Some years ago I got a summer job working in a biscuit factory.
It was surprisingly dirty work. Every year they’d close the factory down, strip down all the machines and clean them. That meant taking apart the conveyor belts, hosing them relatively clean, putting them back together, scraping off stuff from the other parts and generally getting rid of sticky stuff.
At one point I found myself inside the monstrous machine which deposits the lumps of mallow onto the biscuits (before it’s sprinkled with coconut), with a power hose, trying to blast off a 6 inch thick crust of unimaginable goo. 12 hours a day, for 14 straight days. The only perk was getting to buy brokendy biscuits on the cheap. The stuff they couldn’t sell went into a little hut outside the factory and you could get a week’s supply for half nothing. I had more Garibaldis than I knew what to do with.
But in that job I learned a valuable lesson from a man who we’ll call Charlie. Charlie was much older than I was. I was 17 (it was a very good year, I have to admit), and he was a grizzled old grafter who spent most of his days with a John Player Blue hanging from his mouth. He was kind of the boss of the cleaning crew and he looked like a piece of old flint.
Biscuit factory cleaning is boring work. While it might be physically demanding, putting together half a mile of conveyor belt is not exactly stimulating. And as a young man I was full of chatter and talk. There were other younger lads there and we’d talk football and possibly Twin Peaks if that was a thing at that stage and Sherilyn Fenn and which was our favourite arcade in town (Pierrot for me, the others had a fancy for the Hideout on South William St).
Charlie, however, would say little.
“Pass me this” or “Give me that” or “Go get me one of those”, was about the the extent of it. We’d do the fetching, he’d do the mending for mending was his thing. I am not a mender or a fixer. My mind is not mechanical. I can be flummoxed by the instructions on how to affix a bicycle light, so I was more than happy to let him do that stuff.
So, one day, I fetched, he mended, and he needed me to stand and hand him various tools and bits of things which you use to fix things apparently.
“You don’t talk much, Charlie,” I said.
“Mmmmmm,” he said, not exactly encouraging further conversation.
I wasn’t quite as good as picking up on the subtleties of communication as I am now. Now, I’d keep my mouth shut, let the man work. So I blathered a bit about this, waffled a bit about that, and all the while he had his head stuck in a machine doing things to it I simply didn’t understand.
Eventually, as I tried to talk to him about whether or David O’Leary was the finest Irish centre-half of all time, he stuck his head out of the darkness and said, “Shut the fuck up.”
“Oh,” I said. “Why?”
“Because you sound like a cunt talking about nothing. No need to talk unless you’ve got something to say. Talking for the sake of talking, that’s the sign of an insecure mind.”
I was silent.
“Now pass me that there,” he said pointing an object I later learned to be something called a spanner, before he went back to work.
“Fine then, I’ll shut up,” I said, “but you could have told me that 583 words ago, you old prick.”
