I once saw this piece of graffiti displayed in tall white scrawled lettering, high up on a wall in Shakespeare Road, in South London. I've either driven or cycled down that road more than a dozen times since, but I've never thought to look for those words again.
This was the type of written graffiti displayed way before those books of collected graffiti became so popular. I can't remember now, but I'm pretty sure I bought at least two such books. I even started to write my own witty one-liners too.
For some reason, though, those words have both amused me and horrified me equally. I am amused, or had been amused because I've always been a hard grafter, and it just amused me how some people would think that work is bad for you. And yet, in the same breath I know how work can work against you, especially if you're doing a rather energetic job and you incur an injury, say.
I'm doing a rather energetic job myself. One which requires my total fitness. I work a 10-hour day, 4-day week. Lucky old me, you might say, but even though we have our '318s' to show us the details of our duties with things like meal breaks, we rarely have the opportunity to follow them to the letter, as we're almost always on our feet for those ten hours, or more.
It's a killer of a job, and this is the first time that my job has really scared me. I can do my job, but only if I can get fitter as I get older, and be able to take all the shit that Royal Mail will be throwing at me.
Maybe I'm exaggerating my predicament, but I've got a strong feeling now that I may not make it to retirement age, which for me is in about 15 years time.
Right now, I'm trying to get myself as fit as possible, so that when I reach a certain age when most people should be doing little or sitting down jobs, I, hopefully will have enough fuckable energy left in me to stave off from being well and truly fucked by work before I can enjoy what's owed to me.
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4 comments:
i have a heel spur that has bothered me for many years. All those years of working on a concrete floor did it. And now working on that hard tile above concrete floor isnt helping. Today was the worst of it all. Im sore.
15 years huh? Thats not bad at all. Then you can enjoy fun in the sun!
I didn't know what heel spur was until I looked it up.
Looks like I may have it temporarily, as I've damaged my foot by putting too much weight on my back.
Doesn't look like I'll be going to work tomorrow / later today. I've been trying to work it in, so to speak for the last couple of weeks, but it's not improving fast enough. At one point, I had an ankle support on each foot, then I got it down to two supports on one foot.
It's a nasty shock to the system when later in life you expect to work less harder through seniority, as has been enjoyed by so many others of us in the past. Now, that won't happen, as the work has been ratcheted up so unrealistically that you wonder how you will ever cope as you get older.
15 years is a lot of time in which to incur more injuries and illnesses working for an employer that has frelled up their entire workforce by giving us no breathing space in which to do our jobs properly.
It does lesson over time as you stretch your foot. But when you arent walking on it for a while, it tends to come back. I found that out over the summer. As soon as I started back to work, it started hurtng again. The mornings are the worse when you have to go to the bathroom and cant walk to it.
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