How do I manage to keep working in this tomato packing torture shed? The most likely cause is the amazing group of people I have had the good fortune to meet. Like abused siblings we rally together to help each other see the lighter side of working in a potential mine field. Unfortunately it is a rather transient crowd, as people just pass through to top up their coffers or their pain tolerance. The up side to this is that there is always someone leaving worthy of celebrating with a larger than preferable portion of wages being spent on partying.
First it was Andrus, a friendly and curious Estonian who was always trying to understand the idiosyncrasies of the English language and believed that the volume of his speech enhanced pronunciation. If you didn't pick up what he was saying on the first 2 goes, it was either shouted at you or you were told to be intimate with yourself in terms too profane for this journal. Secondly, it was a lovely Irish girl who didn't want to have her real name of Karen C. used in my journal so I'll refer to her in future as Miss Karen D. She had a knack of making such beautiful adornments out of tomatoes, and the shed will no longer be as enjoyable, or fashionable without people sporting a piece of fruit in some alluring and imaginative way.
Being Friday night for Miss Karen D.'s going away, most people had a day off. Even part of the Nutbox farm crowd had the night off, myself included, as changing patches was reducing picker output. Miss Karen D. also pointed out to me that like the Caboolture strawberry farm, a google search on Eat????s only brought up my journal entry berating the place. While I remained unconvinced that Chief Nut Case is actually literate, I'd rather not take the chance of someone else giving him the gist of my ramblings and have changed the name to protect the guilty.
That little snippet of information formed the bulk of what I remember being said for the night. I filmed parts of it, which I often do as age continues to reduce the effectiveness of my memory and other body functions. I was determined not to go out to a pub as a fun and friendly environment was being loudly enjoyed at the hostel. Like every night of partying at the hostel though, before long the owners of the establishment vented their frustrations on a belligerent crowd too drunk to realise or care that everybody else there probably has work the following morning.
So against what better judgment I was capable of, we went out on the town. Bowen seems to have more pubs than people, but only one is worthy of patronage apparently. It's name was another snippet of information lost to the annals of intoxication, and it seemed to contain the same hostel crowd with a few local rednecks thrown in to keep everyone on their toes. Drinks were twice as expensive, the music sucked and the lighting was bad enough to make it hard to figure out the gender of the person you found yourself dancing with.
How I ended up dancing is beyond me as blister town should have kept me off my feet, and the dance floor. It didn't stop me from giving Julia a piggy back most of the way home either. That was easy to tolerate because it was as close as I'll come to physical contact while staying in societies least private of places; the hostel dorm. Of German extraction, Julia has such a cute American twang to her English that I like listening to her talk, even as she practices all the swear words she has learned off the boss.
She learned a few more the other night when she saved the two lid boys from a severe dressing down that left them nude and blue. Julia had sent a box through sideways and called to me, the nearest knight in hobo armour, for help even through there was nothing I could do to save the damsel in distress. It was my turn to have a swing on the emergency stop cable knowing that doing so was going to attract some very unwanted attention. And it did. The less said about that the better.
