A simple job
Time for a little history. A combination of social history and economic history. I live in a country where we are secure from the worst of the excesses in the workplace. We have rules and we have expectations. Among them a kind of insurance policy no one in the good old days as you I. It provided a small amount of money as a dividend for those times when you did not have a regular salary and you still needed to do things like eat and sleep. We referred to it as stamps. If you were getting stamps you will get a check every couple of weeks. In return you will be called to work in random places at random jobs for random amounts of time. Proof that you were willing and able to work. And so at one point I agreed to do something outside of my experience. Forget all my expensive education. I was called to help unload a truck. I received the address and time and I took my bicycle and went there. The job was much simpler then one might expect. Taking small boxes of food from a tractor trailer into a warehouse. I remember the boxes containing something like meat spread. And the driver who met me on the dock explained that he needed his truck unloaded so he could go for his next job. Sounds fair. The salary as such was minimum but it was salary which meant that I would meet all the expectations of my insurance program. So let’s get down to it. We had some kind of conveyor belt mechanical and we had small boxes to remove from the truck and get them inside. I can handle that. I spent the whole of the day transferring small boxes from point A to point B. And at the end of the afternoon the driver met me with the agreed amount of money in his hand and something extra. Not just extra money but a heartfelt thanks for having done a job all the way from point A to point B. He traveled a lot and what he found for the main part was that people would show up and then find ways throughout the day to avoid doing anything useful. I was the first person who would ever come in and just done the job. I put it down to my education and my sense of moral obligation but he put it down too what a difference. His truck was now unloaded and he could go off to his next appointment and I could get back on my bicycle and ride home. A day in the life of a manual labourer. As you can guess this was my only opportunity to unload a truck with sandwich meats or any other kind of truck I wasn’t the one that people usually called. I was just someone in the right place at the right time with the right morals. If I have passed anything on to my children I hope it is that sense even though they have never helped me unload any kind of truck. As I’ve explained to my sons a job is something that you do because someone else gains from your effort. And if they pay you that is a bonus.
