Odd jobs in life lead to interesting stories

I WAS fascinated to read an article by Bernard Salt, the widely quoted expert author and journalist, writing about the range of casual work he sometimes enjoyed as a young man.

He did some interesting things and it got me thinking about what jobs I did before and around the time I was a university student.

Most notably, I spent a total of about nine months as a completely unqualified ward orderly in the general hospital near where I lived in suburban London.

I loved the work and meeting all kinds of people, many of whom were close to death.

My main attribute was that I was a strong young bloke quite capable of lifting bed-bound patients and very much at ease talking to many of them.

I also found it possible to learn to eat a good breakfast as I worked, despite the usual aromas that inevitably came from some of those who had spent many weeks in bed!

I also learned a great deal about how people coped with their own impending death or the death of a person they dearly loved.

Most of the nursing staff were brilliantly hard-working men and women who did all they could to make their patients as comfortable as possible.

Occasional hassles with visiting relatives were part and parcel of their job and that was all taken in their stride with the consoling words of older nursing staff who had often ‘seen it all before’!

I worked, particularly over Christmas vacations, as a postie delivering countless hundreds of cards and other mail around the district.

I had to cope with dogs, their sharp teeth and their lack of understanding that I was just a postie trying to do my job.

I had no desire to pinch their bones or biscuits and I wasn’t going to harm their owners, especially if they, the dogs that is, would stop barking and let me get to their letter box.

I must have been quite good at the job because, after several weeks of mail delivery, I was promoted to ‘mail sorter’.

This was an absolute doddle and involved sitting in front of a huge pile of letters etc and allocating them to their appropriate delivery areas ready for a bigger slave than me to cycle round the district and complete the delivery.

My first and worst-paid job was as a bottle washer. It was with a large company who manufactured and sold gallons and gallons of non-alcoholic soft drinks.

I had to develop a particular skill enabling me to pick up one dozen, no more no less, from the pile of used and empty bottles and thrust them into the machine that washed them.

Failure to pick up the twelve bottles was a sackable offence comparable to pinching a dozen full bottles when you thought nobody was looking.

The major threat to one’s health was the likelihood of cutting yourself on one of the many broken bottles that lurked between the reusable piles of every conceivable soft drink container.

When I started work there I was told that bottle washers were permitted to drink as many bottles of the stuff as they liked.

I didn’t realise that, within about one day, I would hate the stuff and drinking it was the last thing on my mind as the days dragged on.

I lasted about two weeks, as I now recall, before telling them they could shove their bottles wherever they liked as long as I didn’t have to wash them ever again.

Another endlessly boring job was as a weeder and general tidy-upper in the garden glasshouses that were next to the family home.

They grew carnations as well as the weeds and I have hated that beautiful flower ever since.