The Dream Job That Wasn't.
I studied design, and my father had a friend in a really swank part of a local holiday town called Knysna who ran a vinyl business printing signs and making accessories like tarpaulins and cushions for boats.

Anyway, at the end of my second year, my father asked me if I fancied a job working as a designer in glorious Knysna. I'd met the guy who ran it before, and he was really nice and I was told I'd be staying at his place (which was also really nice).

Naturally - picturing myself designing things in the morning and waterskiing in the afternoon - I said: "Wahey!"

As this idyllic working jaunt approached, I was told that I was no longer going to be staying with the owner, because his wife had just had guests for a while and wanted privacy. My father organised me a free place to stay with some friends of his who ran a holiday farm. Mountainside chalets and so on. Quite picturesque. Well, this didn't sound so bad. The farm was nice. Nice job. Nice town.

Anyway, when I arrived, I was informed that I'd have to cycle to work (I couldn't drive at the time). Work started at 7AM and so I had to be on my bike at 4:30AM or so to get down the corrugated mountain road to be picked up by the workers' bus. When I say "down" the road, the first kilometre or so was downhill, precipitously so, prompting many moments of sheer terror as my bike shook me to bits on the corrugations and tried to hurl me from the hairpin switchback corners. This downhill was followed by a few kilometres of uphill consisting of corrugations interspersed with long stretches of lovely soft, deep sand that functioned as gravel traps and forced one to get off and push.

It was a coastal town, so the mornings that weren't bone-chillingly damp and misty were rainy. Even though it was a summer holiday in Africa, I usually waited shivering for the bus, my hands white-knuckled and cramping from rictus-gripping the brakes on the descent.

As for the job itself. I was not a designer. I was a factory lackey. Peeling the labels off bottles to prepare them for screen-printing. Painting noxious waterproofing onto fabric umbrellas. Cutting, punching and contact-gluing bits of vinyl together with a heat-gun, fuming about ten IQ points out of my brain and sowing the chemical seeds of future cancers.

When I got home, exhausted and braindead, I would pay my way by helping about the farm, working in the woodshop, inhaling sawdust, feeding animals, wandering through the lacerating bush in the icy dark to the next valley to feed their absent hippie neighbour's enormous, angry pigs heavy buckets of stinking refuse.

I adjusted, and tried to see the lighter side, and hey: money! So after the first week's grind, I received my first remuneration. A stunning total based on increments of the princely sum of 30p an hour.

No, I told myself, you're a big fellow. Chin up! Endure! It'll build character!

The second week, of course, was no better, and so I surrendered and went home.
(Ladyfingers is in your wardrobe,, Sun 13 May 2007, 13:55, Reply)