MINDLESS MUSINGS

Blue collar work isn’t very intellectually demanding, so there’s plenty of time to ponder. I’ve always been a nerd, but university was never on my radar. I didn’t enrol until I was in my late 30s – that’s another thread and one I will be eternally grateful for.

Anyway, this sideroad concerns all the contemplation that took place, and is still taking place, while I go about earning a quid. More precisely it is about the reflections that flooded my mind regarding the job I was doing at the time. Call me a forkie philosopher. You know like “yeah, I know this is the job, but why is the job?”. I often irritate my coworkers.

A funny side to that is that I ended up studying philosophy as an adult and a joke I encountered many times was: “I studied philosophy…would you like fries with that?”

So, without further ado, I would like to present a poem (sorry) written by a pisshead forklift driver working for a company that was overwhelmed by stock – excessive overtime was the norm – good money but exhausting if you were one of the foolish ones actually working hard. Feel free to call me a foolish philosopher too.

This was over twenty years ago (note the DVD reference and I’ll tell you those TVs were the heavy, bulky ass ones). Long before I had a degree in philosophy and literature and therefore knew I should not be writing poems, I felt a yearning to express my bewilderment (to whom I have no idea). Ladies and gentlemen, a verse penned by a hungover, depressed, angst riddled man whose idea of a poet was Jim Morrison (at least I had the pisshead part right).

SLAVES

We are all slaves.

Slaves to other people’s greed.

More, they want,

More,

Always more.

Never enough.

The stuff comes in,

We ship it out

But still they want more.

More TVs,

More DVD players,

More fridges.

The bosses want more

More customers,

More freight,

More money,

It’s better for us all they say.

Don’t you want the overtime?

When they have it all.

They want newer stuff.

The latest DVD player,

A bigger fridge,

A better TV,

Something else.

So we ship it out.

We get the overtime.

We get the money.

So we can buy stuff.

TVs, DVD players, fridges

Don’t you want a new car?

Thank you for indulging me. I hope you get the gist of what this tangent will be about. Corporate confusion through the eyes of the grunts on the floor – the overthinking ones anyway – or one overthinking one – you get it. Also reckon here’s where I’ll throw in those true stories I have collected after 33 years in the workforce – names and businesses will be changed to protect the negligent and the lazy.