Monday, August 14, 2006

Nil by mouth

Normally I bring in my meals on nightshift, that way when I do finally get a break I am not scrounging around the kebab joints and taxi cafes at 3 am looking for something edible, something that will not kill me before the end of the shift. Yesterday we could not get a feed to save ourselves. In the end it became comical. We would walk into a place and before we had even settled on something on the menu - the pager would go off and we would be walking back to the truck...cursing.

Each time we walked in to place serving food we would get a SelCall for a job. The sandwich place was bringing in its tables as we pulled up. The pasta place was flat out and after queuing for whileI gave up. Later I ordered a pizza and cancelled it before it had been put in the oven. Later still I ordered a kebab and then suffered a vicious scowl from the guy behind the counter, despite cheerily saying we'll be back soon. We wouldn't and we weren't. I started looking around to see if we were being filmed for some kind of Candid Camera show - ha ha really funny guys - its midnight and I'm about ready to eat a box of rubber gloves from the truck.

We finally pulled into a service station and I stood there for a bit almost tempted to go one of those pre-packaged bacteria-filled certain-death chicken sandwiches. Normally I wouldn't even consider eating something like this, but my Blood Sugar Level had dropped to well below my mental age and these little guys had the crusts cut off them and all. Fortunately the little voice in my ear that was telling me not to buy them, won out. I guess that's why we work in pairs after all. A bag of peanuts, a fruit juice and a deranged psych patient later we got back to branch. I ate about seven pieces of toast with every different topping I could find in the cupboard. Bless the social club for keeping us well stocked. Exhausted but finally sated, I fell asleep on the couch watching infomercials.

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