tin house shop

12august2015
after sinking low with street life and no money, time came to get a job. the guy who lived in branch ave , told me they're putting on at the steelworks, and his old man was driving him out to try and find work. he asked if i wanted to get a lift out with them, as i remember. so, i did just that. he said tell them tin mill, that's where they were all going. it was hard for me after being sacked from their mine. the company which owned the mine also owned the steelworks. also their employment office blokes gave preference to outsiders, immigrants and blow ins, rather than locals. i got in by the skin of my teeth.

13august2015
that was pretty much my mind thought on it. it had to start somewhere, the tin house shop was the crossroads, when i come to think of it. work is the bargain you make with the machine, to exist in the world. it don't matter if it's a penny or a thousand. this is not a rant , it's my thinking at that time.

14august2015
the time would have been around may 1976, could of been earlier. after getting the job , i can sort of remember we had to have a medical. after been given instructions where to go to  catch the bus to the medical centre. on the way , we were greeted by two blokes . they began tell us how we had to join their union if we wanted to go further on, and how if we ever had trouble they were on our side. we joined the union , they took a small amount out of our pay, fees. the steelworks bus was a double decker, which were once for public transport, double deckers were phased out late sixties. the bus trip was quite fun. back then the place was real busy, with 30,000 employees. the medical was the piss in a becker thing. we got work gear and had to report on a specific day for work duties.

23august2015
with the street and being low, i seen the journey as going nowhere. the people i hung out with were nowhere. i meet these sort of hippy types , born agains.  they started preaching to me in the street. this would have been a few months before getting the job. i thought about them guys, thinking more about me before, than what they were on about. for what they were on about  was something i had left behind. the job wasn't about them guys or what they said, it was more me picking up the pieces that had been lost. the people i hung out with just put shit on me. a few years earlier , pre teens i would have had just bash them, but through adolescence i had became a low urchin. not just adolescence, but heaps of other factors. them hippy born agains were the first lot of what would become them Pentecostal types ,  revivalist if you like. i never had much to do with them. my way, was more looking how i'd fucked up and try doing the right thing, and eventually things would improve.

26august2015
i thought that last bit would give me a bit of prospective and thought of that time. i can't really remember the first day, how many first days have there been, hey , when you don't really fit in, most days are first days. probably got a clock card number 62363 as i remember. i sort of remember going to the psm machine shop and hanging there until someone told me to go to the tin house machine shop. talk about not wanting to be there. like i said before mainly apprentices, my first taste of weirdos in action , and still going on. i really despise apprentices, they're dead shits , from the mine i didn't like them. now i was a labourer to them. money ways , i got more than a 2nd year, and on par with a 3rd year. some  called me ferret and some called me rat, i really didn't have much of a say.  another called me weasel. although there was one guy who knew me, so the sav name wasn't that far away, the guy i knew from birmingham  worked on a different shift, he'd been working a few days or weeks earlier than me.

28august2015
i find it a bit boring writing about a job , although there were times that seem okay. my main things back then was sleep, not an early bird lifestyle,the early worm catches the bird, night owl, bird of night hoot not. at the start i was on 5 day shift work in the machine shop, that fitted in okay with my lifestyle. you've got to really understand that i was 17 and a half years old then, and you had to be 18 to work there really. there was exceptions though , you had to sign this bit of paper. you could get a job there a 15 as an office boy. that job fizzled out around 1978. apprentices were a different kettle of fish.  day shift was the only shit shift , afternoon shift was okay . i don't really remember much of night at the machine shop.

2sept2015
i was thinking about the guy from birmingham, who has since moved on , rest in peace. i've been in two minds about whether to use his name, i wrote a bit in an earlier blog. he came to australia around 2nd or 3rd form, 72/73. he was in a higher class than me, so i never really had much to do with him at school, although we did play house baseball, if you can understand that. at that time he had long hair , most of us had short hair from the parents authority , so he was a bit of the in crowd at school. you know in times of your life you're teamed up with unexpected characters. so, we were in the tin house machine shop. we got talking about things, like music and such. he was into stuff like yes, close to the edge, probably eno and that type of stuff, but he did go on about yes. i decided to join the record clubs tape section, with the record contact all paid up. this would of been the time i switched to cassette tapes, the bought ones. so i got 6 or whatever tapes for $1.99, one  being, yes close to the edge, couldn't get into it really. i did have a record we both had though , king crimson , in the court of the crimson king, and we both agreed the song , 21st century schizoid man was the heaviest thing . to be honest, i bought that album because of the cover, a few months or years earlier. after a while of being on the same shift , he was moved to 7 day shift work, in the dreaded mill.

4sept2015
the mill was the roll shop, a noisy cunt of a place, were you did chuck changing . without getting into too much detail, chucks contain  bearings that fit on the end of rolls, big rolls that need to be changed when necessary. the machine shop was a fairly quiet place compared to other sections. you could hear the difference by just walking into them places, you also had to wear a hard hat in the mill, in the machine shop you didn't. it would be fair to say the machine shop was a laid back atmosphere. they both had there different characters to boot.