Personal · 23 October 2006 ·
Back again
So I am back again, now able to tell you more about what I did.
I worked for the temping agency Hands to Work. They provide you with a place to sleep (You pay 55 Euro per week for a 2-room bungalow that you have to share with up to 4 people) and then sent you to work. You get all sorts of work. Quite a few people worked at a candles factory, then there were companies that produced salad. A friend of mine got a job at a relabeling store house: They repacked mango fruits from Israel, removed the labels of origin and put on new ones that referred to Costa Rica as country of origin. Completely insane, but apparently people make profit from it as people prefer Costa Rican mangoes over Israeli ones. And the strangest bit: Apparently it is completely legal. Usually it wouldn’t be but at this place it is. And we, the consumers, will still trust the labels of origin and won’t notice a thing.
I for my part worked at Verhaak bv, a wholesaler for paper products. I packed displays for a Belgian store. Basically it were cardboard boxes filled with Christmas accessories like gift wrapping paper, starbows and many other things.
The work was alright and the company was simply awesome. Everyone was kind and friendly. There were about 20 people employed and i got in contact with almost everyone, even the boss. He explained how his business works which was really informative. It is so weird: Supermarkets and stores order pre-filled displays. These displays are packed at Verhaak and then, as a whole, sent to the warehouse of the supermarket. It is such a waste of resources, but apparently it is economic and pays of.
I wouldn’t do this job for the rest of my life, however as a short time job it is great. Not only because we had cake every third day…
However on my first day I had a different job: Slicing iceberg lettuce. Great job (hope you have a good irony detector), yeah! Especially if you can enjoy it half asleep, because you have night shift. It’s a bit like a near death experience… no, i don’t say it is awful. It is certainly not particularly nice, but there are worse jobs. But what I meant when speaking of near death experience: Your whole life comes up in your head and you think about almost everything that bothered or interested you since your birth.
But that’s only the first 4 hours. Later on you start to think about other things… more related to the actual work. You start to wonder where the salad goes to, who will buy it, who will eat it? Additionally you think about how to make the process more efficient and wonder about different slicing techniques.
But then, the last 2 hours you start to not think at all. Your brain activity decreases dramatically. It is only slightly reactivated when the end of the shift is near. But once you are at home again (at about 7:30am) you won’t be able to fall asleep because the sun just came out and on an ordinary day you would now get up. It’s like coming back from holidays: Jet lag.
Well anyway, I am now about to move to Potsdam and looking for a job there or in Berlin. Any ideas, suggestions, love letters or anything else?
Update:
I have photos:
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