Making Bread

A dozen or so years ago I was temping and was offered some shifts at a bakery that had just opened in the town. It was owned by Budgens and they'd relocated from Slough to be near their distribution centre in Wellingborough. Apparently the Factory Manager had chosen Kettering over Wellingborough because staff costs were cheaper. That didn't bode well for me, but I turned up on the first shift at the unearthly hour of two in the morning. I was given an overall and hairnet, shown the toilet and canteen and then we made our way onto the factory floor.

I've worked in a lot of food factories over the years and it is my assertion that our hospitals would not have anything like the infection rates they currently or historically have had if they had to observe the hygeine rules that apply to food production. I regularly see hospital staff walking around town in their work uniforms, even in theatre green gowns.
Anyone leaving the bakery premises for any reason had to remove their overalls. Food contamination is a big deal. So why are hospitals so lax?

I was introduced to my supervisor and was given a job to do. I think it was passing baking trays through a scrubber/greaser. Any bake waste was cleaned off and a film of oil applied. The bakery got through thousands of trays in a shift and some may have been used more than once.

The bakery produced loaves and rolls, plus doughnuts, apple turnovers and hot cross buns. They also produced "part bake" french sticks that, as the name implies, were part baked and then frozen. They were then delivered to the store and finished off in the instore bakery. Sometimes the smell of fresh baked bread isn't always what it seems.

The bakery had two types of oven. One was a conveyor belt when the "raw" loaves were loaded in one end and the baked loaves taken off at the other. The work work was very hot and potentially dangerous. I still have a scar or two on my arms from where a hot tray touched aginst my bare arm.
The other ovens were turntable type. The product was wheeled into the ovens on rolling racks and then rotated until they were baked. Each oven held three racks. I made sure I never worked these ovens. It was far too hot, the racks were too heavy, and it was too dangerous for me.

The reason for my early start became apparent. Each product was produced on a production line. The raw ingredients were loaded into a huge bowl which was then mixed and loaded into a hopper. The machine then extruded the dough according to the specifications and the dough passed through the machine, being neaded and rested until it emerged at the other end where the individual rolls dropped onto the greased trays. These were then loaded onto a rack and then into a proving cabinet. After a while they were ready to bake and they went through the ovens and on to the packing area. It took about 5-6 hours from raw ingredients to packed product.
The main bottleneck was the ovens, hence the staggered starting times. The roll plant started at two in the morning and the bread plant at six.
Over the next few months I worked in every department of the bakery, always as a temp, despite their overtures to join on a permanent basis.
In the run-up to Easter we made so many hot cross buns I was sick of the sight of them. I was working on the packing line loading the trays ready for despatch and we'd be packing them for hours.
Another time I worked on the Part-Bake line. I also worked on the conveyor oven, the bread plant, the doughnut plant, packing the frozen french sticks into boxes. I even worked in the despatch area, picking the individual stores requirements.
My favourite (?) job was when I was asked to produce a product called "Bun Rounds"

They were similar to the illustration except they were covered in icing and topped with a glace cherry. I had to do every part of the process. I loaded the dough into the moulds, into the prover, into the oven, then applied the icing and the cherry before packing them, labelling them and taking them to the despatch.
It was hard work but I enjoyed the challenge of having a deadline to work to.

I can't remember how or why I came to leave. I'd been working on and off for almost a year. I must have had a better offer, or went on holiday and came back to find someone else in my place.
That's what happens when you temp.

Call Centres- outbound

Call Centres. Don't you just love them. Don't you just love it when you get a phone call just as you're sitting down to dinner. You pick the phone up and for a few seconds there's silence. Eventually a voice comes on the line and asks to speak to the owner of the house (and usually in a foreign accent).

Welcome to the world of Call Centres. I've worked in several over the years and basically there are two sorts- inbound and outbound.
Of the two, inbound is probably better. The customer rings you. With outbound you ring the customer.
I've done a couple of temp jobs in outbound call centres.
The first was a part time job while I was recovering from a shoulder injury. In hindsight I shouldn't have taken it because I got into trouble with the DSS and lost my benefit for a few weeks. Although the rules stated that you could work up to 16 hours a week without losing your benefits you have to get their permission first. The problem is that they are slow in reaching a decision, and the job has gone before they come back to you. So I went ahead and took the job.

It was awful. Soul destroying. Four hours of torture for minimum wage.

The job training was of the "you'll soon get the hang of it" variety. My tools were a telephone and a well thumbed local business directory. My task was to cold call local firms on behalf of an agency that tried to find placements for young people. My firm got paid for every appointment I was able to make for the agency rep.

Well for a start half the numbers didn't work. Most of the rest when they could be bothered to answer the phone weren't interested and it took less than a week to work through the directory. I was promised another database of businesses to work through but that never happened. In the end I gave up, thoroughly discouraged.
What a crap job.

I have every sympathy with call centre operators who ring to try and sell me cavity wall insulation or whatever it is they're trying to sell. It's a thankless job with no end product and no job satisfaction.

I did another spell working in an outbound call centre. This was slightly different. I was working for a domestic shower company making appointments for engineers to call to fix leaking showers. So in essence it wasn't really cold calling as the client had already rung in to report the fault.
My job was to make an appointment for the engineer to call.
Each engineer was allocated a territory and we had to manage his appointments so that he made best use of his time. Sometimes the engineer would have to travel a couple of hundred miles to get to all his calls so it wasn't possible to set an exact time when he would arrive. The best we could promise was either morning or afternoon. Sometimes I'd have to phone a client a dozen times before they answered the phone, and then there'd be negotiations because the day or time wasn't suitable.
Once again I have every sympathy with the operator when I have to ring to make an appointment for an engineer to call. They can't just drop everything and come at your beck and call.

I went for a couple of interviews for outbound call centre jobs, not that I was interested in getting the job mind you. Sometimes you go to an interview just to keep your agency happy.

I recall being sent to an interview about twenty five miles away, way outside the distance I was willing to travel for a job at minimum wage. I was told that it was an inbound call centre but when I arrived it was outbound.

It was a short interview.

Another time I was sent to a new call centre that was being set up. They were trying to get local builders to sign up to a builders only credit card. It was a sound business idea with soild financial backing.
When I arrived I found the same management team that I had for the first job I described above. Not a good start.
There were a dozen or so candidates and we were given some team building tests followed by a face to face interview. During the preliminaries we were told about "open" and "closed" questions, and to use open questions where possible.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed-ended_question

I had my interview with the personnel woman and she asked me if I knew the difference between an "open" and "closed" question? It was with great delight that I answered "yes" and said no more.

Apparently I did enough to be offered a job, but the hours (Mon-Fri 2-10pm)were against me. I was playing a lot of music and attending meetings most evenings so it was no go. Still, I'd have enjoyed the challenge.
I've no idea if the credit card got off the ground. It depended on getting the local builders merchants to accept them, and getting enough local builders to sign up. In the end I expect the recesssion killed it off because I've never seen it advertised anywhere.

Multi Drop

About ten years ago I was working in a distribution warehouse and discussing the rise of the internet. I made the sweeping statement that town centres were doomed because of the rise of out of town shopping centres and the internet. I went as far as to say that one day we would either be warehousemen or white van men. Either picking and packing, or delivering goods ordered over the net.
Nothing I've seen has changed my view. You can go shopping at Iceland and they will deliver your shopping for you. You don't even have to go to Tesco or Sainsbury's, just click on the website.
After I left the retail sector following redundancy about fifteen years ago I've done all manner of jobs including warehouse/distribution and multi-drop deliveries. Yes I've been a white van man. And a white 7 1/2 ton lorry man.
I drove a C15 fridge van around East Anglia for a meat products firm. My round extended from Peterborough in the north to Clacton in the south, from Ipswich in the east to Hitchin in the west. In the eighteen months or so that I worked there I averaged 2000 miles a week and went around the clock at least once. I wore out several sets of tyres and broke down and had to be towed home a few times as well.
I must have driven along every road between the A14 and the A12 looking for a way past traffic jams and making up time. Every customer wanted his goods first thing and you can't be in Peterborough, Cambridge and Colchester at the same time.

Another time I drove a 7 1/2 ton lorry delivering goods to schools in Northamptonshire and Oxfordshire. There were always too many deliveries and I'd always run out of time and have to bring some back. I was working for an agency so I'd only get an odd day here or there and I never ever went to the same school twice. I recall driving through rural Oxfordshire full pelt, trying to make up time, with my map on my knee and trying to get to the other side of the valley. I turned down a country lane that appeared to connect the two roads only to find it narrowing at the bottom and with no way to turn around. I decided to continue and forced my way through the trees overhanging the road. The sides of the lorry were quite scratched and there was branches and foliage all over the road.
Another time I managed to spill a tin of emulsion paint all over the floor of the van. What a mess. I talked my way out of that when I got back to the depot.
I wasn't so lucky a few weeks later when, as I drove past some roadworks, a digger suddenly turned and caught my wing mirror with its shovel, shattering the glass.
I took the van back and explained that it was a genuine accident.
I don't think they believed me because I wasn't asked back.

Another time I worked in a distribution centre unloading the night time trunkers. You've seen the vans driving around the place delivering catalogue goods. Back then they were festooned with three flying ducks along the side.
We worked from about 9.00 until 6 or 7 in the morning. A trunker would pull up and back up to the loading bay. The tractor would detatch the trailer, hook up to an empty trailer and go back to the hub. He'd return later with another full trailer, unhook and take the by now empty trailer away. And return a couple of hours later with a third.
The back of the lorry would be opened and the goods would cascade out all over the floor. The constant motion of the journey put paid to any stacking of the goods. It looked as though the trailer had been loaded by a hopper chute through the roof.
Our job was to take each item, look at the delivery label and place the item by the back doors of the delivery vans, anything up to 40 of them. There were all kinds of items from clothing to hoovers and garden tools, in fact anything you could order from a catalogue. Our small team worked away and eventually emptied the trailer. Then we had a short break and started on the next one which had just arrived. It was all go and we earned our money.
It was still preferable to driving the delivery vans. Each driver was expected to deliver 60 or more items to household addresses often miles from the depot. If there was no-one home he had to go back later and try and deliver it and get a signature.
I worked as a driver's mate delivering large bulky items that couldn't be handled by one person. That wasn't too bad as the drops were well spaced out and there weren't as many, but I always declined any offers to work on the delivery vans.
That was a hiding to nothing.

More Rubbish

One of the many jobs I did in the late 90s was to drive a furniture lorry. I passed my driving test in the 70s, and my licence allowed me to drive any vehicle up to 7 1/2 ton without any extra training. These days you have to go on a training course.

The lorry was fitted with a tachometer and it was a job to remember to fit a disc and then set it correctly. I've lost count of the times I drove miles while it was set for a mealbreak, or took a break while it was set to drive. The discs were stacked up in the despatch office and I never saw anyone ever look at them.

Two or three times a week I'd deliver furniture around the area. I had a mate who'd help me carry the items into the houses, and we had fun getting overstuffed sofas through narrow doors. Sometimes we had to take the doors off, or remove front windows. I noticed that the newer houses were much smaller than the old ones, and a suite of furniture that looked nice on the showroom floor would completely fill a living room. There was room for a sofa, one armchair and a TV set. Maybe that's all people need these days.

When people bought beds we'd offer to take the old one away. It cut out the hassle of getting the council to collect it, and cut down on the amount of fly tipping.We'd take the beds and suites back to the yard and stack them up. When we had a lorry load we'd take them to the tip.

These old beds and sofas were classified as trade waste and had to be taken to a depot in Northampton where there was a weighbridge. I spent a couple of hours loading old saggy, wet and mouldy beds and sofas into the van. There was a certain amount of covered storage at the yard, but the other staff wouldn't be bothered to stack the beds under the shelter but just leave them where they fell. Once I'd loaded up I'd drive the fifteen miles or more to Northampton and I'd pass these enormous open top container lorries heading in the opposite direction.
Upon arrival at the Waste Transfer Station (to give it its proper title) I'd get the vehicle weighed and drive up the ramp to unload in a cavernous dusty and smelly building. I'd back up to the heap of rubbish and throw all the beds and sofas out. A large digger would drive up and flatten everything and then scoop it up and drop it down a chute into the lorry waiting below.
I then returned to the weighbridge to be weighed again, this time empty (plus me in the cab of course) and then they'd charge me for the difference in weight. Once I'd settled up, I'd then drive back, following the lorry that now contained all the crushed bedding that I'd unloaded.

So why couldn't I just drive the bedding to the landfill site instead of a pointless thirty mile round trip? There's a weighbridge at the landfill site and both sites were operated by the same company.
Whether the beds were collected by me, collected by the council or flytipped, the probability is overwhelming that they'd have ended up in the same landfill site eventually.
There's money to be made from rubbish. All those road miles moving the rubbish around may be bad for the environment, but they're good for business.

A dozen or more years later and the fleet of lorries still travel between Northampton and the landfill site near Corby. They use a different route these days but I still recognise the vehicle livery and the huge trailers that look like forty foot containers with the roof sliced off. They pass close to a windfarm the receives subsidies whether the wind blows or not (it seldom does. It's estimated that the farm is no more than 7% efficient). Plans for an electricity generator powered by burning rubbish keep getting turned down on environmental grounds.
Any methane gas that is given off by the tons of rotting matter in the landfill is burnt off rather than collected and used to generate electricty.

It's all rubbish really.

Rubbish

When I was temping a dozen or so years ago I was happy to take any job offered. Some weeks I could only work for a couple of days due to my music commitments, so I was happy to take the odd one or two day assignments.
One May Bank Holiday I was asked to do a day working on the Domestic Refuse Collection at the basic minimum wage, but at double time for a Bank Holiday otherwise I'd have turned it down. It was hard and heavy manual work for someone in his late forties, but I gave it a go.
I turned up bright and early at the Council Depot, climbed into the Refuse lorry and we drove to a neighbouring town where we were to do our round. There were three of us, the driver and two mates who worked on opposite sides of the street. You've all seen how they do it. It's quite hard and there's a knack in getting the bin onto the hoist and then getting the empties away. The lorry is constantly moving and you have to watch out for traffic. You very rarely sit in the lorry and you're always on the go. I wouldn't want to do the job for minimum wage.
We drove up and down the streets which were quiet as it was a Bank Holiday. As we drove down one street in a rough part of town a man came out of a house, saw me and started effing and blinding "Who you looking at? I'll smash your face in", etc etc. Charming man, charming neighbourhood.
After an hour or two the lorry was full so we climbed in and drove off to the tip. This journey comprised my morning break. We returned to carry on the round and filled the lorry twice more before we finished the round in the early afternoon.
I politely turned down other offers of odd days on the bins at single time. The job is worth more than that.

A few months later I was offered a couple of days work at the landfill site that we'd dumped the household refuse. It had been very windy and paper and other rubbish had escaped the netting surrounding the tip and had to be picked up. So I spent a couple of days litter picking from 8 in the morning until 4 in the afternoon. I turned up at the gatehouse and they gave me a roll of black bags and told to get on with it. The netting that surrounds the tip is very good at catching any paper or plastic that blows around, but if too much sticks to the netting the net becomes a wall and the rubbish is lifted over the netting, so the first priority was to clear the netting. Pick the rubbish off the net, put it into a black bag. When the bag is full, drop it into the tip. Repeat until all the rubbish is collected. Once that was done I cleared all the rubbish inside the boundary of the tip, then all the fields around the tip for a quarter of a mile or so.

Plastic takes forever to degrade. There's a wood a short distance from my house that is the site of an ironstone quarry. The overburden (the soil and rock that covers the iron ore) was removed with a mechanical shovel and tipped so that it formed ridges and valleys known as hill and dale. These were planted with trees and the gullet was eventually filled with household refuse. It's possible to walk through the woods and see the site of the gullet, and also see old washing up liquid bottles sticking out of the ground and showing no signs of decomposing

I spent a couple of days clearing old plastic bags from the fields and hedges, enjoying the open air and being inspired to write a song or two. The only downside was the fact that my trusty Doc Martens finally gave out and began to leak water after a year of hard use, in factories and three months walking the streets pushing charity bags through letterboxes (but that's another story)

The driver of the Refuse lorry told me that when this landfill tip was opened it had enough capacity for over thirty year's worth of domestic rubbish. It had been in use for just over fifteen years and was almost full, such was the increase in the local population and the amount of rubbish they were throwing away.

Since then the council has introduced a two weekly refuse collection and recycling for domestic customers. We're quite happy to sort out our rubbish, with different bins for garden and household waste, and boxes for glass, paper, metal and plastic containers. What I'm less happy about is this.

I'm responsible for making sure my firm's rubbish is collected. It's a small firm with only a few staff, but even so we can produce a lot of cardboard and waste paper, drinks cans etc. I called the Council to ask if they had any facility to separate the recycleable stuff from the rest of the rubbish. They said that hadn't and had no plans to extend recycling to business customers.
Our business rubbish is collected in blue plastic bags that currently cost about £1.60 each. If I separate out the recyclable items I'm left with one or two blue bags that we have to leave out overnight as the binmen go by before the office opens. At the moment we don't have an urban fox problem and the rats are well fed from the rubbish left outside the many takeaways at the end of the street.

I can see the benefit of recycling. I've worked as a binman and I've worked in the landfill site. I'm happy to separate my household rubbish so that the council can sell the cardboard, cans and paper to offset the cost of landfill.
What I don't understand is why the council can't or won't extend the recycling scheme to their business customers.
I suspect that it's more to do with taking money from businesses than recycling.

World Cup Cricket

I was watching the cricket this afternoon and it reminded me of the time I worked in a call centre selling tickets for the 1998 Cricket World Cup. The main centre for getting tickets was at Lords and it was soon apparent that they couldn't cope with demand. People were hanging on the phone for hours trying to get through, and there was a real danger that the matches would be played before the tickets could be sold. Something had to be done.
I had a call from an agency asking me to turn up at a location in Market Harborough where I would be trained ready for going live the next day.
This was the first time I'd worked in a call centre so I was interested to find out how it worked.
The computer programme was fairly straight forward to use and we were soon up and running. The phone would ring in my ear and I'd find out what match the person wanted tickets for. Tickets were finite and many matches had sold out. We mostly had games featuring the smaller nations like Bangladesh, Kenya, Ireland and Holland in provincial grounds. All games featuring England and India were sold out and we had only one Pakistan game with unsold tickets.
I won't bore you with details of how the process worked. I've worked in a number of inbound call centres since then, selling magazine subscriptions and booking engineers for photocopiers. They all use versions of the same software, so if you've seen one, you've seen them all.

I did learn one important thing regarding Indians and Pakistanis. I'm not being racist, just telling you what happened.
If someone rang asking about a game featuring India and they were told that it had sold out they expressed dissapointment and rang off.
If someone rang about a Pakistan game and I said that it had sold out, they wouldn't accept it. Are you sure? You don't have one or two left? I can pay a bit extra etc, etc. It's as if it's built into their culture that tickets can always be obtained with a little backsheesh.
They wouldn't take no for an answer. If I said there weren't any tickets they would take it as a personal affront, as if their money, their offer of backsheesh wasn't good enough.
There was one Pakistan game that had some tickets. We were told that tickets were limited to two only per caller, so we had the spectacle of the buyer asking for ten or twenty tickets and being told no. Then they said can my brother/sister/auntie have two tickets? I checked and was told that they could if they came to the phone and ordered them in "person". So another voice would then buy two tickets for his brother, another voice would buy two for his sister, then his auntie/uncle/cousin/grandmother all had two. Once he had his ten or twenty tickets they'd all be paid for with one credit card.
Specially obtained to buy tickets for the World Cup.
The tickets were specially printed with the buyer's name, but when people in the same family are called Hussein or Ahmed or Mohammed who knew if the tickets were genuinely for family members or to be touted outside the ground?

We never had this problem with the Indians, only with the Pakistanis.
Maybe if there were tickets available for Indian matches I might have a different view but my opinion of the two nations was definitely shaped by my time selling World Cup tickets.

Trolley pushing

I went shopping in Morrisons for the first time in months (due to being housebound with my leukaemia). Seeing the lads and one girl pushing snakes of trolleys back to the trolley park reminded me of a time 33 years ago when I did just that.
I was working at Tesco Weston Favell. At that time it was the biggest supermarket in the country. People would travel from all over the county and from as far away as Milton Keynes to do their shopping. We had over 30 checkouts and at times every one was busy, with long queues at every till. This meant that we were always out of trolleys.
I had a small team of lads and our job was to keep the trolleys moving back to the trolley park in the entrance. When it was really busy we'd wait while a customer unloaded their trolley into their car and almost snatch it out of their hands, such was the demand for trolleys. We had one goods/passenger lift that would take twenty trolleys and many times I'd ride up the lift, open the doors and twenty or thirty shoppers would descend on the left, take the trolleys and rush into the store. We hardly ever had to empty the lift! It didn't matter how many trolleys we had, there were never enough. We had a team with a van and trailer touring the local estates rescuing trolleys from alleyways and ponds, and we had a contractor come in every couple of months to repair the trolleys and steam clean the really dirty ones.
Like the time a woman left her young child to soil itself while sitting on the baby seat. It was everywhere. On the mesh, on the floor. As we rushed over with a mop and bucket she never batted an eyelid, just scooped the child up, left everything and went and got another trolley and started again.
There's an art to pushing a row of trolleys, especially when the ground slopes as it did under the Weston Favell Centre. It was possible to push twenty trolleys without them breaking away if you kept them pointing upslope slightly. Once you were at full speed, a flick of the wrist would point the trolleys downhill onto a ramp up the kerb. You soon learned when to stop pushing so that the row of trolleys would stop just in front of the lift. We were out in all weathers, and apart from one or two very lazy lads who's rather argue than push a trolley, we kept the trolleys rolling, and thereby kept the tills ringing.
Now that every town has two or three supermarkets we will never see the levels of business that we had back in the seventies and eighties.
When we lived in Somerset our nearest Tesco was either Bristol or Yeovil. Now there are Tescos is Shepton Mallet where we lived, and in Wells where I worked.
In the early eighties the nearest cashpoint was in Bath, more than 30 miles away. Now even our local newsagent has a cashpoint machine.
The banks have closed branches everywhere. There will come a time when banks will be as rare as cashpoint machines were in the 80s.

We seem oblivious to one consequence. Every cashpoint machine has contributed to the loss of a person's job.
However, they'll always need someone to push the trolleys.