Does setting a machine on fire count as flouncing?
I worked at a fish factory for a certain seagoing Captain with a penchant for kids. It was summer work meant to fund an easy, and slightly boozy, last year of Uni. The day pay was good,the night pay was even better and if you worked over time on a night shift you were laughing. On the outside anyway, inside you had probably died far too much. It was that kind of job.

There were lots of different processing and packing lines in the factory and I ended up on most of them. The HR manager seem to think that all temp works were scum and so shouldn't get the benefit of working on one line. After all you'd only get comfortable and good at your job that way.

Some lines were easy and just involved pouring a lot of frozen fish onto a conveyer belt and making sure it was the right way up. A little mind numbing but you got decent breaks. Some were entirely more back breaking and soul crushing. One line was affectionately called 'Death Row'. A line of neverending fish fillets, a cranky packing machine and never ending back ache.

I was shit at my job. In fact any job bar two. One was the simple tipping the fish out job and the other was working on a 'shaker' deck. A big shaking machine that spews out fish fingers. One that is highly arousing if you rest against it just right. I was good at it though as the supervisors actually taught me how to use it and even fix it. They must have noticed the smile on my face.

HR fucked about though and I ended up on a host of different lines where I proceded to fuck up.

1) I jammed a packing conveyer belt that then fired out box after box of fish products onto the factory floor.
2) I broke several belts inside another packing machine, causing much smoke and even more down time.
3)There was a huge noise and a massive industrial sized bolt fell out of the vegi machine and onto the convey belt. I briefly considered letting it get breaded and battered.
4)Messed up the machine packing fish fingers. Instead of carefully boxing them and moving them out so I could stack them on the pallet it tored through the boxes and the pushed half of the crushed fingers out onto the floor and the other half into the workings of the machine.

My best mistake though came on my last shift. I had a new job lined up which I could fit around uni and would leave me smelling of fish a lot less. So I was a little unattentive. Thats right, all the above mistakes happened when I was trying to be good.
I was at the paperwork/Quality control post on a line, doing the job I had been told. Checking the weights of rejected packages. My supervisor forgot to tell me it was also my job to check for blockages in the high powered packing machine. I didn't and it blocked. Nobody else noticed until the boxes set on fire.

Im glad I don't have to work there ever again. I have also never eaten that particular Captain's frozen products again, even the vegetables. You'd be suprised where e coli gets.
(Peljammy Watching Godzilla, Sun 25 May 2008, 12:28, Reply)