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…
Dig them when the flowers are fully open. Try not to dig too aggressively and dig quite a way from the stem and leaves. In an ideal world they should be the size of hen’s eggs when ready to dig, but most of us get ones a lot smaller then that. Don’t eat them if they are green!