and I'm keen to explore them.

(In case you're wondering, the camera is a joint family combi birthday/Xmas present so thankyou mia famiglia!)

First up, I figured out why I dislike traveling on the number 11 bus so much. (You'll recall this is the Birmingham Outer Circle bus route which trundles around the suburban sprawl of this great city in a little over two hours, if you're lucky.) It occurred to me while coming home that I've never seen these busses bunched up in groups of two or three, a common occurrence with routes in and out of the city centre, and then I realised why. They stick to a very strict timetable which seems to assume the worst. This means they are rarely late but the flipside is that when traffic conditions are good (which they usually are when I travel thanks to my early starts) they have to slow down to make sure they're not early. The usual tactic to prevent rampant earliness is to stop for a few minutes at key bus stops, which is kinda irritating when you're in a bit of a hurry, but this isn't enough for the 11 so the drivers meander along at a speed not dissimilar to a motorised wheelchair, lending an air of endless purgatory to the occasion.

So anyway, having been offered and turned down numerous jobs when I was ill, some of which were pretty keen and in one case terrifically local, I of course had nothing last week and was getting somewhat desperate. December is always a dry time for industrial temping (the factories shut down for Xmas so the supply chain grinds to a halt) and if I'd thought things through I would have worked solidly through October and November and done GDFAF now, but I don't think things through because spontaneity is good and I am stupid. But I finally got the call from Wide-Boy Tim at the agency with some work and somewhat amazingly it's a job I've never done before. For this weekend and every weekend up to the new year I shall be a car park attendant in Solihull.

Possibly the best thing about the job is the jacket. As you know, I've become something of an aficionado of high visibility clothing and have acquired quite a collection of waistcoats, but I've never worn a jacket quite like this. You probably know the sort - a large padded waterproof jacket commonly worn by persons working in out-door traffic related activities that don't involve a lot of movement. I'd suspected they might be warm but never imagined how comfortable they are. It's like wearing a perfectly tailored duvet, snug but not restrictive, large but not balloon-like and quite sleekly cut. At the end of the day I put on my own padded US Army issue extreme cold weather parka and it utterly paled in comparison. I covet this coat. I need this coat. Unfortunately it's got a huge Solihull council logo on the back so even if I do manage to "acquire" it I can't really wear it in public, but they do sell them at the army surplus store. That said, I was told to write my name in it so when the job is over, who knows...

My job is to support the full time guys during the busy pre-Xmas period. Part of their job is to walk around the car park checking everything is okay, taking abandoned trollies back, checking for lost property and looking disapprovingly at badly parked cars. Probably the main job is just to be a bright yellow presence, deterring the criminal element and making the place seem less like an abandoned concrete maze. Meanwhile the other guys deal with jammed ticket machines, lost tickets and other ticket related traumas, of which there are a lot give the state of most of the customers.

It quickly dawned on me that a multi-story car park central Solihull allows you to experience people at their worst as they move from driving to shopping. Driving turns people into impatient maniacs for whom every second has more value than life itself. Shopping turns people into arrogant tossers who are under the delusion that the world revolves around their solipsistic ego-centric arseholes. And the delightful 1970's decaying concrete environment of the car park offsets this quite nicely. So a one-way system is seen not as a means to ensure smooth traffic flow while keeping pedestrians safe but as an irrelevance, while areas not designated as parking spaces are seen as parking spaces with no thought as to why they might not be designated parking spaces. And the maximum speed limit would appear to be about 30mph.

My induction was somewhat customer oriented, as everything appears to be these days, so on my first few rounds I made eye contact and smiled but was greeted with so much sour-faced bemusement that I gave up and just ignored everyone, which wasn't hard as they were ignoring me. Of course the hi-viz does turn you into invisible street furniture which might explain it but my colleagues expressed similar sentiments about our customers. This, by the way, is why you rarely get good customer service in shopping centres. It's not that the staff are bad people or poorly trained. It's that shopping centres bring out the worst in people and when you're subjected to this day in day out your armor is up and there is no benefit of the doubt. Customers are the enemy and will crush you with their words if you give them half a chance.

Thankfully I wasn't on the receiving end of any of this because my job was simply to walk around the car park every half hour and drink tea. Which, while potentially boring, is actually quite interesting because I'm really getting to know every inch of this car park. It's the sort of public space that people don't generally dawdle in and I'm getting paid to dawdle so I'm seeing it in a new light. I took along my old camera - the compact point'n'shoot with the broken battery lid held on with wire - and am taking photos. So far they're nothing special but I'm hoping by the end of the month I'll have uncovered something, or at least painted a picture of a car park that not many have seen before.

Oh, and I did get to tell someone off today. On one trip I noticed a car parked where it wasn't supposed to be and I sighed, tilting my head to one side as I stared at it, wondering how someone could possibly have thought this was an okay place to park. On my next round the car was still there but someone was walking towards it. I approached her with a smile and told her how wrong she was. She expressed confusion and launched into a long and somewhat surreal explanation of how she thought this was okay because somewhere else was okay which I brushed aside and, after telling her not to worry about it (we don't issue tickets or anything like that) told her her quite sternly not to do it again, which felt really good. With a grin on my space I went back to the office and proudly announced that I'd got one to great cheers from my associates in car park attendance. Unfortunately she was the only catch. I really wanted to get that tosser who parked in the disabled bay without a badge. I mean, what is it with people?

Multi Story Car Park set on Flickr which will be added to over the month.

One of the most thrilling responsibilities of my job as car park attendant (weekends only) is checking the stairwells. I'm checking these for blockages, specifically in the form of teenagers who will use this space for "hanging out" away from the eyes of adults. On my first day I was also informed that shagging had occurred in that very stairwell and was given the impression that this sort of disgraceful activity was a regular thing, but as the weekend passed and I found nobody in there at all, let along anyone contemplating carnality, I began to suspect maybe this was a slight exaggeration. Understandable, really, in that nothing exciting tends to happen in a multi story car park so the story about discovering under age sex was bound to become legend. Especially as there appeared to be only one story and the details were somewhat fluid. Last weekend it was three guys and a girl, this weekend only two chaps were involved. But the punchline remained the same: Car park guy: "What the? Okay, move along now" (or words to that effect). Shagging lad: "Can you wait 'til I've finished mate?"

So on my first day I was gingerly opening the door, wondering what the hell I would do if I stumbled upon such a scene but soon it became part of the routine. But then, on Saturday afternoon, I approached the stairwell to hear voices, so I took a deep breath and entered, whacking the handle of the door right into the back of a teenage girl. Oops. But then what did she expect leaning against a door like that. I was greeted by about nine teens, the girls all dolled up like Lolita and the boys looking quite shockingly ugly, like teenage boys tend to do. Fags and a bottle of Bacardi were being shared and I felt a little sorry for them since this was obviously the only place they could go to share their fags and drink their Bacardi without being bothered. But it was my job to move them on. Initially we had a stalemate with the girl moaning about her probably bruised back and me just standing there, wondering how I was going to shift them, until I realised I was wearing a large fluorescent jacket and therefore represented authority. Plus my being there kinda ruined the whole hiding from adults thing so as long as I didn't leave them I'd win. Eventually, after apologising to the girl and explaining that this was an exit and couldn't be blocked, they asked where they should go, and I was slightly flummoxed. Where could these kids go? I glibly suggested a park bench or bus shelter and a couple of them took the lead and left, saying thanks on their way out. Thanks? What was that all about? I was expecting to be sworn at and maybe subjected to some spit. But then these were Solihull teenagers after all.

The greatest of all possibly disasters than can befall the staff of a municipal multi-story car park occurred today and I, dear reader, played a critical role in dealing with it.

At a little after 1800h the kettle broke.

And I'm sure you can imagine what would have happened should the guys have come in the next morning to find they couldn't make a cup of tea. It would have been... well, I wouldn't like to say.

So after a phone call to the manager of All Car Parks, Solihull, who was at home having his tea, I was dispatched to find a shop that was still open and able to supply us with a new kettle. After a frantic rush around Mell Square (Argos: closed, Boots: no, Dixons: no, Woolworths: yes except we've sold out) I eventually found one in Sainsburys for £5.48.

Phew!

(I've been doing extra days at the car park this week hence the quiet...)

Had an iffy couple of weeks, truth be told. Nothing specific and I'm tempted to just put it down to January and that combination of dreary weather and the niggling feeling, however much you try and rationalise it away, that one should be taking a step back and taking stock of where one sits in the universe which doesn't necessarily paint a pretty picture. Oh, and a singularly massive lack of employment from the agency didn't help, especially as I'd earmarked January as a bank-balance filling month. I'm used to being on standby for work but morning after morning of waiting for the call and then finding myself at a loose end when it doesn't come gets a little dispiriting. Yes, there are plenty of things I could be doing but the drive to do them just isn't there. So very little to report, hence the blog quietness.

I did finally get some work on Friday which should be permanent for the next few weeks, working at a courier depot humping parcels in and out of vans and trucks every evening which, as you might know by now, is pretty much my perfect job. I haven't had a box humping job for what seems like ages and it's great, like a workout only you get paid. Unfortunately it's on the other side of the city but I'm coming to terms with the fact that there's very little industrial work in Bournville (despite living right next to the blimmin' Cadbury factory!). The shift does mean all the gigs I was planing on going to this month have been knocked on the head but, while a bit of a pisser, it's not the end of the world, especially as I'm going to be around for whatever passes for daylight at this time of year. Once my fitness levels build up again (the car park didn't do me any favours in that department) I'll probably start cycling there too, weather permitting, which should get me ready for the Outer Circle Flickr Bike Tour, especially as I suspect it's going to need a number of goes to cover properly.

As for the ennui I'm reluctant to blog a bunch of moaning but at the same time it's probably useful to get this shit out in the open so it's revealed as the pointless niggling it really is, so stand by for that.

So I'm working at a distribution depot for a courier who generally deal in large boxes. The system is very simple. Vans come into the warehouse laden with boxes. We remove the boxes from the vans and throw place them onto a conveyor belt. This leads to a large truck into which they are thrown stacked to be taken to another presumably much larger warehouse where they are distributed around the country. This takes five or six hours depending on the number of boxes. Overnight and into the morning the same procedure happens in reverse, though I have nothing to do with that.

As such there's not much to report other than it's something of an eye-opener seeing how parcels are treated. Or to be more accurate, the minimal levels of packaging people use for fragile items is somewhat shocking. Suffice to say you should always wrap your item with the assumption that it will be thrown a good 10 metres, potentially dropped from a reasonable height and probably stacked under a number of very heavy boxes. And to paraphrase The Incredibles, when everything is marked "Fragile", nothing is considered fragile. And for the record, every parcel-related courier works along these lines. It's how they get them across the country in 24-48 hours.

So anyway, I started this job on Friday and it was okay. The foreman guy asked if I wanted to come back this week and I said yes. He intimated that he wasn't too happy with one of the other temps and it appeared that I'd stolen his job. Go me. On Monday that foreman wasn't there but the guy who I was supposed to be replacing was. Thinking nothing of it I started work. An hour or so in the boss, who wasn't there on Friday, looked at me for a long second and said "I don't know you". Turns out this whole I'm-replacing-someone thing hadn't been communicated to him but he graciously let me finish the shift despite it taking them over their staffing budget. As you might imagine I was rather annoyed from a cash point of view but towards the end he casually told me to come in on Tuesday. As I left I jokingly asked him if he was sure and he said to come in for the rest of the week. Which I've been doing, along with the guy I'm not replacing anymore. I guess the budget has been increased.

Other than that piece of incompetent vagueness which is par for the course in the temping world it's been brought home to me how unfit I've become over the winter. I haven't had a real labouring job for a few months and haven't been cycling a whole lot and, while I'm probably still fitter than most of my peers, I'm well out of practice. As the job is in Perry Barr, exactly the opposite side of the city from Bournville, I'd been getting the number 11 bus which is as tedious as ever so since it wasn't raining I cycled in on Tuesday. 16 miles on the bike and six hours in the depot later I was a physical wreck and felt like shit this afternoon, but I think I'm getting used to it. It always surprises me how quickly the body gets out of shape - like treading water except you don't notice you're drowning...

I am totally fucking psyched! I am the king of box lugging! My body is a powerful machine! I am a god!

The fitness, ladies and gentlemen, is back. After three days of feeling like a relative wimp at the courier depot I was put in the lorry at the end of the conveyor belt to basically fill it up with boxes. The belt is relentless and the boxes are heavy and have to be stacked about 8ft high. Towards the end of Friday's shift I was on fire, hurling 30kg boxes like they were so much candyfloss, and let me tell it, it felt good!

Fuck yeah!

As we were repeatedly informed by the brainless fucktards on BRMB (one of our two equally awful tip-pot local radio stations, the other being Heart) it was (still is) "colder than Iceland!" tonight. Give a moron a phrase like that and they're going to run with it, more's the pity. I somehow doubt in Iceland their broadcasting idiots are chortling about how the weather tonight is "warmer than Birmingham!"

But even in these Icelandic (!) conditions I was standing outside the depot having a fag in my t-shirt, for that is how hard I am right now. Oh yes. Today the blokes scanning and throwing the boxes onto the conveyor belt were working kinda slowly it seemed to me and I was getting well narked. We've been finishing early every day since me and the Polish guy teamed up in the back of the lorry and I don't think that's a coincidence for we rock. Bring it on, I said, but the trickle remained and after three hours they stopped for a break! You what? We don't have breaks here - we go home early! So the Pole grabbed a scanner and we carried on without them, the rubes.

I mean, a break? You don't need a break! Just go and have a fag and cup of tea for five minutes.

Breaks... tchh...

I am totally fucking knackered... I am a physical wreck... My body has more aches than I knew were possible... I am in pain...

The job, ladies and gentleman, has taken it's toll. After an initial burst of godlike magnificence at the courier depot I've started to feel the effects. The 16 mile cycle ride every day and the relentless lugging... On Friday morning I woke up with bruised muscles, a blinding headache and a very sore thumb and let me tell you, it felt awful. Still, I made it to work and home again though I did sleep like a baby last night (and only recovered enough to write this now).

Oooh fuuuuckk....

(Back on Monday!)

Third week at the courier depot completed. Physical state: tired, not wrecked like last time but certainly not godlike. Slight twinge in my back but nothing serious (touch wood). Cycled two days out of five this week, partly to avoid exhaustion and partly because it's really quite bloody cold out there and while I'm not a fair weather cyclist by any stretch it's just not healthy getting sweaty for an hour in freezing conditions. Further to that I've had the snots all week, which has been pleasant. But enough of my relative well being, fascinating as it must be.

Today all the temps got a phone call. You know that scenario where migrant workers in the southern United States are digging a ditch by a freeway and the charge-hand drives up in his pickup with a list of names of who will be coming back the next day? It's a bit like that only it's all done with mobile phones. Polish Rob was the first to get the call before he'd even arrived saying he wouldn't be needed next week. Soon after I got the call saying I would. Which was nice, if a little fucking awkward. Rob was a gentleman about it despite the fact that he'd been there three weeks longer than me and is by far a better box lugger than I. He called me "old man" the other day when my cold was affecting my 3D Tetris skills which was weird and possibly marks some kind of milestone in my life, but I digress.

Rob's a funny one. Like I said, he's one of the many (millions of, apparently) Polish migrant workers in the country at the moment thanks to the country's recent joining of the EU. I remember back when I lived in east London (circa 2002) getting a night bus home and being surrounded by Slavic voices and since the East End has always been the first port of call for immigrant communities it's not too surprising that pretty much every industrial job I've done over the last 6 months has had a Polish guy or two working there.

On the whole I've gotten on with them. Like many immigrants (and I'm aware I'm generalising horribly here but please bear with me - it's either this or I qualify every statement extensively, or just write nothing at all) they're hard working, friendly and shockingly over qualified, which probably explains why I get on with most of them. For example, one guy I was working with at an office supplies dispatch warehouse was wearing a Linux t-shirt so we got talking about open source and computers and stuff which inevitably turned to me asking why he doesn't get some computer related work, with him inevitably replying that his English wasn't good enough for the entry level jobs but that he was trying (and working on his English).

Rob didn't seem to have any particular skills but he had a plan. He was taking English lessons during the day (which continued during our conversations with those awkward questions about how the language works to which native English speakers just shrug because they don't know - it just does, somehow) and working at night, trying to save up enough to get a driving license so he could get a better job so he and his girlfriend could settle down and raise a family. Only he wasn't getting enough steady work to pay for the driving lessons and his relationship with his girlfriend was pretty rocky. And he was tired all the time.

And now he's been told by the gaffers at the depot that, given the choice of four temps from the agency they'd rather not have him. Which, amongst other things, meant the parcels were not gently stacked in the truck this evening.

What's interesting, if that's the right word, is the choice of temps consisted of a white English guy (myself) a black guy, an Asian guy and a Polish guy. I'm as native as it gets in this mongrel nation. The black and Asian guys are probably 3rd generation. Rob's been here for a year at most. Can you see what I'm getting at?

I can only speak from observation and I wouldn't give much weight to my opinions but it seems to me that in the years since I first did the industrial temping game in my early 20s the black and Asian workforce has become a lot more integrated, a least at the manual labour level. In 1994 or so I worked at a factory where the factory floor was entirely staffed by Asians in red hats supervised entirely by whites in white hats while the dispatch area was white only. There was no movement between departments and the whole place stank of some kind of institutionalised apartheid. Conversely in most of the places I work now you'll find a full spectrum of Asian, African, Caribbean and white workers mixing at all levels from shop floor drudgery to lower management (upper management is still the preserve of the overweight middle-aged white man but that's a whole 'nother issue). While I'm not denying the frequent racism that does exist in this country this does strike me as a glimmer of hope for the future.

Except, of course, for the Poles. They're at the bottom.

Haven't written much about work at the depot this last couple of weeks, mainly because it's been very dull indeed. Due to the shifts I very rarely see my housmates and when I do it's about 11pm and they're ready to go to bed so conversations aren't exactly high level. "How was your day?" they ask and I have nothing to say at all.

Since Polish Rob was "let go" I've been working exclusively in the big lorry at the end of the conveyor belt on my own. The boxes come up the belt, I take them off the belt and stack them. As the lorry fills the belt retracts and then I move to the next lorry. They have a capacity of 40 tonnes and while I'm sure I'm not lugging that much weight I am filling an average of three of them in a night. That's a lot of boxes. All the parcels sent from Birmingham as it happens.

While it's tiring work I actually quite like being in the lorry on my own. I can work at my own pace without having to work around someone else's stacking strategy and more importantly I don't have to make inane talk with anyone. We don't go home early like we did when Rob added to the numbers but that's not the end of the world.

We had a staff meeting today. A "WLM" which I assume means "Weekly Line Meeting" but I'm just guessing. The manager wanted to let us air any grievances and issues we might have whilst reminding us not to clamber over the belt like monkeys, especially when visitors from head office were in. It was a nice gesture but it did put us back a good 20 minutes which is not handy when you're on task-and-finish (get paid for the full shift no matter when you complete the job). Amongst other things he said that stacking was really good at the moment. That'll be me then. I guess I should have some pride in that but to be honest I'm just being anal. There are some key rules - heavy at the bottom, light on top, not too high, slot everything in efficiently - and it's satisfying to play by them, especially once you get to know the different varieties of boxes that come down. But of course I don't care because I'll be gone soon. I'm taking a long weekend and in a fortnight I'll be in Winchester helping mum and stepdad put their house in storage and then I have this book to start writing, so someone else will take my place. Maybe they'll also be anal, but they probably won't.

It's interesting how agency workers are such a normal thing in the workplace these days that we get treated as part of the team. They seem to assume I'm going to be there for the next few months if not longer, which many temps are. I once worked with someone who'd been "temping" at the same place for three years with no sign of being taken on full time. They could be let go with a few hours notice with no recourse, which is kinda sucky, but they probably won't because this is how it works these days. It's telling that we're rarely referred to as "temps". It's "agency" with no indication of time.

So I'm something of an anomaly in the agency game. I've been with the agency for nearly two and a half years but I'm definitely a temp. Sometimes I feel I need to remind people of that. I'm a temp, as in temporary, as in probably won't be here in a month's time. By all means make the most of me while I'm here but don't get too comfortable else you'll miss me when I'm gone.

(And no, I'm not boasting. You should see the state of some of my fellow "temps".)

Off to London today, for the first time in ages, and back Monday evening, so no updates (and probably lots of retarded comments on the blog so just ignore them). Busy Saturday at the Celebrating Andy gig/event and Sunday is a Flickrmeet but feel free to text me if you fancy meeting up.

In an effort to swing back into what is commonly known as a "normal" sleeping pattern I stayed up all night last night, settling down with the huge pile of 2000ADs at around 8am to await a call from the Agency. And Lo! One came through at about nine-ish. An intriguing job working in a cemetery doing little picking some gardening, clearing the dead flowers away and maybe some gravedigging. Gravedigging? Now that's something I haven't done before! Only it's in Sutton and not exactly in central Sutton so we're looking at a really long commute, so I turned it down.

An hour later the lovely Ms K phones again with another job. This one's based in the centre of town picking litter and pushing a barrow about the place for the council. Bingo! I love that sort of work! It's a Tuesday - Saturday job. Ah, I've got to go down to Winchester on Saturday to clean my mum's house after the building work. Is that a problem? Not sure. 20 minutes later, yes, it's a problem. Balls.

Around noon and another job, this one at Five Ways at a bank... Oh, I've done that one before. Have you? Yup. 8am start, right?

At least it's work, but damn! I could have been digging graves!

• Steve Wright is a twat. This is not news and I've known it for years, but by god, having had to listen to his inane glorification of the stupid for two days it bears repeating.
• Went to see the CBSO on Thursday. Went in blind and it turned out to be Mahler's Symphony No.2 (Resurrection) which was, well, quite stunning. I particularly taken with the indulgence of the piece, employing a full choir who only sung at the climax. Give that the acoustics in Symphony Hall are spot-on throughout the venue and their cheap seats are only a fiver I must make the effort to go more often. That said, it would be nice to be able to stand. It seems unfair that the only person who's able to dance is the conductor. (Dad's review)
• The office block in which I've been working has, unsurprisingly, reaffirmed my belief that such places are just not good. They had a "dress down Friday" (the irony being I'd made a special effort to wear clothes that weren't really scraggy) combined with a St Patrick's theme. The sight of middle aged women in large green foam hats combining the seriousness of their job with the desire to be wacky is just depressing. Also I noted the number of posters about the place for charity fundraising, none of which were directly connected with poverty. Given that the majority of the building deal with debt collection (resulting from other departments in the company pushing loans onto people who really shouldn't have loans) this was not too surprising, like they're trying to balance out the karma without dealing with the root cause.
• This last fortnight I've been feeling like I'm drowning in half-baked ideas and projects, but I made a list of them and it's not actually that bad. Maybe I'll actually get them done now.
• Oddly, or maybe not, I'm been contemplating putting myself forward for medical trials, the logic being as follows: 1) The noise made over the recent TGN1412 thing implies these things don't go wrong very often. 2) At the same time a significant number of people will be put off applying so they'll be looking for guineapigs. 3) I've been known to spend a couple of weeks feeling grotty and not getting anything done so I might as well get paid for it. 4) A couple of grand would free me up for a month or so of book writing. 5) Blog fodder! (Oh, altruism and for the good of mankind and all that too...)
• It's too fucking cold and I'm sick of it. This better break into Spring soon.

It's funny, I stay up through the night more often than anyone I know but I very rarely get night shift jobs. I had one last night for the first time in ages, back at the courier depot unloading the incoming parcels so they can be delivered all over Brum, and after nine hours of lugging I'm somewhat pooped.

What was really weird was how different the morning felt. When I've pulled an all-nighter at home it's all perfectly normal, but walking through an industrial estate at dawn (and it was a lovely dawn today - shame I don't feel comfortable taking my camera to work...) and getting the number 11 bus just as the commuters and school kids were kicking in was very odd (and really annoying what with the absurd amount of traffic on the Birmingham side streets. I'm so glad I don't have a "normal" job). I guess when I set my own schedule I'm quite segregated from society but in this case the juxtaposition is quite stark. Not in a bad way - I do like night shifts. They seem to go by much faster than day shifts for some reason.

And so I'm off to bed. Enjoy the day.

Some of you might be waiting in anticipation for the latest installment of Pete's Temping Life. I'm sorry to say you won't be getting one for a while, if ever. I've decided to apply for the job I'm currently covering on a permanent basis, which means, if I get it, no more agency work, which means no more writing about the jobs. It's a little hard to explain but it just doesn't seem right revealing stuff about a job I actually have an investment in. So, unless I fail in this application, here endeth the Agency Worker Diaries. Gosh!

I've had reactions possibly boarding on the surprising to the news that I might be getting a permanent job, or at any rate have taken the step of applying for one, thus going against the rules of my employment-related life for the last three years. Whilst I don't want to talk about the job for the same reasons most people don't blog about jobs they actually want to keep, I suppose I can say it's a caretaker position doing odd jobs around the place, so it's no different to a lot of the work I've been doing through the agency, and re-emphasise that it's only four hours a day (though with the higher perm payrate it'll be the equivalent of six through the agency) so it's not like I'm giving up one whatever it is I've been doing and selling my soul to The Man. In fact I see this as helping me to do all that stuff. By getting up at the same time every day I'll have more of a structure of my life (I've already surprised a couple of people by being asleep before midnight) and still have 2pm onwards for my many projects. And it has those cushty benefits like holiday pay and the like which are such a novelty to me these days.

I've been doing the job since last Monday (if I get it permanently that'll start in May sometime) and it has involved a bit of an adjustment. Essentially I now have a very large "evening" and I may have overestimated the potential that affords me. While I am only working four hours it's a fairly intensive four hours coupled with a significant bike ride involving hills (6 miles round trip) and yet in my mind I have this massive expanse of time in which I must get things done resulting in me doing essentially 12 hour days and being surprised that I'm knackered at the end of them. A balance will be found and I think it'll be a good one. Already my weekends are for doing things rather than recovering since the recovery happens on Friday.

One idea that might have to be reconsidered is doing other cash-in-hand (yes, I do declare them) jobs during the week. I popped over to Jez and Nat's new house yesterday to help them shift an inordinate number of bricks which the movers had refused to touch and while it was an okay job on it's own, coming after my normal morning (not to mention cycling from Northfield to Moseley) I was fucking knackered afterwards. That leaflet delivery job I did last year (posts here, here, here and here) is coming up again and I'm having to seriously think about whether or not I can do it. Even spread over two weeks it'll still involve 4+ hours of walking a day and that sort of walking has a tendency to hurt (remember a good walking speed is 4mph). I could bring someone else in on the job but they won't be allowed to fuck up of Nat will never speak to me again. We'll see.

Actually, it was interesting seeing Nat's reaction to the news of my potential job. Everyone else has been fairly positive about it but the look on her face was one of sheer horror. Their new house is lovely (and very, very large) but needs a fair amount of work, a significant proportion of which had been earmarked as "Pete can do that." Suddenly I'm slightly less able to, and that's not a good thing. One forgets the intrinsic value of being someone who is invariably available for odd jobs.