Jobs.

[Tarquin Thunderthighs lll]

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.

[The Peepmaster]

Blimey. So you could have actually been somebody... 


Thanks for your good wishes. I daren't mention it on the other forum, in case people start making puns... 

[Joan]

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. 

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.

[Malc]

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?

[Joan]

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.

[Zesty White]

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?

[Malc]

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.