Photographic evidence

In January 2003 I didn't have much going for me. I'd left university the summer before with a history degree and no idea what to do next at all. On realising that I was only directly qualified for a job requiring me to toy with the G2 crossword all morning and play Championship Manager all afternoon, and that such opportunities seemed scarce, I returned to my home village in Nottinghamshire and sunk into a deep malaise.

By January my parents were understandably weary of accomodating a bad-tempered, rarely employed and expensively hungry layabout. My father, then an executive recruiter, did some work for a woodchip factory in North Wales and in the course of the conversation learned that they needed a short term marketer. By the time he left they somehow had the impression he was harbouring an available and keen young man in proud possession of a marketing degree. I had no good excuse not to take the job, so I was signed up - for six months I would commute from Nottingham to Wales on Monday mornings and return on Friday evenings, staying with a local couple in the nearby village in the week. My job would be Marketing Assistant to the Product Development Manager, primarily helping with the organisation of a wood-based design show intended to showcase the factory's fine range of medium density fibreboard and associated other woodchip-based products.

The strangeness of those few months cannot be incorporated into one blog post, or possibly even one hundred. But last week I was remembering one of my stranger regular jobs and thought it might serve as a stand-alone snippet.

The woodchip factory was owned by a scary old Austrian millionaire. I know he was scary because all the very hard and manly men who ran the business were plainly all petrified of him. Living as he did in Austria but liking as he did to shout at people, he wanted a way to make sure his Welsh factory was being maintained to his own Howard Hughes-esque standard of cleanliness.

This meant me being dispatched every Friday morning to do a lap of the acres of factory floors and the woodchip yard with a digital camera and strict instructions to take photos of certain areas from specific angles. I would then paste these photos into a template and email it to Austria, where I like to think he poured over them with a magnifying glass in a darkened oak-pannelled study, slamming his wizened fist on the desk every time he spotted a stray pallet.

Unfortunately for him, his rigid process didn't really raise the average cleanliness of the factory. For the first couple of weeks I plodded around, striking a incongruous figure in my suit, long black overcoat, reflective jacket and hard hat, snapping away and no doubt getting a lot of the foremen a trans-European telling off. Then they all got wise to the connection between my Friday morning saunter and the earache, and I started to notice forklift trucks whizzing stray crates out of my way, people with brooms racing across the site towards me and large men appearing at my elbow to say things like "Hows about you takes this one so's that large pile of crap over there don't appear, know what I mean?" before cracking their knuckles and gobbing on the floor.

The risk calculation was clear and the scary but far away man lost out to the scary and quite close indeed men. So a travesty of a pantomime ensued for the remaining weeks of my stay where I would go to each point, wait patiently for a small area to be emptied and swept, dutifully take my photo and be sent on my way with a gruff "good lad".

I actually enjoyed that job. It meant the end of the week was almost here and got me out of the portacabin I worked in for the rest of the time. But of all the pointless tasks I've performed for money, it was certainly represented the most elaborate waste of time.