Granite

Hi White Voider, hope all well. My week has started off okay, I was busy all yesterday and early to bed, after a group about the meaninglessness and monotony of recovery. That means that things get boring when they are going well and you are following a routine. A little voice inside your head just wants to smash the routine to smithereens and get high. It’s a godsend in a way, routine, it keeps us grounded and humble and active and engaged and maintains that workaholic mindset, which is healthy, but in another way it’s tame, tedious and tiresome. Geben mir some cocaine!!!

I’m actually having second thoughts about using on payday. I’ve had too long to think about it, and the cons are settling in. The cons far override the pros. One’s a long list and the other is just a few bullet points. I’ve got them all stuck onto my fridge. The only thing to do is wait and see how I feel on payday. There’s no way of telling what I might or might not do until the funds are actually in the bank. Then it’s fire tonight time!

Been reading about David Harewood a bit, about the terrific life he’s had as displayed in the book. Flying into different cities around the globe to do theatre with other actors he loves and all. It would be a quite a thing wouldn’t it, that? I worked with my best mate for 18 months fitting granite worktops in celebrities’ houses. It was a special time of my life as I was genuinely happy. It makes a hell of a difference if you are working with your mates and people you love as opposed to mundane humdrum work colleagues. A work colleague means nothing to anyone, he’s just another bum in a job who you are forced to spend 8 hours a day with. Working with your bessie however means howling with laughter from the first bell at 8am, all the way through till half four. We had such a giggle all day long, I didn’t smoke at the time but they were getting stoned on the job and everything. We called a spliff a ‘doobie.’ We used to verbally commentate on everything we were doing, it was dead funny, just talk talk talk talk talk. The granite was exceptionally heavy (I couldn’t lift it now), but we were all big and strong so it didn’t matter so much. The island pieces in kitchens were ridiculously weighty, the strain on the lower back was tremendous. And try lugging a 2 metre length up three flights of stairs for a living! One time I smashed all the granite because it was tied up incorrectly and I took a turn too fast, another time I crashed the van into a lamppost, it was all going on. My bessie pissed himself when I crashed that van into a lamppost, I rang the boss instantly and told him what had happened. It was in the morning so he was flapping all day until he could see the damage in the afternoon. Fortunately it wasn’t that bad so there was no big issue. Maybe more about my granite fixing days another time, there’s loads of memories there. Chill out for now x

 

When I laughed, hard: Mark Stillings

ReAL LiFe

(1)

Working in a warehouse, driving Sidetracker trucks, the boss was stationary, talking to someone else in a truck. The two of them together were blocking off the path of myself and Mark Stillings, a co-worker. The boss and his pal were chatting away, oblivious that we were waiting to drive out of our aisles. Minutes passed. I would have patiently waited all shift, HE WAS THE GODDAMN BOSS FOR CRYING OUT LOUD, but Mark Stillings, eventually, just shouted “F**KING HELL!” at the top of his voice, at the boss. I laughed really hard for ages to myself. All that pent-up aggression, AT the boss.

The next time you are feeling slightly nervous around your boss in the workplace, just imagine shouting F**KING HELL at him (or her) at the top of your voice

KELLY, SCAFFOLDER by Erika Babbage

DNM Fiction® EDITED BY A.MICHAEL

For interview with Erika's husband, Errol, and other DNMF writers, see Interviews post in February.

Kelly’s first day as a stand-in scaffolder had her huffing and puffing within two minutes of starting to load a wagon in the yard. It was barely eight am, a time she only ever saw if the dole had her on Jobclub, and the bosses – two posher-than-thou nerds – stood over her like hawks. Her Pathways to Work advisor had wangled her a day as a stand-in for somebody, could have been Steve the Scaffolder from Somerset for all she knew, and the day, from this position, was looking longer than a month of Sabbath Sundays with nothing but confessional wafer bread to eat. The poles and planks were ridiculously heavy to manhandle, jesus tonight, and her skin seemed to bruise upon mere contact with all the knobbly fixtures and fittings. After five minutes she’d cut her finger, after ten she’d ripped her Moschino jeans, and before the passage of half an hour she’d learned a valuable life lesson – that she would never be undertaking any kind of manual labour ever again. Not ever. This was even worse than The Turkey Factory, when she’d upchucked her breakfast onto a conveyor belt of flapping headless turkeys after not five minutes. Well no, actually, there was no worse than that.

When she saw a big plug-ugly pensioner pointing at her and laughing, Kelly didn’t know whether to say something or ignore him. Why a man who looked so downright weather-beaten and utterly ass-rough should ever have the right to laugh at anyone was a mystery, but there was no mistaking what was happening; Kelly was getting the mick taken out of her because she was new here. And it was a private joke, which was much more offensive than being laughed at by a group of people, in her book.

“Hurry up lass!” the oh-so plug-ugly pensioner told her. Shouting like that, he was obviously deaf as well as gormless. Cheeky twerp. Where did an over-the-hill bum like that get the right to tell her what to do anyway? The dude was filthy and he hadn’t even started work properly yet; Kelly was reminded of a mechanic who had swindled her for five hundred notes and put her off driving for life.

Glancing about, everyone here apart from the snooty bosses looked like they’d turn bathwater black just by taking their clothes off next to it. She couldn’t see from here, but she was willing to bet her Yves Saint Lauren belt and her Pringle socks that those chum balls didn’t have black fingernails. Is that all they did, stand there like generals while everyone else busted a gut lifting this and shifting that? She reckoned they would just shake their heads if she asked for a plaster to wrap over her finger. Either that or point her towards the office where it would take her ten minutes to hunt down a first-aid kit and make her look like a waste of time.

So much for The New Deal. More like THE BUM DEAL.

© Errol & Erika Babbage MMX