Goodbye to all that
Surely any occupation that you are compelled to attend, day-in day-out, year after year, whether you like it or not, at unnatural and uncongenial times; which, by occupying your time keeps you from what you enjoy; which, whilst being furiously hectic somehow manages also to be boring ...will, eventually, and usually very quickly, become hateful to any rational person. Perhaps, among the professions, it is possible to enjoy and be interested in your work, but, for we bottom-of-the-heap types, forget it. I have eventually hated every job I've had. Ah yes, people point out, as if in mitigation, but we all need the money. Of course ...but that makes it more, not less, annoying. No one likes coercion. Really it's a benign, softcore kind of enslavement, in which you give up half your waking life in exchange for the "freedom" to enrich others by consuming.
There are other ways of exploiting you once you've retired, but at least I'll never again have to set my alarm clock for 4am, or scrape frost off the windscreen at 5:30, or put up with the idiots, cock-ups, failures of communication, ass-coverers, Health & Safety nonsense, or read any semi-literate jargonese ("going forward") about Accountability with Empowerment (surely one inheres in the absence of the other) or, a particular fetish of my late employer, "making the boat go faster".
The photograph, taken in about November 2011, shows me about to load two pallets of the firm's product into the trailer of an articulated lorry. Actually, I'd have loaded the larger pallet and taken the smaller one off again, keeping it aside (with others under the clock) for loading at the rear. Placing small pallets among larger ones is courting disaster, as the larger will probably topple over at the first roundabout down the road from the factory. Pallets should stand shoulder-to-shoulder and support one another. As we see, it was about 6:48 ...in the morning, that is. I'd be here, standing and walking, in a temperature maintained at around 3°C, for another eleven hours and twelve minutes ...every working day for the last eight years. Thank God Almighty I've left it all behind.
Goodbye to all that
Surely any occupation that you are compelled to attend, day-in day-out, year after year, whether you like it or not, at unnatural and uncongenial times; which, by occupying your time keeps you from what you enjoy; which, whilst being furiously hectic somehow manages also to be boring ...will, eventually, and usually very quickly, become hateful to any rational person. Perhaps, among the professions, it is possible to enjoy and be interested in your work, but, for we bottom-of-the-heap types, forget it. I have eventually hated every job I've had. Ah yes, people point out, as if in mitigation, but we all need the money. Of course ...but that makes it more, not less, annoying. No one likes coercion. Really it's a benign, softcore kind of enslavement, in which you give up half your waking life in exchange for the "freedom" to enrich others by consuming.
There are other ways of exploiting you once you've retired, but at least I'll never again have to set my alarm clock for 4am, or scrape frost off the windscreen at 5:30, or put up with the idiots, cock-ups, failures of communication, ass-coverers, Health & Safety nonsense, or read any semi-literate jargonese ("going forward") about Accountability with Empowerment (surely one inheres in the absence of the other) or, a particular fetish of my late employer, "making the boat go faster".
The photograph, taken in about November 2011, shows me about to load two pallets of the firm's product into the trailer of an articulated lorry. Actually, I'd have loaded the larger pallet and taken the smaller one off again, keeping it aside (with others under the clock) for loading at the rear. Placing small pallets among larger ones is courting disaster, as the larger will probably topple over at the first roundabout down the road from the factory. Pallets should stand shoulder-to-shoulder and support one another. As we see, it was about 6:48 ...in the morning, that is. I'd be here, standing and walking, in a temperature maintained at around 3°C, for another eleven hours and twelve minutes ...every working day for the last eight years. Thank God Almighty I've left it all behind.