The Book of Sifty

Fighting it out while my pizza burned! 6:00AM

When I turn up to Sarahs place, she suggests we go out for beer at the local. Its a hot sunny day, and since the footballs on telly the pub is packed. We head up onto the roof garden of the bar, which is deserted. Sarah insisted on getting the first round, and infact only let me get one round in all afternoon. She knows I'm a bit strapped for cash and shes working, so her theory was some other time I'll buy.. cool. So the game finishes and the garden bar fills up. The people next to us, (all ex employees of the computer games publishing wing of Virgin! why am always surrounded by games industry people?), order a very yummy looking pizza. So Sarah disapears downstairs and comes back with a pager. In the UK and the USA they have these pager things they hand out in these situations. They set off the pager when your table/pizza/whatever is ready and you can go and collect it, or be seated or whatever. Very clever idea. For example in Winter Park rather than sitting around the expensive bar at the local pizza restuarant bar waiting to be seated, you could scoot across the road and get cheap beers, then go back when they paged you. All good.

So anyway another round passes. This time Sarah lets me go and get it, with her cash, (which is how I got away with buying one round since I bought it myself and returned her money!). Anyway to get down to the bar on the ground floor I took the back stairs, rather than push my way through the crowds on both the roof and in the bar. So on the way back up in the bottom of the stair well are two guys. They are both huffing and puffing and standing in funny stances in opposite corners of the stairwell, about 2m apart. As I get near the top of the stairwell I notice one has a bleeding nose and the other a ripped T-shirt. Hmm... I stop and look down. Sure enough they start fighting again. But its a funny kind of organised kicking boxing. Although it looks quiet nasty. I'm holding two pints and at the top of the stairs now so decide theres not much I can do. I head back to the table and sit down to tell Sarah that I should probably head back down to the bar and tell them. She says well she has to get cigarettes and check that our pager thing is working since the pizza was taking ages, so she'll tell them. So I wait with our stuff while she heads down. She comes back in bit and says that there wasn't anybody in the bottom of the stairwell anymore, and our pizza still wasn't ready. After a bit more our pager goes off. Its now been almost an hour since we ordered so I race down to collect it. When I get to the servery where they hand out the pizza, there a couple of guys arguing with the barmaid. She apologises and gives them their money back. When I hand over the pager she says sorry theres been a problem in the kitchen and our pizza will be at least another 20 minutes, would I like refund or was i willing to wait?

Well after a bit of questioning it turns out the specific problem was with the kitchen staff. See they didn't get on very well and had decided the only way to fix it was a small bout of kick boxing. Sure enough that had been them in the back stairwell. Fighting it out while my pizza burned!
Just great. We eventually did get a pizza and a free round. After that it was back to Sarahs to meet her friend Sara, have a few drinks before we headed out to party. Party was in Shoreditch. Which I may have mentioned before is a very cool area of London that has been sort of rediscovered in the last few years. At about 1am I decided that it was well past my bedtime seeing as I had to be up in 5 hours, and I had drunk way too much. So I left the girls and got on a nightbus.

Next morning it was up at 6:30am and into the rental car.

Where's my pizza? 6:00AM

Well I leave the UK in three days. Got a bit to do before then, packing mainly. But also some throwing out of things that I've had for a while that really are going to be taking a space in my already volumous lugage. Out goes my jacket, casual black one with grey strip and collar. Out goes some t-shirts that I'm sick of wearing. I've already lost my 'gumboots' they got trashed with last weeks activity.

Sorry nuff dross about luggage. In the last 7 days I've done about 85 hours work. I'm very tired. On Saturday last week I climbed on fast train to London. I had to be there before 12 to pick up a rental car. Normally they would have been open all afternoon. But the world cup football match was on at 12:30 and the rental dude was closing early. So I got the car and headed down to Sarahs place. Shes the daughter of my mums friend and also went to school with my sister. I was staying the night there before getting up, driving across London with the rental car to meet the others I was working with for the week. All good except I had to meet them at 7am on Sunday morning!.

A week at the races.. 6:35AM

I probably shouldn't have been driving, since I was still a little worse for wear from the night before. But I really had no choice as I had to pick up the others from outside a tube station and head out of London. I'd signed up for a weeks work at Royal Ascot. Incase you don't know thats a massive horse race thing the Queen puts on just after her birthday. Personally I can take or leave horses but I needed the cash. Driving across London I was foiled a few times by early morning road works and got lost several times. But eventually made it to the station to collect the others.

The agency I got the job through was providing a car, accomodation, breakfast and promised long hours. Which was perfect since it kept me from spending any more cash. I was going to be a kitchen porter. The job was super hard work as the hours demonstrate, and involved working for a bunch of grumpy chefs in a kicthen that turned on a massive meal for 1200 or so people in private boxes in the 'Gold Circle' grandstand. The menu ranged in price from '88 pounds to '180 or so, this didn't include any booze and I think staff for your box were extra. To own a box at Ascot costs something like '30,000 a year, then you have to use the in house kitchen to cater it and buy the extras they provide, such as a bowl of strawberries and cream for about '42 pounds. Most boxes had at least one waiting staff member dedicated to them. Still the place was packed, and there were 10s of thousands of people hanging around who didn't have boxes and just sat in the grandstand or on the grass. The kind of gratuitous wealth involved here was a little sick really.

Anyway the job the six of us did invloved unloading pallets of food from trucks, dragging them to the chiller and unloading them each morning.
There was a lot of food!. For example each day they got 2 or 3 pallets of strawberries alone. I then helped load up trolleys with cold foods prepared in the main kitchen, and took it up to each of ten kitchens over five floors of boxes. Very hard work. Not helped by the fact we started at 7am and finished after helping clean the kitchen at about 10pm. Still during the week I managed to see the Queen and one horse! Not to mention a lot of very rich (and often trashed) rich people and celebrities.