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.

Of course I’m not at all prepared for this but rather than panic and rush out I take my time, finish what I’m doing on the computer, make a few sandwiches, have a cup of tea and leave the house at 8.30 to buy a newspaper before waiting for the bus into town. I reckon if I can get there for 10.00 everything will be cool. From the city centre I need to get a number 63 down the Bristol Road to it’s terminus in Rubery, which doesn’t seem a problem. I used to live in Selly Oak and the 61/62/63 buses were always reliably frequent. As I’m waking to the stop a 63 goes past me. Ah well, there’ll be another one along soon. On getting to the bus stop I realise that while cumulatively the 60 buses might be frequent, individually they ain’t so and the next 63 isn’t for another hour. Arse. As I’m pondering my options (go to the agency office, hang about in Waterstone’s) a small, old single decker bus trundles up and lo and behold it’s got “63″ on the front of it.

This is one of the stranger effects of deregulation. The predominant bus company in Birmingham is Travel West Midlands who’s monopoly is such that the only bus pass available is theirs and only their buses are listed on the time tables. But there are also a number of smaller operators who trundle around the main routes with rickety old buses when you least expect them. This was one of them. For a 40p surcharge on top of my bus pass, the cheerful rasta behind the wheel informed me, he would take me to work. Cheerful? Oh yes, and no bullet proof security glass between me and him, plus I suspect he would have even given me change were it necessary. Compared with the grim CCTV-infested, no-change TWM buses this was a breath of fresh air straight from the late 70s (when the bus was probably last refurbished). Half way there the driver stopped and locked us all in while he popped out to get a pasty.

The one downside of this ancient bus was the griminess of the windows – not normally a problem but when you’re trying to navigate your way around a strange but bland area with your A-Z it’s nice to be able to read the street names, but soon the bus took a sudden right turn which matched on the map with the final approach to Rubery and I was there at a little before 10.00.

When approaching this kind of work I generally know exactly what to expect, but at the same time I have no idea what it’ll be like. On the whole the work is the same all over – pick up this and move it over there, then repeat until your brain melts – but the working environment can vary dramatically and none of these nuances are communicated to you by the agency. Is your boss an arsehole? Are the perms happy and content or miserable and bitter? Is there free tea or do you have to pay? Do they play mind-rotting local radio at full volume? And if so, am I able to bring a walkman without it being broken or stolen? Usually I expect the worst, dressing in my oldest clothes (no provocative t-shirts) and maintaining a low profile. “Keep your head down and don’t talk to the natives” is a rule to live by.

I was met at reception by the boss who immediately showed me where the toilets were, mainly because he needed a piss, but it was a good start. Quite chatty too, even though I was avoiding eye contact and keeping my middle class, non-Brummie accent to a mumble. He started describing the work and said that quite a few temps tend to just vanish once they see how much lifting there is involved. I said I’d just travelled from Kingstanding and definitely would be seeing it through, and he said in that case if I did a good job he’d put me down as having worked from 8.00am. Things are looking up!

The job itself was utterly simple. A container full of 17.5 kilo boxes of baby wipes had to be unloaded onto pallets, 15 boxes to a layer, five layers high, by him and two temps. Normally the perms would do this job but they’re on a rush, hence the temps and him coming out from the office. And that was it. After the statutory standing-around-for-a-bit we cracked on and within an hour had made a substantial dent. I started to wonder whether this job was actually going to last until 5.00. There’s nothing more annoying than traveling across the city for a job only to be sent home after three hours because there’s nothing to do. You don’t tend to get task-and-finish in the temping game and when you’re on £5ph ever hour counts.

Lunch time was painless. Free cups of tea made for me (woo!) and a reasonable chat with the perms. I’ve found there’s often a fascination with agency workers, especially those who, like myself, aren’t students or obviously thick, as if we might have found a magic way out of the daily grind of full time employment and my story about cutting my spending down the the point where I only need to work half the month went down well enough. The fact that I felt able to divulge even the most sketchy story of my life says a lot. During the M&S job before Xmas (which I never did write about properly) only one person got that out of me and that was a fellow temp on the last day.

After lunch I discovered that the boss was a biker, which explained a lot, and I felt a lot more comfortable telling my full story. The other temp, an engineering student from Yemen, also came out of his shell and as we moved further back into the dark container it almost became fun. Well, fun enough to keep my tiredness at bay. I might have fucked up sleep patterns but I’m no insomniac and by now I’d been up for 20 hours. By 2.30 the end was in sight and the boss vanished to the office to complete our time sheets. Full pay from 8.00am to 5.00pm for four hours work. Turns out he’d been a temp in his time struggling for money so he always treats agency workers well.

The journey home was my only worry. Now the adrenaline of the job had vanished I really didn’t relish the idea of waiting an hour for the elusive number 63 but one turned up pretty sharpish and I slept all the way into to town, even when the bus was filled with kids from King Edwards, and then the long journey home to a welcome bed.