Wednesday 28th October:

After waking at 3.45am, I filled myself with a huge, hot bowl of porridge and set off along the empty, snaking moonlit road to the bakery.

Arriving on time at 5.15am, ready to start my trial shift, I was hugely excited. Having had many different types of jobs over the years, I knew it wasn’t the pay or nature of this particular job that was exciting me. It was the prospects; if the trial proved to be successful, it would breathe some life into my fading bank account and get me in the PAYE tax system, cementing my ability to return to Ireland at any point in the future with no more paperwork hurdles to jump. It was the final box to tick.

To cut a long story short, the trial shift went very well.

At the end of the first morning, I was beckoned into the office and asked how I felt about things. I confirmed that I had enjoyed the shift and would be happy to accept the temporary 5 week position if they were equally happy to offer it to me. They were and they did.

So, with a mix of relief at becoming financially more secure and also slight trepidation at the responsibilities about to be laid upon me, I duly agreed to be back in the building at 5.15am the following morning for another helping of work based delights.

For the next two weeks I was shown the ropes by a 6 year veteran of the packaging department. A mighty stallion of six-days-a-week stamina and galvanised procedural thinking. After these two weeks of being taught by the best, I was then entirely on my own for the following three weeks. To summarise, I worked 6 days a week (Sundays off) from 5.15am to around 11am for 5 weeks in total.

Here’s what was involved:

I worked in the packaging area, on the ground floor. Bakers worked on the floor below. The bakers sent bread, still hot from the oven, up in a lift to my floor. I then referred to my “daily orders” sheets, packing the different breads into their correct boxes / wrappers / containers and labelled them with their appropriate names and sell-by dates as they cooled. These items were put out by me, in the bakery’s shop next-door and in the two branded delivery vans, ready to go out “on the road”. 

Breads were organised into different crates depending on where they were headed relative to the distance from the bakery. Cakes and pastries were put into the chilled area of the vans. 

The vehicles had to be filled and ready to go by 7.50am, as the drivers arrived to start their route at 8am. After this point, when the vans had left, I took a different batch of breads and cakes to a supermarket in town, signing-in the goods and replenishing their shelves. Then towards the end of the day, I packaged more cakes, ready for the next day. 

This was the general method followed every shift.

The trickiest part was remembering the types and combinations of packaging, the labels and names of breads. Every day there was a different bunch of customers who had different goods ordered. For example, customer “X” would order on Wednesdays and Fridays and customer “Y” might order on Mondays and Tuesdays. This was incredibly confusing, as there were at least 4 regular customers that had the same name!

The two week supervised crash course came and went quickly enough and I survived the three weeks on my own unscathed. Very pleased.

Here are some of the notes that I took:

 

Highlights:

• Managing to remember mostly everything I was told!

• My tax form from Revenue arriving in the post (Ireland’s equivalent of the UK’s Inland Revenue). They requested details from me, such as my Irish home address, PPS number and other personal info, all of which I was now able to provide.

• Smelling fresh bread in the morning.

• The unexpected sound, not dissimilar to crackling rice crispies, from inside the lift as the bread came up to me. (The bread cools and the outer crusts crack and pop when the bread shrinks and changes temperature).

• The occasional chowder at the pub with a pint of Guinness at 9.30am.

• My bread and cheese feasts I made for myself when I got back from work.

 

So, now I’ve been paid and finished up, what happens next?