wasted and ready
do you want to know what time i woke up this morning ?? 3:50. in the am. fuck me. i got to work at quarter to six. a mere seven hours and forty-five minutes after i left it the night before. glenfield station was dark and cold when i left it. and the city was dark and cold when i arrived. i stared out the window that looks down onto elizabeth street, watching the sun rise and wave after wave of sydney buses drop creatures of the eastern suburbs off to start their days. i was out of that place by 1pm.
hippy steve and i pass our time by playing spot the metrosexual. we peer out the window, and as soon as a guy with a bro-hawk, a man pink shirt or designer sunnies walks past, one of us calls out �metro!� this man�s metrosexuality is then questioned heatedly, and if it is then determined that he is indeed a metro, five points is awarded to the person who called it in the first place.
it�s lead to some interesting thoughts: �nup, he�s gay. you can�t be homosexual and metrosexual. you only get to choose one sexual.� �white shoes do not a metro make.� �but his jeans are so tight.� �ten points off for attempted irony by calling an obvious non-metro� �you�re just jealous because you don�t have a whole bottle of product in your hair [hippy steve.]�
i won last night. hippy steve pipped me this morning. next shift we are on together, the decider will happen! the tension is that of state of origin. hippy steve is even contemplating swapping shifts so we can have a proper rematch on monday.
my work is full of little cliques. there�s two old groups. by old i mean my mum�s age. the day staff and the night staff. although my mum has stronger allegiances to the younger night staff crew than the old ones. then between the younger ones it seems to be divided up between who you started with. for instance, i started with twelve other people, and they only seem to talk to each other and they make claims that no-one else will talk to them. because a lot of the people there know of me because of mum, i have broken free from my starting group and have aligned myself with a group i call the a team because, of course, it�s full of people who�s name start with a. this makes me mr t.
but in saying this, apart from hippy steve mainly, there�s no-one there who i would enjoy socialising with after work hours. and because of the nature of our shift work, always coming and going at different times, there�s no time for friday night after work co-worker drinks.
my work deals with me hearing about dead people. about once a shift i will hear of someone who has died. i deal with the call, and i instantly forget about it. perhaps this is because i have no actual attachment to this person, i haven�t seen the body, and in a lot of cases i don�t know the circumstances in which they passed. this dead body is only a part of my life for thirty seconds and then the next problem comes in and i don�t have time to deal with it.
but last night, my dear best friend was driving me home [cause the trains were fucked, ironically because someone jumped at minno earlier that night] and we decided to go down parramatta road instead of the m5 so that we could get maccas from opposite the annandale. as we were about to turn onto new canterbury road, we saw police cars getting us to merge lanes. we assumed it was an rbt and made jokes about the friendly mcdonald�s staff spiking our cokes with vodka. as we drove past the cops, we realised that it was not an rbt, but rather a traffic accident. and there it was, a dead body lying in the gutter with a sheet covering everything but it�s feet.
i felt sick. i have to detach myself from the things i hear. but seeing it was a completely different story. seeing a life ended. wondering how and why. who this person was and what they do. but by the time we were back in the field, and had listened to most of hello nasty, i�d almost forgotten. and that poor person is just another statistic of our road death toll that no-one, but those who knew them the most, will ever think about again
27/02/2004 16:09