A FRIEND of mine was recently whingeing about his staff job. He didn't think he could face another year of it – how every day was the same, stretching into meaningless infinity. It put me in mind of two of the worst jobs I did when I was a student.
Lerwick, 1988. Most Meaningless Job In The World No1: Outdoor labouring. Me and a pair of ex-cons were driven for an hour every day, down dirt tracks, to a place that looked as barren as the lunar surface, to dig holes round telegraph poles at £3 per
hole. I'm no geologist but Shetland must be mostly granite and one 3ft deep hole took four hours of jarring back pain and weeping blisters.
Our boss was there to test the poles for rot, so when a hole was finished he'd climb out of his van, approach the pole with a cork screw thing, take a sample, then grunt to say "fill it in again". I lasted 10 days and made enough money to pay for my shovel, blister ointment and bandages.
Most Meaningless Job In The World No2: Porter in a Shetland hospital. The daily duty was to cart things out for incineration or removal. Mostly industrial sacks filled with geriatric nappies, but there was the perk of getting to cart the occasional corpse to the mortuary, which was in fact why the vacancy became available.
The guy before me had been fired for slacking on that particular duty. He'd been young and vacant and one day during corpse-carting duty, his beeper had gone off and he'd run off to do the nappy bags.
His error was discovered the next morning as a local doctor tried to park his car only to skid to a halt before a stiff on a gurney in the middle of the car park. This was told to me as a cautionary tale.
My new colleagues were Bob and Tom, time-served veterans in meaninglessness. Tom was almost catatonic and it wouldn't be long until he was due in Ward Four himself. Bob was the enthusiast who took great pride in demonstrating the stacking of nappy sacks on the trolley.
He even showed me a little trick he'd picked up over the decades that saved you making two trips. The way to stack 50 nappy bags on the trolley was to make a small incision with your finger and squeeze the air out of each sack.
I almost vomited as he demonstrated, and the bag made a loud farting noise accompanied by the stench of excreted NHS food.
Thankfully, this task took only 45 minutes per day, leaving us with seven hours and 15 minutes to be "on call". Beepers at the ready.
A doddle you would think. But the problem was that in that time, Bob would not let me do anything. I came in with a book one day and he insisted we'd all be fired if the supervisor caught me. We had to look busy. Playing cards was out. Crosswords too.
And Bob was no conversationalist. Tom seemed to focus on just breathing. I found myself watching a clock, quite literally, working out how many pence I was making per minute, per day, per week. Bob had done this for 25 years. I found myself praying for a fatality in Ward Four.
Which now that I look back makes me glad to be a freelancer and not in a staff job. How many of us are just sitting at our desk jobs killing ourselves by killing time?
The full article contains 611 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.
