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Some may well argue that there is little difference between the class 57/3 and the string of skips being towed by the "Young Henry" mechanical horse at London Paddington, but this is still a splendid scene for 2017 in a London Termini! Direct Rail Services 57310 'Pride of Cumbria' stands with the sleeper stock of the 1C99 23:45 London Paddington to Penzance, alongside First Great Western 'HST' 43018, the 1A94 15:59 from Penzance on Friday 22nd September 2017.
© Gordon Edgar - All rights reserved. Please do not use my images without my explicit permission
A well worn 43290 atands in platform 7 at Euston now at the rear of 1Q28 a Derby R.T.C. circular, the chap driving the electric Jungheinrich Electric Tow Tractor busies himself moving a trio of bins.
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.
We've all seen those clips of black-and-white film from the 40s and 50s showing beady-eyed scientists in white coats conducting experiments on lab rats. The rats were kept in clear perspex boxes, which could be assembled in various configurations, linked together and used for simple experiments. They were known, after their inventor, as "Skinner's Boxes". In such an experiment the cage was equipped with a chute and a lever: the rat learned that if he pressed the lever a grape would come down the chute. Once he'd got used to this the apparatus was modified to deliver the grape only once every so often. The rat quickly got wise to this and kept pressing the lever until the reward was delivered. The number of lever-actions required to earn a grape was gradually increased and then became random. The poor old rat never knew when he would get his reward and just kept pressing. Of course, sometimes the rat was sated, or it got knackered and its tiredness prevailed over its hunger. It stopped pressing the lever. But the men in white coats had added a twist: if the rat ceased to press the lever, it was given an electric shock through the floor of the cage. The rat now had to press the lever not to gain something pleasant, but to prevent something horrible. It had to operate its lever faster and faster to prevent the electric shocks.
So why was such an experiment done and what sort of psychopathic pervert would think of subjecting innocent creatures to such treatment? Why were they so interested in the behaviour of rodents? Well, of course, they weren't. What interested them was the extension of their findings to people. You see where this is going? How's your job these days? Are the rewards quite what they were? Increasing or decreasing? Do you find yourself working harder to get them? Are you becoming richer or poorer? Do you feel that you have to tread water faster and faster just to keep your nose above the surface?
You can understand why I'm not looking happy in this "selfie", taken in October 2010, when I still had five years of work ahead of me. How did I manage to see it out? I was working 12-hour days. To start at six I had to get up at four, extending the twelve hours to fourteen. I used to go to bed as soon as I got home and had wolfed down some microwaved ersatz ready-meal for my supper. I'd start reading a book and sometimes, literally, didn't get to the end of the first line of print. But two hours later I'd wake up ...unable to get back to sleep because of anxiety about missing the alarm clock next morning. This was my existence for the last eight years of my working life. I stood on this greasy floor for twelve hours every day in a temperature of 2.5°C, hideously overworked for most of the time. The stress? You've no idea.
G-BWBH Jungheinrich Forklift special shape hot air balloon built by Thunder in 1995 teething at the 2019 Longleat Sky Safari
Taken with a Nikon D90
My sister retired today. She is two years and three months younger than me; I've still got 49½ working days to go ...not that I'm counting or anything. And they say it's a man's world. Fwuh!
I can't bloody-well wait. Since leaving the buses in June 1990 I've done stupid, blue collar, low-paid jobs like this, surrounded during the last ten years by immigrants from eastern Europe (with a smattering from Portugal and Brazil) because our native dossers are unwilling to do such work. The unwillingness I completely understand. I do it most unwillingly myself: but then, the same applies to every job I've ever done. I've loathed every single minute of working life, but I've done it, and I feel there has been a kind of resigned, beetle-like heroism in the relentless getting up and going in every day. I've never been unemployed. I've worked because I've had to, the alternative being to live under a railway bridge and eat scraps from litter bins. We are all "free" to do that.
Come to think of it, I hated school too. School and work have been the total of my life so far. Of retirement I cannot yet give an opinion, but I've looked forward to it as a far-off, blessed deliverance from suffering since about the third day of my working life, that is since February 1966.
Perhaps I will return to this subject during the mercifully decreasing number of days that stand between me and a pension. This was actually taken back in my "lost" digital years, in November 2007. Note the food industry hairnet. They were white in those days. Apparently the colour is important, and has been changed twice since. We now use blue; I've no idea why. Those wifty little "bump guard" jockey cap things were replaced by proper hard hats, latterly with ear defenders. They make me look ever so butch. All I need now is a pair of rigger boots. This was "my" reach truck, then nearing the end of its "rental aggreement". It was replaced by another not long afterwards. I preferred the older one. About six months ago one of my colleagues, told to clean the newer truck (we must have been trying to pull the wool over the eyes of some auditors, or a deputation of big knobs from Head Office), thought that the easiest way to accomplish this would be to take it outside and hose it down. In this he was doubtlessly correct; unfortunately it blew all the truck's electrical circuits. The estimate for repair was £3,000. We parked the truck in a corner and managed to keep the matter from our boss until about a fortnight ago when ...blimey! ...he actually descended from "upstairs" and made an appearance on the shop floor. By this time the person responsible had been sacked for a series of unrelated misdemeanors, mostly involving collisions between his truck and various parts of the building.
My new forklift for supporting the huge red truck. It's inspired on jungheinrich one. I tried to do at the same scale than the truck. Hope you like!
My new forklift for supporting the huge red truck. It's inspired on jungheinrich one. I tried to do at the same scale than the truck. Hope you like!
My new forklift for supporting the huge red truck. It's inspired on jungheinrich one. I tried to do at the same scale than the truck. Hope you like!