Paper Pushing

With the high-pitched whine of a protesting engine and a rattle of gears and chains and machinery, the blue plastic bin is hoisted upwards and pitched forwards. From it spills a tide of papers spreading and thinning as they slip and slide over one another and across the starkly slick surface of the machine in front of me.
I don't say anything. Over the insatiable roar of the shredder mechanism, I would not be heard anyway. Instead, I reach out both hands and haul the mass of paper towards me, and then push it onto the thrumming conveyor belt which disappears beneath the metal safety hood. I try to thin the pile, keeping the load light so that it will not clog the blurred blades.
There's more to the job than that - but not a great deal. The paper must be sorted, so that the resulting bales - to be sent off to Malaysia for recycling - should be either mainly white, mainly lightly coloured in the light office pastel shades of pink and green and blue of receipts and invoices. Alternatively, they might be indiscriminately mixed or even less discriminately everything else, including plastic and polystyrene and anything else that might have been dumped into the recycling bins populating offices throughout the city.
And so, our job is to sort through it, picking out the coloured pages from the white batches, and picking out the white from the rest. There are plastic bales too, and every bin must be carefully searched for crumpled money bags, discarded shrink wrappings from magazines and tiny, tantalising jigsaws of sliced up credit cards.
But as ever, Phil is not happy.
"We're dealing with tonnes, here," he growls - he has been working here long enough that his voice, and his alone, can be heard above the machine, "We're not dealing with single sheets. Don't sort it so much."
I still don't say anything, but push the paper through faster, grabbing only for the most obvious and most damaging bunches of papers and plastic which might colour the white bales in too-obvious a manner. In this way, the paper moves across the machine faster - vanishing beneath the hood, to emerge on the other side in jagged stripes being dragged up another conveyor to the baling machine. The noise of the shredder remains constantly active, chewing through the papers ravenously, never pausing or idling as we feed it continuously.
But Phil is still not happy.
"Don't let so much other stuff go through," he says this time, "the white bales can be sold for more - no one's going to buy one that's not white."
I grit my teeth and adjust my pace again - this time slowing so that I can pick more rogue colours from the mix. And so the day continues and the nature of my deficiencies are determined by my supervisor's whims.
"Too slow." he says.
"Too careless." he says.
"You show no signs of improvement whatsoever." he says.
I have been here a week so far, and as far as I can tell, I am no better or worse than anyone else operating the machinery, Phil included.
"I think he wanted a girl." Crystal says.
"Sorry?" I say.
"From the agency." she explains, "I think he was hoping to get a girl this time."
The turnover of temporary staff seems to be rather high, but I cannot afford to be fussy, and I cannot justify abandoning the job until something better comes along.

Christmas and New Year have been and gone, and the much promised boom in the Christchurch job market has failed to materialise. I have been taking whatever has been offered to me, and before my tenure in the shadow of the paper shredder, I have been manufacturing plug-in insect repellants, packaging tubs of Veet and sorting through outdoor gear for a distribution outlet - not to mention the two nights a week washing dishes in an out-of-town pizza restaurant. But there's something about the shredder which makes me want to get out of there as soon as I can.
No-one else around the machine seems to have any affection for the work either. As soon as the clock strikes ten, twelve or three, it is abandoned without a word as we retreat to the tiny staff room for a break.
"Do you have shopping malls in England?"
Crystal's pack lunch is a box full of fruit in various shapes, sizes and colours. She picks at it, extracting a small chocolate bar concealed at the bottom.
"Yes," I say.
"What about Starbucks, do you have Starbucks?"
"Oh yes."
"And Subway?"
"I think so, yes."
She nods, satisfied.
Crystal met her boyfriend through their shared hobby of customising cars. She is working through the school holidays to raise money to add further bells and whistles onto her Toyota. It is not until I accept a lift to the nearest bus stop outside work, however, that I fully appreciate where the money goes. Crystal's car is pink - pink in the most violent and overwhelming sense. Outside, the spoilers, hubcaps and various mouldings are all glossy and rosy - inside, everything from the upholstery to the steering wheel to the dashboard to the mats on the floor is the same, vivd shade. It is enough to instigate a dull ache at the back of the eyes, as though its all-encompassing pinkness seems to impinge on not just one, but all five senses.

Being a security company, the factory is well secured. One door will not open until the one preceding it has closed, cameras follow you around every corner and it is understood - if never explicitly stated - that the employees working the shredder will not read any of the documents which pass through their hands.
Of course with Phil grumbling in the background, such a luxury would be impossible anyway, but it is difficult not to appreciate that sort of things which we push from the bin to the shredder.
Bank statements and bills, curriculum vitaes and school reports. There are magazines, newspapers - a complete set of broken-spined law manuals. In less pleasant bins - signified by a sharp odour which accompanies the tumble of contents - there are mouldering lunches and half-drunk cups of coffee, banana skins and beer bottles. More often than not it can be picked out gingerly, but on occasion it is only discovered as something indescribably seeps through the fabric of the gloves.
But even without paying attention to the materials we process, some things stand out, begging to be noticed. A programme from a memorial service, a wedding invitation, family photographs and newspaper clippings. Things thrown away carelessly which must be destroyed further. Entire lives passing before us into a serrated oblivion, moments of poignancy punctuating the nine-hour day.

I count away the hours: dividing the clock-face into fractions and ticking them away. Two hours until the next break. Half-an-hour. The next time I look, it will be time to peel the gloves off and get out of here - if only for fifteen minutes.
At each break, I check my telephone for messages from my agencies. As the breaks slide by, with no word, I slowly resign myself to another day, another week.

"So where in England you from?" Phil asks me.
The machine is off, and we are sweeping up the floors - half-a-metre deep in the detritus which has got away.
"Oxford." I say.
"Where's that?"
"Near London."
From this distance away, it may as well be true.
"Oooh." says Phil, "Lah-di-dah. How posh."
"Yes." I say, "We all have butlers."
"Butlers?"
"And corgis."
"Corgis?"
Later in the day, I hear him telling one of the drivers that I have a butler, in a tone of horror which proves everything he suspected was true. I could have intervened, but I couldn't see the point.

"Are you free for Monday?" Liz asks.
It is thursday, and I am pacing about outside the front gate with my telephone clamped to my ear.
"Oh yes." I say - a small lie. I am supposed to be staying with the shredder for a further month, but the agency contract allows a single day's notice.
Liz - who represents a different agency from the one which secured me my current position - continues to explain how an office job has come up, one lasting for three months, one which pays somewhat more than my current hourly rate.
"Are you computer literate?" she asks.
I rattle off a string of examples which I hope proves I am. It is the sort of enthusiastic burst of self-promotion which usually eludes me entirely during job interviews and I stop short, wondering where it came from.
Liz sounds very understanding, as employment agents invariably are under any circumstances, good or bad. She promises to do what she can, and hangs up amidst a flurry of appreciation. I pull myself together and head back into the factory to find Phil.
He is sitting in the small yard at the back, smoking a cigarette, holding a black caps flag which he has taken to waving since the cricket started.
I explain to him about the job, and apologetically admit that the following day will be my last. He nods at the floor, smoking thoughtfully.
"Three months, eh?" he says. "Not that long. Could stay here for six."
I realise I feel rather guilty, and apologise before leaving him to it.

The following day, continues much as before, and Phil remains reticent and quiet. When the three o'clock break comes however, we are led upstairs. It is the birthday of one of the office secretaries and cake has been laid on for the staff.
The atmosphere is a little awkward, and conversation is muted. Phil disappears for a few minutes and when he re-appears, he passes me a bottle of beer with something which could be mistaken for a smile.
I must look stunned, because Crystal leans across the table.
"The new temp's a girl." she says.

One Hundred, Not Quite Out

For the sake of argument, let's assume that the five rather bloated articles below are actually just one great big, very bloated post. That would make this post the one hundredth entry on this particular blog - small potatoes by the standards of most weblogs you can find online, I appreciate. Those with the stamina to update several times a day, week in, week out.
A modest achievement then, to fill this thing up with at least one-hundred rambling entries. Notices pinned to a virtual wall, gathering virtual dust.
So, with that in mind, here's the virtual pop of a virtual bottle of champagne being opened. Cheaper than the real thing, if not quite as satisfying. Grab a glass, take a swig. Don't blame me if the virtual hangover is more potent than you were expecting.

I would say something like, 'here's to the next one hundred posts' but given that it has taken so long to reach three figures, we'll probably be back home in the UK again before the two-hundred mark is even in sight. So we'll see how things go, and how much more we can add to this thing.

In the meantime, I'll see if I can make a few tweaks to the blog itself. A few improvments could be made here and there if possible. Maybe I could get around to updating the itinerary page, or the links - most of which seem to be pointing to blank sites or error messages these days. The photo-blog too is due an update. This depends on my finances at the moment though from my perspective. I have eleven rolls of film waiting to be developed - you have been warned, as has my bank account.
The guestbook still works though - admittedly, it contains only nine posts or so, most of which are getting on for two years-old at this stage. Every now and then, there is the occasional tenth - anonymously posted and containing only a string of links to such sites as 'Lindsay Lohan's Underwear Drawer' - I deleted them, I'm afraid, but I'm sure a quick search on Google could bring them up - so to speak - if anyone was interested. Feel free to add any messages, either to the guestbook or to the comments link under each post. Talk to us, guys!

Speaking of Google, the new site counter - that little green box at the foot of the page - has turned up a few interesting results since I installed it a few months ago. The hit count is only as modest as you would expect from a website which is only updated intermittently (with long interminable pieces which no-one can really be bothered to read), but there are some interesting results regarding how people have found the site, and where they have come from.
Some, hailing from Canada, America, Eastern Europe and some places that I had to look up on a map, have found the site through Google - including one chap from Milton Keynes who ran a search for the words 'hostel', 'dorm' and 'shagging' and found StillNotHere.co.uk. No surprise that he didn't stay very long either - but it's nice to know that we're not completely invisible on the web, even if the average visiting time is something like two seconds at the moment.

As for the future, well I'm in Christchurch trying to raise money - not an easy task with the current exchange rate if I want it to mean anything when I get home. Gary and Julia are down in Queenstown, working their socks off in a supermarket and a health spa respectively.

What next? I have no idea, to be honest - which is probably why the itinerary section remains so out of date. Here's to more posts on this thing anyway. However many it takes.