Factory Record

My girlfriend, and my Mum, who I’m pretty certain are colluding over this, keep asking me when I’m going to get a ‘proper’ job.

“I’m a writer!” I explain in an exasperated tone, whilst adjusting my beret and twirling my bum-fluff moustache. “This is a proper job.”

This is despite the fact that I only started (hilariously) describing myself as a writer when I was a waiting tables in an horrific Italian chain restaurant, and felt insignificant next to all the actors, artists and musicians.

It’s no surprise I don’t want to enter the rat race (and on a slight tangent, there was an ace Channel 5 documentary on the other night about a charity in Mozambique that has trained rats to sniff out landmines, it was great, there are clips on YouTube, have a look) when all my mates do is whinge about office politicking and the interminable dullness of their life. OK, I may be permanently broke and miserable, but so are they, and they can’t sleep in until Loose Women has finished.

I’ve worked pretty much every shit job you’d like to name (binman, waiter, barman, Manager of Manchester city) but easily the worst was when I worked on a production line in a pre-packed sandwich factory in the Fens. I needed a job desperately as I’d run out of rum and fresh limes, and was in danger of sobering up for the first time in about four years. So I signed on at an agency, got an advance on my pay from my Dad, and bought two bottles of Havana Club from Bargain Booze and went back to pretending to be Ernest Hemmingway in Havana rather than Chris Taylor in Lincolnshire.

I lasted three days in the factory. On the fourth day, when the mini-bus was due to pick me up, I shut all the curtains at home, turned all the lights off, and hid under the bed with my phone off. There was no way I was going back to that place. People had been there for thirty years, they told me. And I couldn’t last three days. It wasn’t that the work was hard, it wasn’t. It was more that it seemed like some form of horrendous, mental torture. Everything about the place seemed to be geared to driving me insane. From the freezing temperatures, to the mindless idiots (this is not an attack on all factory workers, by the way, not by any means. Just the fucking imbeciles I was forced to work with) in my team, to the way the management played Mel C’s ‘Northern Star’ album on repeat for twelve, long, consecutive hours as a motivational tool. That proved to be the final straw for me. It was at that point I vowed never to come back.

I just didn’t seem to fit in there. I was different to everyone else. Not better. Just different. We had to continually wash our hands in anti-bacterial hand wash. “I hope this has some sort of moisturising agent in.” I quipped. “Nothing worse than dry hands, is there?” No one laughed. Not even a smirk. Hell, a look of disgust or disquiet would have done. I vowed never to speak to anyone there again.

I had got chatting to one woman and her husband at lunch on my first day. A member of staff had been removed from the canteen and sent home for the day for openly masturbating in the middle of the room. I filed the tactic away in my mind just in case things got really bad and I needed a quick escape. (“QUICK! Another one’s wanking! Call security!”). It was an instant ice-breaker, and the couple saw my look of horror and fell about laughing. They explained that I’d get used to seeing stuff like that, and that the fella in question was always at it, like a safari park chimp.

The woman explained how she had been working on the production line for five years now. She lived in Boston and had, she claimed, used to be a QC, but found the stress and responsibility too great and so had packed it in. I marvelled at that. From being a lawyer, to having to put up with this shit for twelve hours a day? She must have been more bored than I was. I decided then that if she could do it, I should stop moaning and just get on wit it. I’ve always had a childish kind of respect for people opting out of society and just doing what makes them happy instead. And this woman seemed more than happy.

It only occurred to me weeks after I’d left the factory that when she said she was a QC, she didn’t mean a Queen’s Counsel, but a Quality Controller – the person responsible for the output of a production line and whose responsibilities go so far as to give them a different coloured hair net. It was a hammer blow to my young and naive ideals.

I’ve had more boring jobs. And more physically arduous. But I have never had a job that was such a relentless assault on my mind. I reckon I got out just in time. Another few days and I’d have ended up a humourless, mindless, automaton, like some kind of hair net wearing, sandwich filling Dr Who baddie.