Did your jam taste funny in 1985?
Shameless pearoast, but...

Many years ago, when I about 14, I went with some mates to do a summer job picking fruit (this is not a euphemism, so don’t start). It was a glorious hot summer, and every morning, Monday to Friday, we’d be picked up by bus at 8 o’clock and driven to the fruit farm. All we had to do was work our way along rows of fruit, picking gooseberries, raspberries and strawberries. None of which I liked, and so I could fill my bucket twice as fast as anyone else, who adopted the ‘one for the bucket, one for me’ approach.

Our wage was the princely sum of £2.50 per bucket. Marvellous. “Doesn’t matter if the berries are all squishy, lads,” the farmer told us, “they’re all going to be made into jam anyway”.

I don’t like jam either, by the way.

However, by about day three, and concerned as to how much he was paying out, the farmer decided to drop the value of each bucket by 50p. The tight-fisted, in-bred little shit. But, we carried on picking our assorted berries, and £2 per bucket still wasn’t bad in the grand scheme of things. It wasn’t as if we had bills to pay or anything. And happily, the sun shone on, and we had a grand time.

A couple of days into week two, and farmer tight-arse informs us that the price is going down again, to £1.75. Now, I wasn’t well versed in the art of employment practice, but surely, the longer you’ve been doing a job, the more your pay goes up? Doesn’t it? Apparently not, in this case.

Slightly peeved by this, our work rate and productivity went down a bit, understandably, but the sun still shone and it wasn’t a bad setting in which to be pissing around with your mates. However, on turning up the next morning, we were informed yet again that the price per bucket had gone down again, this time to £1.40.

This was the final straw – farmer tight-arse was really taking the proverbial now. “I’m sick of this – I’m not coming back tomorrow”, I said. My mates all agreed. But, since we were stuck there all day, we thought we might as well earn some more cash, and have a little fun into the bargain. And so it passed that, each time anybody needed a piss, we would do so in the buckets we were filling, and grin inanely as we handed each bucket back. Then we left, never to return again.

So if anyone out there was around in 1985, and thought that their Robertson’s fruit jams tasted slightly funny, I’m afraid that you have probably unwittingly consumed some of my very own piss (and that of my friends as well). I’m very sorry for that, but it’s proof that if you’re in business, you should never piss off your workers. Because they’ll just find a way to piss all over your business…
( Davros' Granddad a voice of calm reason in a world of spastics., Thu 18 Sep 2008, 16:12, Reply)