Odd jobs: Earning a crust was full of life lessons

Don’t get worked up over current employment stats

I’m not sure telegrams exist now. I don’t know anyone who’s had one in recent years, and if

they are still used I suspect they are not

delivered by high school students on

bicycles.

According to Liam Dann, writing in the Northern Advocate on Monday, we are witnessing the golden age of youth employment. I would guess that like many others who comment on how good or bad things are these days, Dann doesn’t have a great deal of experience to draw on. It’s certainly a good bet that he wasn’t here during the halcyon days of the 1960s and ’70s, an era when it was rare for anyone, whatever their age, to be without paid employment.

I got my first job, the summer holiday variety, when I was 15, delivering telegrams for the post office.

My role was to sit quietly in a small room on the upper floor where two women received telegrams from wherever.

The message was printed on to a paper ribbon, cut and pasted on to the standard telegram form, stuffed into an envelope and thrust into my hands for delivering. And however mundane the message, I was expected to ride like the wind to any point within the Kaitaia borough.

I’m not sure telegrams exist now.

I don’t know anyone who’s had one in recent years, and if they are still used I suspect they are not delivered by high school students on bicycles.

A year later I was back at the post office for the summer of 1968/69, as a mailman. That went well. So well that it ended with the first and only time in my life that I have been sacked.

I would start sorting my mail at 7am, load it into a large satchel on the front of the official PO bike, and head for the RSA, turning right into Matthews’ Ave/Naumai Ave, then left into Church Rd, delivering mail as I went. Te Ahu St and Rongopai Place were mine, then I would head down South Rd, zip around Oxford St, and head back to the PO for a cup of tea and a biscuit.

Initially I was done and dusted for the day by about 11am, until I was told that I was covering for a man with a wife and children to support, and that this was a full-time job. Ergo, I was not expected back until 3.30pm.

Finishing at 11, I was told, did not cast the incumbent in a very good light.

So I pedalled a little slower, stopped at home for a cup of tea, and most mornings would pause to chew the fat with the vicar, Kevin Barnett, who always complained that I was late even if he was getting his mail two hours earlier than usual.

Having taken these precautions against premature completion, I would arrive back at the PO at about 11.30. So I was sacked.

My final summer job, a year later, was at the Sleepyhead bedding factory in Kelston, Auckland. That was hard yakka, working from 6am to 9pm five days a week and half a day on Saturday.

For a time I was in sole charge of feeding coconut fibre between two rollers attached to a machine that turned the fibre into a mat, which was later cut and placed on the springs of mattresses as they were manufactured in the building next door.

Sounds easy enough, but the coconut fibre came in bales, of similar proportions to bales of hay. Some pulled apart quite easily, while others had to be broken up with an axe.

And when the axe hit the bale with a “dongggg” that sounded like Big Ben at close quarters, I knew I had struck a hard one.

However hard they were, I was expected to break up fibre at a sufficient clip to maintain a pile of the stuff, which I also fed into the rollers. Inevitably the pile would dwindle to the point where I would be scratching around for crumbs, knowing that if the fibre ran out the whole plant would grind to a halt until I caught up.

But whenever that threatened — and it did, several times each day

— a huge, immensely strong and very friendly Pacific Islander colleague who spoke not a word of English would appear from wherever he was working, take the axe and break up a dozen bales in the blink of an eye.

He was obviously watching closely; he always arrived in the nick of time, and I was very grateful.

Even though I needed help on a regular basis, I reckon I earned my money. And what money! Every week I took home $120, which equates to a fairly miserly hourly rate, topped up with all sorts of allowances for noise, dust etc. But, to put that in proportion, I was paying $10 a week for full board. Three months’ board for a week’s work seemed like a very good deal to me then, and still does now.

And if I failed to make the national coconut fibre shredding team, I had a better time of it than (Kiwi) Keith Dawson, who according to legend brought the Southdown freezing works to a standstill during his brief summer holiday stint there.

The story goes that the call went out for maintenance when a trolley that was being used to shift meat from hither to yon lost a wheel. Kiwi, who was being paid to sweep floors, stuck the wheel back on, inserted the pin and split it, and went back to his broom.

Bad move. Maintenance did not take kindly to that sort of innovative thinking, and it was “everybody out”.

So sorry, Liam, but I reckon that was the golden age of youth employment.

What we have now, which would only be described as golden by those who believe in statistics, is a pale imitation of what really were good days in this country, the likes of which I doubt we will ever see again.