My New Job

PhatPocket. It's such an American name. Which makes sense, because the manager (and owner, as far as I can tell) is American. So, as many of you know, I got a new job recently. Therefore I have been pondering it.

My job itself is incredibly weird. I'm a PreScanner, which means that I arrive at 9.30 and spend five minutes or so piling books onto my desk in about six stacks, each about two foot high, then I scan them all into a computer programme or, if they're old enough not to have barcodes, I enter the ISBN number by hand. The programme tells me whether the book should be accepted by the company to sell on or not. If the book is accepted then I have to judge its condition (good, very good, acceptable, library or non-library etc.) and put it on the relevant shelf. If the books are rejected by the system, then they're thrown in the recycling (literally thrown, it's great fun) or put in a box for the School Aid charity in Africa.

Alternatively, it seems to be an actual company policy that books which would otherwise be thrown away can be taken home if we want them for ourselves.

As a first job, this is both excellent and crazy at the same time; unlike many employers, PhatPocket don't take advantage of the fact that under 22 year olds aren't required to receive minimum wage and pay everyone equally. What's more, the job is the perfect balance of sitting at a desk all day and strenuous physical exercise; every so often a new crate of books is required, or the bins have to be moved, or we have to get a new trolley to fill with books, all of which are quite laborious jobs.

Other hilarious aspects of the job include some of the stories told by my co-workers (most of which involve drinking), and the day we had a huge amount of frogs in the warehouse. Being on a farm, there is a high chance of escaping wildlife; a lamb apparently got into the warehouse in the spring. A few weeks ago I arrived at work to be told that there were baby frogs everywhere and that I should be incredibly careful where I trod. This then led to a mass exodus of tiny frogs from the warehouse to the pond and a lot of watching where I walked for the rest of the day.

Frogs apart, Margaret is the funniest thing to have happened in my time working at PhatPocket.  When conditioning the books we often find interesting and questionable things being used as bookmarks. The most notable of these was a plain brown envelope simply addressed to "Margaret". Although not that outstanding in itself, this envelope and what it has grown to represent have changed our lives forever. Margaret has become a cult figure at work; one of the men has considered leaving his wife for her and everyone has been accused of secretly being Margaret as a cunning ruse. On Friday we found an actual address for (probably a different) Margaret and we are planning to send her a letter in the near future.

There is so much more to tell you, including the 11:00 read, the collection of "That's not my..." books and how scary Mark is, but this post is becoming unbearably long and there'll be time for it all in another update on my life. Suffice to say that I am (somehow) enjoying my new, quite boring, job and I look forward to the next several weeks of my working life. Primarily because the other benefits of this new job are excellent, but more about them another time... ;)

The Explorer Expedition

So, I said I'd fill you in on what's going on in my massively busy and stressful life. As I'm not sure where I stand on the whole talking-about-things-at-work thing, based on the Official Secrets Act and MI5 and whatever, I think I'll start by pondering the Splorer Expedition.

It was AMAZING!!! We spent a lot of time walking and using buses and some time on the train. The idea was that we would plan and arrange everything ourselves; transport, route, time-keeping and accounting and set up a Geocache route around the Cinque Ports at the same time. (By the way Jack, have you sorted that yet?)

(Can't remember if I've said this on here before but for those of you who haven't heard of Geocaching, it's a worldwide treasure hunt set up using GPS systems to find little caches, or boxes, which have notebooks in to allow people to sign to say they've been there. Some of the caches also have little presents or toys in them, but the rule is "if you take something, leave something of equal value." If you'd like more info on Geocaching, you can check out www.geocaching.com - the official website for this stuff.)

Anyhoo, where was I?... Oh yes, the Expedition. Well there was a lot of walking, which we actually quite enjoyed (except MatT) and also a fair amount of being filmed and pretending to be intelligent by saying big words. And half of us were French for a bit. But that can wait until after the first official showing at the AGM in a couple of weeks.

Another integral part of the Expedition was using the Romney, Hythe and Dymchurch light railway. It's a small railway, unsurprisingly, which runs through from Dungeness to Hythe and back. We all managed to squeeze into a tiny carriage with all our massive kits. Then we sang "the wheels on the train go round and round", followed by "the wheels on the Pip go up and down" (don't ask, just don't.) The journey from Dymchurch to Hate, the bit we did, was through some lovely countryside and went past some interesting sheep. However, the best part of the journey for me was definitely being told to "stop the church music" by MatT and having to explain to him that it was actually ABBA...

Of course, other stuff did happen; Pip tried to kill us all in a huge explosion, Jess's legs became hugely stripy like... Well, like a very stripy thing and, between them, Greg and Rachel managed to drag us up a hill, through some bushes and into a barbed wire fence. We also made friends with some nice people in McDonalds and watched as Greg, Rachel and James tried to freeze themselves to death by paddling. However, I really don't have space to write about all these things here.

As you can see, it was a really great couple of days and we are going back to Dymchurch for the Beach Weekend in September because we loved the area so much.

An Eclectic Selection

Hello dear readers, I'm terribly sorry that my updates have not been forthcoming. I blame a combination of work, holiday, hiking and forgetting. I will briefly outline what I've done and what I plan to update the blog saying in this post because I've pondered so much recently. After this post, I'd like you to pretend that the things I'm talking about have just happened, rather than having happened between a week and three weeks ago.

So, in the last few weeks I've got a job with an online book selling company called PhatPocket (yeah, I know.) This has led me to meet many interesting people, find many... err... interesting books (including "Walls and Fences"), getting my first payslip and working in a warehouse full of frogs (all will be revealed, worry not!!!) Working in a real "office" environment, i.e. somewhere that isn't someone else's front room, has shown me both the joys and pains of the work force; half-hour lunch breaks are both a blessing and a joy. It's also a very strange combination of strenuous exercise and sitting in one place for hours on end; moving books around and then sitting scanning them for ages means that I've not really become accustomed to solid desk work.

On top of that, there was the Explorer Expedition which was, ooooh, about two weeks ago now. We started in Hastings and hiked/got buses/used the RHDR to get to Sandwich four days later. It was an excellent trip all around and highlights include Jess's stripy legs, Jack trying to kill dune bugs and ending up killing Greg in the process, Greg getting us lost and Rachel trying to make us climb through barbed wire, trying to explain the pelvis to James, and Phoebe. Just Phoebe. As before, more details to come.

Since then James, Rachel, Louise, Craig, Josh, Adam and Adele helped at the Holiday Club (run by all the church regulars and the Reverend Sandra) at the church for several days but, since I was working, I couldn't go with them. However, I was able to go to the Bring and Share lunch, although they didn't actually let me bring anything to share. It was a highly enjoyable lunch though and I'm glad I went and saw everyone and had a nice chat to my lovely church friends.

Following this was the family holiday to Yorkshire for eight days. Yorkshire is a beautiful place and if you've never been there then I highly recommend it for a holiday or longer. For me, Yorkshire is the perfect balance between country and seaside, the two best elements of Britain, with enough town aspects for someone like me (someone who isn't a massive fan of the metropolitan scene) not to get bored too quickly. Plus, their accents are beautiful. For the first two nights of our holiday we were staying at Wood House Farm in Westow near York ( http://www.wood-house-farm.co.uk/ .) From Monday night onwards we were staying at Station House, Cloughton - somewhere between Whitby and Scarborough - ( http://cloughtonstation.co.uk/ ,) which is also a tearoom. Both of these places do deserve proper write-ups, but I will do these another time.

Finally this evening, whilst waiting for a rerun of New Tricks to start on the cable channel Alibi, I stumbled across half a documentary (well, a documentary which was halfway through when I found it) about Meat Loaf. The singer, not the food - how sad do you think I am? More specifically, it was a documentary about "Bat Out Of Hell", possibly one of the best albums of all time. If you haven't heard it before, I implore you: please, please, PLEASE do yourself a favour and listen to it. It really is amazingly good.