My first day was a mess. I hadn't received a text about what time I was scheduled to be picked up, so I went to bed early and awoke early just in case. I prepared my lunch, water for the day and refilled my vape and sat patiently outside my hostel awaiting my new supervisor.
My supervisor, a born and bred Maori of Northland, crushed my hand upon shaking it. Twenty three years he's been doing the same job, but he says he loves it and I couldn't find a fault with his effort in managing the crew.
So the ride to our bloc was a good hour and a bit because we had to pick up some islanders. The first coworker I met was a smiley Papua New Guinean and a Salomon Islander who could barely speak English but somehow has a Finnish accent. It's difficult to talk to these islanders due to how amusing they speak.
At the site we had to wait another half an hour because another crew was tasked with picking up the trees. A few curse words were muttered by my supervisor, a sports fanatic.
We begin planting, and it was easier than I anticipated. I bungled the initial few holes but quickly got the hang of it until we marched over the frost hardened ground. This was the challenging portion of the day because of the impossibility of finding a patch of soil to open. I spent a good ten minutes smacking a patch until I asked me supervisor to let me move on. He went to the patch of lipped dirt and began smacking his shovel away until he told me I won this round.
I follow up the hill, smacking away at the ground, hoping my feet will stop hurting and vexing myself about my urge to buy cheap gumboots. Having no sole really crafted a good pillar of pain running through both legs and my lower back. But I continued either way.
After running out of water I felt rather dumb not preparing more earlier.
And then my supervisor told me we have to leave early so I can get drug tested. Another brief interlude of shenanigans begins as he races down the mountain and speeds back to the city to make sure we get there in time. During the ride, my supervisor always responded with the most flat, stolid yeh. Anything I said was met with a flat yeh, but he soon showed emotion when he began discussing how he met his wife in a nightclub or how he got an underaged kid into a bar and escaped the cops from booting the kid out. Crazy bastard. What got me was the amount of tics this man had. He'd slam back into the seat at times and fly into these bouts of rage, screaming at the top of his lungs at the slow drivers ahead of us. "HURRY UP, YA DONKEY." "YOU FUCKING....SLOW CUNT!" "FUCKING CHRISTCHURCH WANKER!" "COME ON GREEN CAR, COME ON HURRY UP, COME ON GREENY" "YOU SLOW MOTHERFUCKER DON'T SLOW DOWN. WHY THE HELL ARE YOU BRAKING YOU TWAT!" And so forth but he's alright albeit a bit short fused.
When I was getting drug tested the lady got suspicious of me when I asked for water. No fucking sympathy. I told her I was dehydrated and she dismissed it as some ploy. When I returned the cup of brown urine, she said dear dog you are really dehydrated. Fugging hell, but I passed and get to work in the rain tomorrow. Oh and there was a huge cloud of smoke from a nearby burn off in pic three. It moved in super quickly and left a few hours later.
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