Roper Rhodes, or, A Funny Old Week.

This past week I managed to get my claws into some temp. work courtesy of the agency I signed up with last summer. I got a phone call from them asking me if I would like to work at a company which sounded like Rofer Rowe. They described the job as simply re-packaging bathroom furniture and accessories. Being incredibly skint I said I would and was even more happy to hear that it paid £7 an hour. I eventually got an email clarifying the details such as where it was, what time to turn up, who to report to et cetera. The company turned out to be called Roper Rhodes.

On the Monday morning my Dad gave me a lift down to this place which was on the way to the hospital where he works. They were expecting me to turn up at half past eight but I turned up fifteen minutes before just to give a good impression, to give the illusion of zeal. I was waiting in the reception when a man walked in. He asked me if I was a temp and after I told him yes, he said he was temping for the week aswell. His name was Steve and he was forty-eight. He had an almost cartoonish cockney accent and, as we continued talking, it turned out he was from Milton Keynes and had only recently moved to Bath. Eventually someone from the company came in and asked us to sign a contract before telling us that the actual warehouse where we were working was just along the road and not part of the more admin. bit that we were currently in. The guy from the company asked if I wanted to get in his car for the short drive to the warehouse but Steve offered to give me a lift instead. In his car I noticed that he had two Brian Adams cds to which I thought Shit, this week is going to be terrible.

Once we were in the warehouse it turned out that it would only be me, Steve and another man named Paul who would be occupying the whole warehouse. Paul would be driving the fork-lift truck around whilst me and Steve would be tucked away in the far corner of the warehouse. We were shown what to do with regards to the job. It was impossibly easy work which consisted of opening large boxes, sticking labels on the smaller boxes within and adding labels to tap display stands. The tap models had names like Aero, Wessex, Storm, Neo and Insight which made them sound more like Gladiators than taps. We were eventually left to get on with the job in hand.

After getting to grips with the work I asked Steve what music he listened to apart from Brian Adams. He wondered how I knew he liked Brian Adams and seemed briefly unsettled by my knowledge of this before realising he had left the cds on display in the car. It turned out that he, like myself, was a Beatles nut and was similarly obsessed with them. He also was a big fan of David Bowie and told me that he went to see the man himself in an Odeon theatre in Chatham when he was 12. We talked about The Beatles a lot, comparing albums, discussing the impossibility of choosing a favourite track and also talking over various myths and legends which surround the band. We got on really well and he told me that he thought I was born forty years too late.

For the rest of the week we got to know each other more and more. He told me about his failed marriage and two children and how he believed he was going through some sort of a midlife crisis, whilst I told him about my lack of direction and various worries. We talked a lot about football aswell. He was a Chelsea fan and the mickey was subsequently taken.

Throughout the week we were crossing our fingers that they might offer us some more work, something to tie us over the week after. On Thursday the same guy who had shown us the basics came in and told us that there wasn't any work for next week. Once he left Steve said that they should have told us that tomorrow, on our last day, because now (and he had taken the decision on behalf of both of us) we were going to do next to no work on our last day. I was fine with that. We had also been listening to the radio all week and it was starting to grate. It was the same songs everyday, each sounding more like the last and there was great irony in that over the cacophony of some dance song we would talk about whether disc one or two was better on the 'white' album. Late into Thursday afternoon, after we had been told we weren't needed next week, Steve suggested that tomorrow should be a Beatles Day and that we bring in some albums to listen to. I told him not to worry and that I would bring in some albums tomorrow.

On our last day I brought in about eight Beatles albums and the best of David Bowie just for good measure. The Beatles albums were played chronologically, in keeping with Beatle diplomacy, and by the end of the day we had just about enough time to listen to some Bowie.

That week would have been a lot less bearable if it wasn't for Steve. On our last day we went for a couple of drinks after work and swapped mobile numbers. I like to think that I made a friend amongst all that monotony and that was the last thing I was expecting.