Fork it.
When I was younger than I am now, but not as young as I've ever been, my parental home was located on the flats of Lincolnshire, more specifically in a small market town called Spalding, where they make basket balls.

Besides the fictional manufacture of sporting goods, agriculture provided employment for the local inbreeds, the holidaying students and, more recently, the newly settled Polish folk, who are actually willing to work for a living rather than signing on like the natives tend to prefer.

I was employed each summer from the age of early teen to early no-longer-a-teen by one of the larger flower bulb importers and distributors in the region. I spent my early years there unloading lorries, stacking boxes on pallets and heaving heavy nets about the place. I was in need of money, lazy and permanently stoned eager to impress, hard working and conscientious, and I was eventually rewarded by being given the most highly sought after job among the great unwashed: I was allowed to drive the forklift trucks.

Apparently my lack of driving license was negated (as far as insurance is concerned) by a single day spent watching an outdated safety video (RED IS THE COLOUR OF DANGER!) and cocking about for an afternoon, lifting pallets onto other pallets and driving around in circles. I turned up for work the next day with the single best distraction from work I've ever had.

We were a small team, all equally dedicated to avoiding work. We did everything we could to avoid doing anything: we drove to the furthest reaches of the site to smoke; we broke things (accidentally, of course); we had competitions to see who could carry the most precarious loads, who could overload their truck just right so it would balance on the front wheels (no one, ever), who could go on two wheels for the longest by cornering too hard; there was a running score board on who spilt the most bulbs throughout the season; and we had races, grand prix races that took in the whole site and invariably put ourselves and everyone else in more danger than we really appreciated at the time.

Over those summers I mastered the art of evading boredom, and there wasn't an internet in sight... truth is, there probably wasn't much of an internet at all back then, but we didn't need one anyway, we had vehicles that turned with the back wheels, that could spin in little circles and that had two big metal things sticking out the front. We had forklifts and we were ace.
( Moey, Thu 8 Jan 2009, 17:56, Reply)