'The Beer Factory'
As we did not have enough money for a decent vacation I had taken on a job at a beer factory. I was assigned a chair in front of a light through where 30 cl bottles were marching by. My task was to seek out bottles that contained alien matter and smash them in a neighbouring wheel barrow.
Initially I did everything by the book. I soon noticed that excessively often there was a clothes peg in the bottles. I found that intriguing and I still do. How for heaven’s sake does a clothes peg land in a bottle of beer? What causal relationship could be underlying? At first I assumed I had blatantly underrated the consumption of beer among housewives. Then I thought it to have originated as a drinking joke. Like putting a clothes peg on your nose and then without hands drink the bottle. Also I dreamed up a Suffragette movement that wanted to confront men with their domestic labour, the last bottle that mum gave out on a house party or a student prank to squeeze greenhorns to size.
It was, is and will remain a mystery.
It was not allowed to drink while working, which was a hard bearing on the boring job. The check on this was minimal, so soon on arrival I’d put a few bottles aside to cool down from the exiting pasteurizing temperature (60º). Once half my shift was done I drank about a bottle an hour, and finally drove my bicycle home in a gentle daze.
The worst case scenario was not really when I failed to spot a dirty bottle, but that the feed of the bottles jammed. Within seconds bottles pushed each other off the conveyer and exploded on the floor. At first I would hasten to rescue, but soon I discovered that a push or a kick against the railing in front of me sorted the same effect.
The bottles I threw in the wheel barrow except for beer also splashed fragments of glass around. I shielded myself against these by putting up a wall of crates. This worked to an extent so effective that I cautiously saved up condemned bottles in the barrow until I threw one in over the wall. The ensuing explosion was a bizarre treat for the senses.
Increasingly I succeeded in pushing back the pressure of work. The next step was securing my privacy. I walled myself in with crates in such a fashion, that I could see my boss approaching through slits and chinks, but he could not see me. This was a good thing, as I was incredibly capable, without missing a single bottle, to be reading comic books at the same time.
Six weeks I kept it up and there after we went to Norway on holidays. There beer is practicably prohibitive, but that didn’t matter. For the time being I was fed up to the back teeth with it.
Jan Ploeg, Boston, October 14th 2007