Month: January 2016

All the same but different.

It’s been a while since I’ve blogged with one thing and another. As usual it was “be careful what you wish for”. I wanted the Hermes job for some fast bucks (as it were) then ended up doing 70+ hour weeks. Two weeks my top line was over a grand. Yet we still owe as much. As soon as xmas rush was over, the very next week, I got 3 shifts. Then three shifts, then 16 hours in a week.  I thought I’d pissed the women off who runs the agency as I had 4 days off before xmas, when I was bedbound with some filthy malaise. I sent a text after the 16 hour week asking what was occurring, but thankfully they then shifted her upstairs and we got a new boss. Since then I’ve not been doing too bad. The downside is that the work starts in the afternoon now. So a 16.00 start can (and has on three occasions) turn into an all night shift. Glass half full, I did get 54 hours last week. Then they announced, post xmas peak, an arbitrary pay cut. The long term workers say that was the peak rate, September to January, but no one told me when I started. It’s a pound an hour less on days and nights, one pound fifty on Sunday, and a fiver an hour on Saturday! I raged and looked for a new job straight away, the trouble is, no one else is offering £12.50 p/h (day rate, £13.50 past 18.00) and definitely not £16 p/h on Sundays.   I swallowed my pride out of lack of option. I’m not cutting off my nose to spite my face. I text them and said I don’t work Saturdays anymore. Sunday-Thurs/ Fri only. My pride can live with that.   I’ve not posted any pictures of my latest incarnation of the bike on here. She’s looking good. Actually that’s not quite the latest. I like the peashooter exhausts but I wanted the upswept megaphone style. I tried to do it on the cheap. You can buy just the silencers, and also some upswept pipe bits. You have to take your bravery by the scruff off the neck and actually saw off the peashooter bit, just leaving the downpipes. This I did, fitted the kick up pipes, slipped on the silencers,all in a few hours. Job’s a good ‘un. You can tell this story doesn’t end there, can’t you? Fired her up, roared like a wounded dragon!  Absolutely massive din. I took the silencers apart (as you are supposed to do) and the interior was basically a tube with holes in it. I should have took pictures. It totally took the piss. If you can imagine a bean tin drilled out all down the sides and all over the bottom, that was it. They said you could adjust the sound baffling (hence it being designed to be stripped down) but it was ridiculous. There was no way I could […]

Continue reading