Wednesday 13 May 2009

Scottish sunshine and bloodcurdling screams

There ain't a cloud in the sky over Central Scotland today. Maybe summer is finally on it's way? Now that I've said that, it will probably be teeming with rain again tomorrow. Looking out the office windows at this different, brilliant blue sky makes me feel like we could, in fact, be in some kind of foreign destination. An office plucked from the middle of Scotland and transported to a strange land where the sun feels warm against your skin and you can barely look up into the sky without having to shield your eyes. Then I hear the heavy hum of the printers downstairs and the battling fork lift trucks outside and am pulled back into reality once more.
The fork lifts are particularly busy at the moment, dealing with todays batch of titles, running off the press downstairs. They scoot about the parking lot outside with their piles of newspaper titles, manoeuvering in and around the trucks and vans as if competing in their own version of Robot Wars. The occasional yell from one of the operators echoing up and around from somewhere in the distribution area.
The operators and factory workers yell so loud sometimes, their voices reverberate around the factory. Once, one of them yelled with the most terrible, bloodcurdling noise I'd ever heard. Truly horror movie worthy. It was so loud I wondered whether he was being eaten alive by one of the printing machines as I worked or flattened by one of the enormous rolls of newsprint which stand ominously around the factory floor. Maybe he'd banged his head and fallen on to one of the conveyor belts which line the walls, waking up at the precise moment when he tumbles off the track into the recycling paper shredder. Perhaps one of the fork lift trucks had took a wrong turn and skewered one of the operators on the factory floor with one of it's forks.
As I sat imagining these various and horrible deaths I could not help but notice that nobody else in the office had seemed to pay the least attention to this terrible noise. To this day I wonder if it may have even simply been all in my mind. A horrendous, mental, cry for help on one of my twelve hour shifts perhaps? Looking at the long lost Scottish sunshine outside through the window, I think all us office workers may well be having similar frustrated screams of pain right now.

No comments: