Student jobs
Best student job ever: Walkers crisp factory, Leicester. On the first night, fixed the foremans PC, after that - he let me do half hour on, half hour off. £8 an hour on nights to do basically fuck all. Brilliant. Hate crisps now though. Was gutted to quit. Might have crushed a few packs on the way out.

The real story however was my first student job.

Find something plastic, have a look carefully for a tiny little nib of plastic sticking out from somewhere - example, look at the bottom of a lighter, theres usually a little round bit with the nib in the middle. This indicates the item was produce by extrusion/injection. There is a mould, and hot plastic is injected into it, it cools rapidly and the machine ejects it, usually trailing a little length of extruded plastic - think little bit of gob that you get sometimes when eeating sloppily and it stetches between your mouth and food.

All those little bits have to be cut off by someone. Usually, very very very very working class people. People who during their entire lives have never amounted to anything other than being someone who cuts off tiny little pieces of plastic from extruded plastic items.

Or students. Enter me.

I got the joyous 10pm-6am shift, mid august 1995. A fucking hot night. On arrival, the grunting fuck who ran the place pointed out "the canteen" (agency description) or what I would describe, as "filthy plastic garden chair in corner" and my "workstation", or more accurately "molten plastic furnace with jet engine attached". This contraption spat out little newly minted round plasticy things, something to do with "make-up innit?" at the rate of - 3 in 2 minutes. I had to remove them from the press, and cut off the little nubby bits with a scalpel.

It says something when you have pretty much mastered every little nuance of a job within about 30 seconds. 29 of those seconds briefly held me, an engineering student, in moderate awe at seeing a nice big grown up machine and 1 second to understand my entire remit for the next 8 hours.

Did I mention the scalpel?

This is how it went for the next 3 minutes:

Grab plasticy thing. Locate nubby bit. Scrape scapel along edge, cut off nubby bit. Wait 45 seconds. Repeat. Grab. Locate. Scrape. Cut. Slice open thumb. Ow. Wait. Grab. Locate. Scrape. Cut. Slice open thumb. Fuck. Grab. Ow. Locate. Shit. BRAIN SHUTS DOWN. Slice. Fuck. This. GRAB. BREAK PLASTICY THING IN OUTRAGEOUS ANGER. Slice. FUCK OFF CUNTY SCALPEL BASTARD.

How I lasted an hour I dont know. I did the one thing I was told not to do - hit the big red emergency cut off button. Wasnt supposed to do it "fuckin cos it takes fuckin ages to fucking get the fucker fuckin started again innit" and walked out.

The agency cunt phoned me back in the morning asking why I walked out and I told him because I would kill myself if i stayed in order to numb the pain of my brain cells dying.
( I have run out of coke is a little sweaty, Fri 23 May 2008, 12:36, Reply)