Like all of us, at various points in my life I have had a wide range of jobs. Also as with most of us, the great majority of these jobs were ones I had on my holidays when I was a student. And most of them were pretty mundane – factory work, truck driving and so forth – they produced the money that I wanted to enable me to wander around Europe as a hitchhiker, but did nothing much else for me.
Ice-cream Anyone?
However, some of these holiday jobs had a profound effect on me in one way or another, and there are a couple that really stand out in my memory as significant to me and my world view.
The first of these jobs that I can bring to mind was when I was a driver/salesperson in one of those vans that chug around selling soft ice-cream to people. On the face of it, a harmless occupation – but it had its dark side too….
This was the relatively large number of people in the Council house estates I trundled around in with my van and chimes, who came out every day (I did this 7 days a week) with large jugs that I had to fill with the soft ice I sold… Literally every day these misbegotten people bought kilos of ice-cream from me, and presumably ate it too…
Can you imagine a diet based around about 5 litres of ice-cream every day? It really saddened me – no, lets be honest, it disgusted and revolted me to think of the harm these people were doing to themselves and their kids by eating the chemical rubbish I was selling as ice-cream…
yuk!!!!
Death Of A Centurion:
However, the job that really got in amongst me was when I worked as a Ward Orderly at a huge mental hospital. Though frankly to call it a hospital seemed to me to be a wild overstatement, as the poor people in the ward where I worked never saw any doctors, except on rare occasions when they flipped completely and needed stronger tranquilizers to keep them calm and easy to control.
OZTHOUGHTS 