I'm still coughing and falling asleep and generally not feel quite right and that's after being stuck down by a nasty cold last Tuesday, at about 4pm, 2 hours before the end of my shift.
So, I couldn't work on Wednesday and I thought I might have been OK, but couldn't work on Thursday either so I only did one shift last week, so I'll be paid £48 for the week and that's actually not enough.
I did spend today (Sunday) doing some editing work, but I won't get to send off the invoice for that until next month, so money is tight.
Maybe that explains my behaviour this morning, I was woken up at 6.53am by a phone alert asking me to work the 8-4 shift today, I could hear rain, couldn't see outside, it was still dark, put on my waterproof gear, grabbed my freshly charged bicycle lights swung open the garage door and started pedaling up the hill. It was raining hard, very hard, there was water running in a stream down the road that sprayed up my the leg flapping legs of my waterproof trousers, cars approached without dipping their headlights for a barely visible cyclist and then sprayed me, and another car and another, I was forced to ride at the side of the road were the pools of water were deepest, I pedaled hard for 6 miles concentrating, not to lose focus from the bright headlights of oncoming traffic, and got sprayed with dirty runoff from each passing car, I kept my mouth firmly shut tight and my eyes wide open, roads are busy at that time of the morning.
I got to the warehouse and clocked in only a couple of minutes after 8am, 'you're looking a bit dishevelled this morning Rebecca' well I wouldn't have come in if I'd realized quite how hard it was raining',
'Oh no, we needed you this morning'
I had to stop and think, I was feeling awkward, what was I doing?
Am I obliged to be on stand by, ready to leap into action to meet the demands of warehouse operations?
Oh dear, my response this morning shows that I don't really understand my position as a casual laborer, I've got confused, let's put this in perspective, I'm paid less than a living wage with no guarantees of work, I can't get sick, it's simply not an option, and I can be on the list for a shift and then be told that there isn't work for me just 1 hour before the start of that shift, actually on Monday I didn't check for phone messages before leaving home, I got to the warehouse only to be told to get back on my bike because I wasn't needed that day.
I didn't know I was part of a rapid response team, ready to be woken up with a call to come to the rescue and then behave like a firefighter setting out on a rescue mission to a burning building,
I'm an 'idiot worker', I thought to myself.
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