Beau Peep Notice Board
Beau Peep Notice Board => Outpourings => Topic started by: Roger Kettle on January 21, 2009, 09:07:01 PM
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What's the weirdest job you've done? As a kid, I made 10 shillings for being a "tar boy" at a sheep-shearing. Basically, I carried a pot of tar around and dabbed the stuff of any wound that a sheep suffered while being shorn. I also spent two weeks, as a teenager, painting a hydro-electric station on the island of South Uist. Over to you...
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What's the weirdest job you've done? As a kid, I made 10 shillings for being a "tar boy" at a sheep-shearing. Basically, I carried a pot of tar around and dabbed the stuff of any wound that a sheep suffered while being shorn. I also spent two weeks, as a teenager, painting a hydro-electric station on the island of South Uist. Over to you...
Nope! I've had some funny jobs in my time, but I can't beat this.
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MY first job was on a farm cleaning out the pig sty's, after three days you did not notice the smell.
Other people did though.
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My first job was on a youth training scheme in art, design and printing, where I spent more time cleaning the toilets than doing any arty stuff. Not exactly the job I had in mind, I left after a couple of months.
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I think Peter's just beaten Roger to the post!! ;D ;D ;D ;D
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Paper-boy, Supermarket shelf-stacker, Hotel washer-upper, Ice-cream sales, Fairground operative, Burger bar cook, Postman, Barman, Bus Conductor, Butlins kitchen worker, Butlins waiter, Bakery night-worker, Foundry worker, Canteen worker, Underground limescale cleaner, L.P. pressing-plant worker, Graphic designer, Cartoonist, now starting a new business (authorised to opertate only last week!)... Travel Operator (http://www.philippinetrails.com).
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Paper-boy, Supermarket shelf-stacker, Hotel washer-upper, Ice-cream sales, Fairground operative, Burger bar cook, Postman, Barman, Bus Conductor, Butlins kitchen worker, Butlins waiter, Bakery night-worker, Foundry worker, Canteen worker, Underground limescale cleaner, L.P. pressing-plant worker, Graphic designer, Cartoonist, now starting a new business (authorised to opertate only last week!)... Travel Operator (http://www.philippinetrails.com).
This sounds painful; can you get it done on the NHS?
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Great website Nige - even on my dial-up speed (except the video on the main page).
The photos are great and what a good idea to have someone there to speak the language and show you all the best places.
I hope you do really well!
Back to jobs... I remember my first Saturday job was working in a frozen food shop. I got to open 2lb bags of veg and put them in four half pound bags to sell to seniors and single people. It was awful as the bags were always underweight so you would have to take a few peas out of each bag to make it fair.
I had work experiance in British Aerospace in the secretary scheme. I got hardly any money but the reallywasn't that much to do either - it was just a waste of time. It was a lot like the Tetley Tea commercials a world of ancient old wood offices and funny characters.
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Peeps, I think your venture will be a huge success ;D
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Thanks, Malc. I hope so too. The opportunity was screaming out at me the year before last when I was there. There is so much enthusiasm, and it's not a destination much promoted - yet, although some parts are a tropical paradise.
I think we'll start to get busy after the Glasgow Holiday Show next month (where the Phils Embassy is giving us free space on their stand), and once we get freely listed as a supplier on the wowphilippines.co.uk website.
It's taken us from last March to build the website to what it is now, and of course it helps that I've been able to do that myself!
Last summer's traveling around the island was all about making contacts, and I envisage this summer's trip to be just as exhausting.
Diane, although the native language is Tagalog (with numerous dialects), English is widely spoken. Most signage is in English. It is argued that the Philippines is the 3rd largest English speaking nation in the world. (That's what they claim, but it's disputed in various quarters).
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I wish you every success, Nige, and I envy your energy. By my reckoning, you are currently a property developer, a website-designer, a cartoonist, a travel agent and a karaoke king! All the best, mate!
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Best wishes with your venture Nige. It's a pity my good lady has her heart set on Hawaii for our honeymoon because I like the look of those prices....
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I wish you every success, Nige, and I envy your energy. By my reckoning, you are currently a property developer, a website-designer, a cartoonist, a travel agent and a karaoke king! All the best, mate!
Roger, I'm saddened that you chose not to mention poet.
Zesty - there's always next year!
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I wish you every success, Nige, and I envy your energy. By my reckoning, you are currently a property developer, a website-designer, a cartoonist, a travel agent and a karaoke king! All the best, mate!
You forgot 'pilchard baiter', Roger!
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For those of you who are remotely interested, 'tagalog" is pronounced "tag-ARRRR-log", not "tagglelog".
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Yes, good luck to you and Lucy, Peepsie - I hope all of your hard work pays off.
The weirdest job I've ever had? Has to be the one I'm doing now, although walking into the Beano office as an 18-year-old to begin work as a sub-editor, only a couple of weeks after I finished school, was more than a little bizarre, especially as I thought I had landed a 'cub reporter' job on one of the company's newspapers, and didn't find out the truth until that first day.
Up till then, I'd only had respectable part-time jobs, like paper rounds and working in my local Tesco's fruit and veg department. I obviously knew my onions, because my boss offered me the opportunity to go full time and train for management. I've only regretted turning my back on that one a few times over the ensuing years.
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Blimey. So you could have actually been somebody... ;D
Thanks for your good wishes. I daren't mention it on the other forum, in case people start making puns... ..0
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I wish you every success with the business, Peeps and Lucy. Great website - looks like you've got it all covered. I'd certainly be interested if I lived in the UK and had the money!
My wierdest job would have to be at the "pea factory", a summer job when I was a student. Christian Salvesen had a cold storage/freezing plant in Granton in Edinburgh, where they stored and froze various vegetables and fruit, including peas. The picking season was a couple of months during the summer and the peas were picked in the Borders by machine and trucked up to the factory to be frozen, ostensibly within 48 hours. No machine is perfect, least of all one that has to pick peas, and along with the peas, the machines would gather up things like leaves, caterpillars, bits of rabbit, etc, etc. People were needed to remove this debris before the peas were frozen and packaged, so some boffin decided that students would be the ideal breed to perform the task, the idea being that they would be able to sit at the conveyor belt and think about other things while ensuring that your bag of peas only contained the little round vegies.
The job involved sitting at a conveyor belt while the peas and debris rolled along in front of you and picking out all the things that weren't meant to be there. Mind numbing (and finger numbing, as the peas had been washed in something), but well paid - we got award rates and time and a half on Saturday, double time on Sunday.
I have to come clean here, though, and admit that, thanks to my friend, Babs, I only ever did about two hours of conveyor belt time, on my last day of the second year. This is because on the first day they asked for people to help in the canteen, peeling potatoes, making chips and tea mainly. Everybody obviously thought, no thanks, and only a couple of people put their hands up. Babs nudged me and said, "Come on, this'll be much cushier." So I volunteered. Of course, she was right. We got to sit in a nice cosy canteen, serving tea and chips to the students and to the men (the real men that worked there) during the day. They had a cook who made the main meals, and all we had to do was make the tea at the start of the shift (so that it was well and truly black by the time the men had their tea break), cook the chips (apparently I made a bloody good chip), serve up the stew, and if we were on the night shift, peel a dustbin full of potatoes. We were laughing - mainly at the pruney fingers of our fellow workers. Some of the boys were allowed to drive the fork lifts at the beginning, but the union put a stop to that when my then boyfriend drove one into a warehouse door. ..0
I've also been a cook/courier on camping tours in New Zealand, a "supercook" on camping tours in Europe, worked in hotels, in Sandy Caird's shop in Aviemore, and had various boring secretarial jobs.
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I was the Goods-In Controller at Tesco Irvine for a couple of years, that's the most important job in the place, as you are responsible for checking everything that goes in or out. You are, effectively the sentinel at the gate. I had a couple of helpers, whose job it was to jack the pallets up and take them off the lorries whilst I checked the dockets. Incredibly, we didn't have a forklift, and if a truck didn't have a tail lift (this was about 1976, many did not), we had to handball everything off onto pallets we placed on the floor. I was 19 and built like a girl. You would have seen bigger shoulders on a sauce bottle.
Joan, Christian Salvesen were the carriers for Birds Eye when I worked at Tesco. Are you sure you weren't a Birds Eye pea picker?
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We were never quite sure who the peas were for, Malc. They just disappeared into the warehouse after the inspection - bit of a mystery how they got into the bags. We just assumed it must be Birds Eye, as there weren't many other frozen peas around at the time (1973 and 74). Not that we really cared. We were more interested in the little envelope with the cash in it (remember those?) and going out and enjoying ourselves spending it afterwards. Many good and long lasting friendships were made at the pea factory.
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I was the Goods-In Controller at Tesco Irvine for a couple of years, that's the most important job in the place, as you are responsible for checking everything that goes in or out. You are, effectively the sentinel at the gate. I had a couple of helpers, whose job it was to jack the pallets up and take them off the lorries whilst I checked the dockets.
I used to be a shelf stacker in a Safeway store which was built on top of the old Airdrie FC ground. I remember having to drag pallets off the back of the lorry with a pair of orange 'lifters', which was always a pain because they'd put the big heavy ones right at the back of the truck meaning you couldnt get a run at the threshold. The front of the truck always had things like crisps or toilet paper which was incredibly light and problem free. Tch!
At that time, I had a build that sounds roughly like that you described. Do you think supermarkets only employ young men who look a bit undernourished?
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Speaking from a Scots perspective, I never knew anyone of my age who was built like a rugby prop forward. At least not in the early 70s. I'm not saying we were like the war babies, brought up at a time when food was scarce, but in the West of Scotland we 1950s babies all seemed to be wiry.
Where I'm from I do get the sense of belonging to a people. There are a lot of men who look like me, same prominent, pointy nose, no chin, same face, same hairline, body shape, etc.
I know a few guys from the West who emigrated here, and they look like my cousins. When we used to watch the football on TV mum's favourite saying was "he's aff the Gibbs, ah'm tellin' ye," and that applied to Denis Law as well as Allan Clark of Leeds. Modern "Gibbs" include Gordon Strachan and Darren Fletcher (Man Utd), as well as Midge Ure, all of whom my mum believes look like her family.