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.

Of course Alum Rock is just another area of the suburban sprawl that is NE Birmingham but I was pleased to see that my destination was a real old red-brick industrial building rather than the usual pre-fab industrial estate warehouse. It’s something of a novelty in this day and age to find these buildings being used for their original purpose and not being either condemned or converted. After spending ten minutes trying to find the worker’s entrance I was eventually directed to the main reception where I was immediately identified as needing to see the HR manager due to my not wearing a suit and not carrying a briefcase. I sat down and waited.

Usually when I arrive I’ve met by a supervisor who immediately takes to me to the job in question so it was another surprise to go through a proper induction with a proper Human Resources person. She was in her 20s, had a double-barreled name, spiky hair, small rectangular glasses and a nicely patronising manner – such a breath of fresh air after all the straight-talking ugly blokes I usually get. We went through all the Health and Safety stuff (another novelty) and I signed a form to say I understood it all “for the records”. I mentioned that this was also to cover their asses in the event that I do something stupid which was laughed off, but it’s kinda true. If management can’t prove that they’ve got an effective H&S policy in place they they can go to prison should something bad happen, which is probably the only reason they bother.

Anyway, eventually I got to meet my actual supervisor who gave me a big tour of the complex and warned me that the women I’d be working with might be a bit, well, crude. I’ve done factory work with a predominantly female crew before and it can be very intimidating. I was trying to explain this to one of the younger temps on a different job who, in his naivety, thought a factory full of women would be “cool”. You know when you’re out drinking and you see a gang of women on a “girls night out”, all loud and empowered, and you feel ever so slightly threatened by their screaming and cackling? Imagine that times ten but they’re sober and ugly. And you’re stuck there for a whole shift. He got the message.

Again, it turned out to be fine. Yes, they’re all barking loons but not in an aggressive way. My job title is “Serviceperson” which means nothing but in effect I’m playing the role of “the man” in that I pick things up and move pallets around. This despite the fact that two of the women there could probably throw me over the building. I’m working in the packaging area where boxes of tampons are shrink-wrapped in batches of six and stacked onto pallets to be distributed around the country and I’m learning new skills such as how to tip a crate of small boxes out on to a table without spilling them all over the place. I’ve also learned how to operate the machine that wraps cellophane around a full pallet – the pallet sits of a rotating disk and spins round as the roll of cellophane goes up and then down. It’s all dead exciting.

When I do jobs like this I like to think about how my cog fits into the wider wheel. Usually I’m involved in a process that affects thousands of people in some small way, be it distributing ready-meals destined for all of south England around a warehouse before Xmas or picking up a decade’s worth of litter from an alley. This time I’m processing boxes of objects that will be, putting it crudely, shoved up thousands of vaginas.

The job runs for the rest of this week and probably the next (unless I get the call from the council about the street cleaning contract). The main problem is the shift pattern being 6.00am to 2.00pm. The early finish is great (I got a couple of hours gardening in this afternoon) but the early start means I have to leave at 5.00am to catch the first bus into town and even then I might not make it on time. So I’m using the old trick of going to bed really early and waking up a little past midnight – the last thing I want to be doing is rushing around at this ungodly time of the morning.