Saturday 17 December 2011

Sugar and Salt

DAY 12:


I've put on half a stone in two weeks while working here. Depressing work is made bearable by depressing food: crisps, chocolate bars, sugary pop. The salt brings you down; the sugar lifts you up again. We're all artificially high under the halogen lights. During break times, some slump in chairs or sprawl on the floor of the rest area, staring at the door through heavy-lidded eyes. A face pops round the door. Does anybody have any Rizlas? The face disappears again. It's back, 15 minutes later. Does anybody have a light? I sip a hot chocolate from the vending machine. On the machine are the words, "Busy Day? We live life at such a pace that taking time out is important. So choose yourself a drink, take a moment and enjoy." It strikes me that somebody was actually paid quite a bit of money to dream that kōan up. At 40p, the squirt of brown silt is overpriced, and repeats on you on the way home.
My neighbouring sorter has spotted the gaudy orange packet sticking out of a pigeon hole. "Crips" he says, pointing. "Crips", I agree. "Give me a crip" he says, pointing at his mouth and rubbing his stomach in the universal language of appreciation. I proffer the packet of Happy Shopper Cheese Curls to him. Instead of reaching in and plucking a few out, he proceeds to up-end it and pour half the packet into his enormous paddle of an outstretched palm for what seems like an eternity, crisps cascading around his hand and onto the floor. "Sure you've... got enough there?" I say. "Good crips" he says, biting the head off a curl. I let him keep the bag.

J is complaining that the line managers have been picking on her - again! This time, about the way she's been sitting on her stool. "I've got a bad back" she complains, "I have to sit like this". She demonstrates: mile-long legs, stretching out like two motorway lanes, at right-angles to the sorting table. An hour later, they've told her off - again! This time, for talking to her friend. "Why are they always picking on meeee?" Young and female - but most importantly, young - J may as well have the legend "Prime Target" tramp-stamped on her lower back.  

They leave me alone, generally. Mainly, because I walk around, quite quickly, with an expression of unalloyed hatred on my face. For those in their early twenties, however, there's no chance. 

"As we're not getting paid, I'm only giving this job 30 per cent" says the cocky 21-year-old Bangladeshi lad sorting beside me. Before a postman strolls over to tell him off for not sorting quickly enough. "It's because you're young" I tell him, when he rolls his eyes at me. "If you want to be left alone here - act older than you is."    

A postcard of an Indian Sadhu has been decorously placed on top of one the sorting shelves in a neighboring aisle. After checking with a line manager that it does, in fact, need to be sent to somebody, I pull it down, and pop it in a pigeonhole. "I didn't see it" confesses the line manager. It had been there for two weeks.

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