Lazy Workshy Jobsworths

And now I'm one of them.

Since the factory has stopped production we are all supposed to be on maintenance duties. I've been assigned to the "environment" team, painting gates and fences and stuff.

Everyone has an attitude of "don't rush to finish anything, they'll only find you something else to do"

In our little team of three, our first assignment was to paint the big steel automatic gate at the front of the factory. It was pretty rusty and nasty. We would first have to get rid of the rust and the flaky old paint.

Clock on at 8:00 am. Meet at the maintenance yard 8:05. Put the cafetière on and talk bollocks while the coffee comes thru. Fill the wheelbarrow with rags, gloves, paintbrushes, paint, sandpaper and traipse down to the gate. 8:30

Boss decides we need mini angle grinders to get the rust off. We stand around in the sun while he goes off to get the machines. 9:00 he's back. Hooray! We have nifty grinders to get the rust off. But no disks, so we do some more sun bathing while he goes off looking for disks. 9:15 and hooray, we have disks, but no extension cable, so moer sunbathing while he goes off to find one.
Just before 10:00 and we finally have everything we need to get started, but 10:00 is coffee time so we traipse off back to the maintenance yard to put the cafetière back on ...

By the end of the day we had de-rusted half of the gate. This was a Friday. It rained all week-end and rusted up the work we had done. The following monday saw the same chaos and us runing back and forth between the gate and sheltere everytime it started to rain.

The paint was water-based white paint for metal, but it was cheap nasty stuff that even after 3 coats still wasn't covering properly. The factory director (called "Mickey" because he always wears a safety helmet with integral ear muffs that look like Mikey Mose ears) finally told us to stop wasting time and money with this rubbish paint and find something else to do.

So they decided that we would paint the inside of the mould workshop. And thus started another week of farce ...