Wednesday, Oct. 24, 2001 Industrial Relations Oh I'm so, so tired folks and I know from all the little aches and pains I have that my body is demanding I give it some rest. Trying to keep up with the demands of a full-time degree is bad enough - having to work 30 odd hours a week on top of it is damned near impossible. So, I slipped off and came home early today.....well, I'm only missing a video screening and I can hire it out and watch it in my own time. Still, and I bet you thought you'd never hear me say this, I'm glad I've kept on working, and it's not just a matter of money. Quite simply, when I get into the car on a Friday night, I begin to feel like a grown-up again. It lets me step away from all the college stuff and reminds me that I'm a very capable person - not just a glorified school-kid, and that helps my confidence no end. Trust me folks, if you can drive a taxi at the weekends you can cope with anything life may care to throw at you. Hey, I've learned important skills such as how to ignore people hurling abuse at you; how to bounce drunk men out of the car (roughly); how to cope when a guy reaches around the seat and grabs your tits (sink foot to floor, take car to 70mph, take hands off steering wheel and suggest that if he doesn't want to die, he'd better stop distracting you while you're driving); how to cope with people who don't want to pay (drag them out of car and kick repeatedly until they find the money); and how to do first aid at 4am in the morning when you find a guy lying on the side of the road with a fractured skull because he got a kicking outside a nightclub. Ha, after that University's a piece of piss :-) Unfortunately, everything isn't sweetness and light at work at the mo.....not for any of us. A new driver started about six weeks before I dropped down to part-time work and he's the colleague from hell. A nasty, snidey little-shit. The sort who thinks he knows it all and knows fuck-all, the sort who'd fight over fifty pence. Thankfully it's not just myself who can't stick him - I'm way at the back of the queue behind everyone else who works at the company. Even the bosses have assured us he's getting the boot the minute they can find a replacement. Just one example of what a shit he is: Now taxi-drivers have a lot of disabled people as customers, whether it's elderly people who find it hard to get around any more or younger people who are confined to wheelchairs. Shit, a lot of people use our company because they can trust us to be helpful. None of us appreciated his comment about 'getting stuck with cripples'. Shit, my blood's boiling again, even as I type that out. Trust me, if we weren't so short-staffed his feet wouldn't have touched the floor on the way out after that remark. Personally I don't appreciate driving across town to lift a fare, only to find he has already got there before me and taken it - because it was a better paid job than the one he had been allocated. Fares are allocated on an equal basis - you take your share of the shit work and the creamy work. Which is why he got told a few home truths by myself last Saturday afternoon :-D It won't make a damned bit of difference to his attitude, but I sure as hell felt a lot better for it. Right, I'm off again........believe it or not, I'm going to sit down and formulate a theory about the locking of car doors - Ms M will know what I'm talking about.
| |
| Stale | Fresh |
�
Cast List
� |
