Thursday 10 July 2008

Demolition Darren

We lived in a freezing cold NSW town for a few years. We chose to go there solely because of its proximity to Bathurst. If you don't know why we consider that a bonus you haven’t been paying attention to our love of V8’s and racing.

I started a job at a nearby underground mine since that was what I knew, but I soon changed my mind. A lot of young idiots worked there who’d never had the benefit of older miners pulling them into line. If this is the new breed I didn’t want anything to do with them.

I left the ‘miners’ to their hero work and got a well paying job at a milk distribution depot. It was 5 minutes from home and permanent day shift. Due to the 5am to 2pm working hours I had half the day to myself to do other stuff I wanted. Loved it.

The depot only had about 6 employees. Three freaks were on permanent nights so I never really saw them. Of the other three blokes on day shift, two turned out to be weirdo’s. (They’re everywhere). That kind of knocked the numbers down for people to talk to. Luckily the boss, Darren, was pretty easy to get along with. He loves Holden V8’s, fast bikes and high speed. In the past I’d always made a point of not being overly friendly with bosses. It becomes awkward for them when you screw up and the other workers are going to give you a hard time. I broken my rule here otherwise life would have been very dull.

Darren and I were keen Playstation addicts. The conversations we used to have about playing Grand Theft Auto 3 made other two workers nervous. Especially if they came into the office while we were discussing how to rob banks or do multiple back flips in stolen cars. They were into S & M porn so they had no right to give us strange looks. We left them to it.

Like me, Darren loved to renovate. He had big plans to rip his house apart and modernise it. He’s one of those ultra-rare people who actually turn their plans into action. I spent many hours after work helping him.

We pushed the boundaries of our capabilities with a couple of those projects. I’m still unsure how we managed to raise that pre-assembled 10m X 5m veranda by hand. Even the Egyptians would have been impressed. I fell through the ceiling while putting in the ducted A/C. My balls hitting the joist stopped me going all the way to the floor. He needed a return air duct hole anyway. I did have a few misgivings about gutting and rebuilding the kitchen. Darren was confident and convinced me it would be easy. It wasn’t, but we got it in. Most of the time we had fun and I got a lot of valuable experience out of it. Also I got to drink most of his beer.

By the way leaving huge burnouts up your street when I leave in the afternoon is traditional.

(Like it? See - The oldest can of peas and carrots in the world).

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