Ten Days in Hell

Right, since I’m stumbling in blogblock land temporarily, time to dust off that story I promised you about the utterly absurd job what I did just before Christmas. It’s a long one, I warn you.

December was, as with the year before, somewhat of a drought work-wise. I was getting the odd day here and there but nothing of any length and cash was starting to run short. I could probably cover my rent but it was starting to look like my family would be getting CDRs of music – nice enough in a hand-made 8 year old kinda way but somewhat embarrassing really. So just when it’s getting to be a little critical, the agency calls with a job.

Last year, just before Christmas, I did a job that lasted five days and brought in a fair chunk of cash. I didn’t write about it then because it knackered me out and, once I’d recovered, the moment had passed. It was your basic warehouse job, moving this and that to here and there, and because it ran over a weekend the money was good. The trick was it was just outside of Newbury which, for those not familiar with UK geography, is a two hour drive away from Birmingham. There was a daily travel allowance, which made it worthwhile, but taking my initial commute into town into account it meant I was out of the house for 14 hours a day. But it was only for five days and, like I said, the money was good.

This year it was the same job and, seeing as I survived pretty well last time and I really needed the money, I said yes. The only difference was this time it was for ten days, starting on Tuesday December 14th and finishing on the 23rd. The catch, and it’s a big one, is that if you miss a day you lose your attendance bonus, being about a sixth of your hourly rate. The coach leaves at 6.00am on the dot and if you miss it you miss the day.

So, the first day I leave the house at quarter to five (there aren’t so many busses at that time of the morning and I didn’t want to cut it too fine) and along with the 20-odd other temps we make our way to Newbury. Only there’s a massive accident on the motorway so it takes a good three hours to get there.

When we finally arrived a little after nine the boss-guy asks if anyone else had been there before. I put my hand up. No-one else does. It occurs to me, not for the first time, that I’d been temping for over a year. It’s not a sense of failure or anything, but it was somewhat dispiriting sitting through the same corny health and safety videos in the same room of the same factory one year on.

And so we get onto the shop floor, which is basically a huge fridge. This place distributes food to one of the major food retailers in the country that isn’t a supermarket. Big pallets of mainly ready-meals come in one end and we sort them to a good hundred locations across the south coast. It’s actually not a bad job – lots of pump-truck action and, because the ambient temperature is about 4 degrees, not at all sweaty. If it was in Birmingham it’d be a blast but having travelled for over three hours to get there makes it a bit a chore, especially as when you finish you know you won’t be back home for hours to come.

So the day ends and we pile back onto the coach which gets stuck in traffic so we don’t get back to Brum until 8.00pm. People a grumbling a bit.

The next day I slept it. Which was a really pisser. I wasn’t sure whether I’d lost my attendance bonus or not or whether I’d be going back to the warehouse or what would be going on. They sent me to the Land Rover factory in Solihull to make up a few hours and when that finished I was told I’d be back on the coach. Since I’d been trained up already they didn’t want to lose me. I asked about the bonus, which was what made it all worthwhile, and was told in some quite uncertain terms that I might not have lost it. Which was vague enough to make me get up on time.

So we’re now on the third morning and I’m waiting for the coach. Turns out there’d been another fuck-up yesterday. The coach had run out of petrol on the motorway on the way home so they hadn’t gotten back until eight again. Tempers were running short and one of the guys said we should go on strike. Obviously he didn’t get much support from the rest of us since we were all desperate for the cash (why else would we be doing this?) and knew deep down that when you sign up as an unskilled temp you tacitly agree to be fucked up the ass in return for minimum wage. However, the piss was starting to be taken and continued along these lines. When we left the warehouse at 3.30pm there was no coach waiting for us. The coach driver is paid to drive us there, wait for the requisite number of hours, and then take us home. Often he drives off to a more interesting part of town which might explain his absence, but the message that came back to us was that he was in Tamworth, a small town north of Birmingham. We never did discover what the fuck he was doing there but a couple of hours later a different driver arrived in a different coach to take us home. But that wasn’t the end of it. Drivers of coaches and lorries have to, by law, take a 30 minute break every 6 hours or so. As he’d driven down specially to pick us up and immediately turns around to take us back he was due for his break just around Warwick. So we spent a hugely enjoyable half hour at the Warwick service station as tempers frayed even further.

Okay, we’re now on Friday morning which, as I can’t remember much about it, must have been fairly uneventful. It’s worth noting, though, that we’d only been getting six hours work at that warehouse. Usually this would be a problem as we’d been expecting a good eight, but given the hell of the coach journey’s it was something of a relief. However, a precedent had been set, which will become important later.

On Friday I’d been called into the agency’s office on site and asked if I could take a register on the Saturday morning, since the Birmingham office wasn’t open. I was slightly taken aback, since I was the only person who’d actually missed a day so far, but said yes. Maybe this was a way of getting my bonus back or something, but whatever, it wouldn’t be a problem.

Saturday morning comes and I’m there with my sheet ticking everyone off and off we go. But an unforeseen side effect of my extra-curricular activity starts to come into play. People think I’m in charge. I start being asked questions about how much we’re getting paid and how long we’re working for and so on. And the really tedious thing is, I know the answers. When we’re at work I have this uncanny ability to listen to what’s being said and figure out what it means, so when someone’s doing something wrong I kinda mention it to them. Don’t get me wrong – I’m not playing this roll up. If anything I’m trying to play it down. I’ve done management in my time and part of this temping life is that I don’t do authority. I’m not getting paid to do authority, and while I don’t have a problem with it, I’m not getting paid to do authority.

I’m especially not getting paid to manage 20+ tired and disgruntled temps, one of whom is me.

The weekend passes with no major problems, which is good because, as I’ve made clear, I’m not getting paid to deal with them, and we move into the final four days before Christmas. This is where it all starts going horribly wrong.

You see, the human mind doesn’t function very well on not much sleep, and not much sleep is what we’ve been getting so far. At most I’d be sleeping for five hours, but often less than that. Usually we’d get an hour or so on the coach, curled up in some spine-twisting position, which is handy but not conducive to a sleep pattern. Add to this the weirdness of having to get up at 4.00am and the slight panic of not wanting to be late and I kept waking up at odd hours unable to get back to sleep. The others were feeling the same. A few days of this would be okay but getting to the end of ten days without going ever so slightly mad was looking unlikely.

On the plus side, the coach had settled down into a nice pattern. The roads were clearer now most of the factories and offices had shut down for the Christmas break and the drivers were on the whole sane. On the down side, the job itself was getting a little hectic as the final days of food shopping approached. They needed us to work harder and for longer hours. We weren’t so keen.

On the Wednesday, the 22nd, I was again called into the agency’s onsite office. The friendly smiley young lady put on her best friendly smiley face and asked me if I could persuade my fellow temps to work ’til six tonight rather than the usual four we’d become accustomed to. A couple of days before they’d asked us to do the same and we’d said no. Because of the coach thing it had to be a majority vote and, because it had been a screw-up on the warehouses side that made it necessary, the agency had sided with us. This time there was no screw up. We were going to work those two hours no matter what.

Being very very knackered indeed I didn’t fully comprehend what she was asking me to do so I said okay, I’d ask everyone. Everyone was gathered around on the warehouse floor with me in the middle and it started to sink in. I said they wanted us to work ’til six. Suddenly everyone moved much closer. Someone asked how much overtime we’d get. I said nothing for the first hour, then time and a half for the second. Major sucking of teeth from the Africans and similar expressions of “fuck that” from the rest. After five minutes it hits me and I tell them to figure it out for themselves. I’m not getting involved. I’m paid to lug pallet trucks around and that’s what I’m going to do.

At this stage I’m very pissed off with the position they’ve put me in. Whoever is in the right (and at the end of the day we have to do whatever they tell us to do because we’re temps on a contract) this is not the way to do it and I vehemently resent playing this role. From now on I’m working to rule, no matter what time we finish. Whatever the outcome I’m far to knackered for it to make any difference.

Soon it becomes clear that more of us want to go home early than stay til six (not that I give a flying fuck at this stage) and so at four we all march off to the coach, closely followed by agency woman who isn’t looking so smiley and friendly now. She announces that we’ll get double time for the next two hours if we get back to work right now. Everyone goes back to work. It’s a farce. An utter farce. But at least we’re getting a splodge more money for it.

And so to the final day. As we arrive I’ll pulled to one side by the supervisor (who’s actually paid to do the bullshit persuading I’d been coerced into doing) who warns me we’re going to be asked whether we can work ’til six again. I tell him in no uncertain terms that I am not getting involved. If they want to get this band of utterly exhausted and pissed off temps to work for an extra 120 minutes that’s they’re lookout. I’m just going with the flow. The whole day is shadowed by this threat. Some people want to work the extra time, some really don’t and some just don’t care any more. The locals have gotten wind of our posturing and sarcasm is starting to emerge with mutterings about “the Birmingham lot”. They’re tired too, though not as tired as us. It starts to kick off when a couple of people phone their bank and discover they’ve paid too much tax which, while probably their fault for filling out the wrong form, is the final straw and they walk out, sitting in the canteen drinking tea. All this time people are asking me what’s going on, whether we’re working late or whatever, and I’m torn between telling them to fuck off because I’m not in charge and spreading what news I can because unless everyone knows what’s going on the chances of us leaving on time, whenever that turns out to be, are slim. The atmosphere in the warehouse is getting ugly and a general consensus is reached that we’re going at four just to get the hell out of here before someone says the wrong thing to someone and it all kicks off.

Of course, after all that bollocks and bullshit it turns out that all the work is done by three thirty and we can go home early after all. So we do. Somebody had the bright idea to buy a bottle of whisky which a few of us chip into and consume on the way back, and once getting to Brum we head off to the Yard of Ale pub for many beers which, naturally, go straight to our sleep deprived heads. It’s a good night. While I know I’ll probably never see any of these people again there is a sense of brotherhood, like we’ve survived something terrible together and it all ends on a positive note. I stagger, wasted in all senses of the word, to the 33 bus stop and get on board where I promptly fall asleep. In fact I don’t really remember getting on the bus. When I woke up I recognised where I was but it looked kinda wrong. Turned out I’d slept all the way to the terminus and the bus was going back into town. Whether the driver had tried to wake me up of not I dunno (I was sitting under the CCTV camera so he might not have even realised I was there) but I was still in Kingstanding so it wasn’t the end of the world. (although Kingstanding is kinda the end of the world, but I digress…) I got off and started the mile long walk back home, stopping at a closed petrol station for a piss. Then once in bed I turned the alarm on my mobile phone off and slept like a tired, drunk baby.

The weird thing was, after 10 days of less that five hours sleep a night it took me a while before I could get a decent chunk of sleep. My body had gotten used to functioning like this and it took until the 28th to get out of the habit.

On the last day I told the supervisor, who like me had been there last year, that if he saw me getting off that coach next December to take me round the back and shoot me. Never again. The scary thing is I’ve only scratched the surface in this post but an exhaustive account would probably fill a book. I wish I’d been keeping a diary as they days went by but I’d never have predicted it could be so utterly weird an experience.