You would think that sticking tails onto My Little Ponies as they came down a conveyor belt would not be a particularly arduous or stressful job.
However, you would be mistaken.
It is, without a shadow of doubt, the most stressful job I have ever had. And I’ve worked in advertising for 25 years!
The individual act of putting a blob of industrial adhesive on a toy horse’s butt and then affixing a peculiar-coloured tail, is not in itself inherently stressful.
No, what makes it stressful is the volume.
Picture this. I am standing at my station in front of the Hasbro My Little Pony conveyor belt.
I am literally three weeks out of London University, where I have managed to secure myself a First-Class honours degree in Classics. Specifically, in ancient Greek and Latin. Two dead languages that are utterly useless and have absolutely no modern-day application, with the possible exception of enabling me to read Lorem Ipsum Dolor.
How did I fall so quickly, I hear you ask?
Well, unsurprisingly, there weren’t a lot of firms out there looking to hire someone who majored in two dead languages. I went for interview after interview and each time was politely informed that I would be going no further.
Finally, I could afford to live in London no more. With the last of my funds, I bought a one-way ticket to hell Norwich and threw myself on the tender mercies of my parents.
When I arrived, I detected a marked lack of enthusiasm on the part of my mother. Apparently, she had turned the spare bedroom into her “art studio’ and was reluctant to go back to painting in the shed.
Still, blood being thicker than water, I was reinstated in my old room, albeit one that stank of turpentine.
That night, over dinner, mum informed me that I would have to pay rent. The conversation ran along familiar lines. “We’ve paid your way through school and uni, yada, yada, it’s time you stood on your own two feet… we’re not a charity etc.” All good stuff, but no need to bore you with it here.
Anyhoo, the upshot was that I had to find myself a job.
The next day I hit the job recruitment agencies. Jobspot, Manpower, Pertemps, Noel. All of them had a tempting array of jobs on offer. Herb picker, night watchman, frozen meat packer, Kitchen Porter (washer upper in hotel) tree planter, overnight warehouse packer and wooden crate cleaner.
Faced with such a bewildering array of delicacies, I hummed and hawed. I looked doubtfully at my delicately tapered fingers with their soft, studenty skin. I tried to envisage them rough and calloused, with dirty broken nails and cuts innumerable.
I sighed. I have always done my utmost to avoid manual labour of any kind, but this time it seemed there was no way of escaping it.
I turned my lacklustre eyes back to the job board. And then I saw it.
Factory worker Hasbro.
I wouldn’t say my spirits lifted, but momentarily things looked marginally less bleak.
Hasbro, I knew, made toys. Surely, working in a place that made toys must at least have a modicum of fun to it.
With hazy memories of Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory, I went in and applied for the job.
To my great disappointment, I got it. Start Monday. £3.25 an hour. (Roughly 5 bucks.) Yes, you read that right. There were no such thing as minimum wage when I were a lad.
Which brings me back to the start of my story. Or perhaps it would be more apposite to say tale.
The foreman, upon meeting me, had swallowed any private misgivings he may have had and led me to my station.
He showed me how to stick glue on the horse’s ass and then stick the tail on. “Think you can handle that, lad?” he asked with just the trace of a smirk.
I nodded. In truth, it seemed ridiculously easy.
I looked with interest at the workers on my left and right. They were all curiously inanimate, gazing into the middle-distance with dead, soulless eyes. None of them talked or even looked my way.
I attempted to strike up a conversation with the guy on my right, but at that moment a loud siren blared out.
Suddenly the conveyor belt began to move. Then out of a cavernous hole at the end, I saw a line of maneless, tailless little ponies emerge.
They proceeded to move down the conveyor belt at a great rate of knots. As they did, the soulless ones reached forward and stuck on a mane and those fluorescent stars they stick on the pony’s ass.
The first line drew abreast of me. I picked one up and carefully daubed its ass with a blob of glue. Then I grabbed a gaudy green tail and stuck it firmly to the pony.
I nodded, pleased with my skill and manual dexterity.
But then I realised, with mounting horror, that 4 other ponies had already gone past and were nearly out of reach. Panic-stricken, I reached out and scooped them back.
I attempted to stick tales on the four as quickly as I could, but I was rushed and flustered and several of the gee gees ended up with tails hanging from their right buttocks.
I glanced frantically up the conveyor belt. The line of tailless little ponies galloped towards me like some fiendish kids’ version of the charge of the light brigade.
The guy on my left looked at me with rough sympathy and pushed a button. The conveyor belt ground to a halt.
The soulless ones looked round in surprise.
The foreman wandered over to me. “You need to work a sight faster than that lad, if you want to keep up.”
I gulped nervously and nodded. “Yeah, I’ll get the hang of it.” I looked with new respect at my fellow employees. I simply could not comprehend how they could do their job so quickly and keep up with the endless cavalry charge.
The conveyor belt started up again and once more the horses started galloping implacably towards me.
This time I managed to do better. A little better. I actually managed to get the tails on three little ponies before being overwhelmed by sheer weight of numbers.
Once again, the guy to my left pushed the button and again the conveyor belt shuddered to a halt.
The foreman wandered over again. “Maybe you’re not cut out for this. Do you want to try something else?”
I nodded eagerly. Anything, even cleaning up my little pony’s shit was preferable to this.
And that’s how I came to be working in packaging. My job was to put the fully assembled ponies into their boxes and close the lids.
Even this job, though simpler, was still enormously stressful. The ponies just kept on coming and coming. I lost count of the number of times the conveyor belt was stopped to allow me to catch up.
Long story slightly shorter. I managed three days at that hellish Gulag. But mid-way through the third day I gave notice. The foreman didn’t seem particularly surprised. No doubt he had seen a lot of weak, effeminate students fail just as I had.
I do have a confession to make though. On my last day, inspired by a fervid hatred of horses in general and my little ponies in particular, I dropped a little surprise into the final box at the end of my shift. A condom in its wrapper.
Driving home, broken and exhausted, I still managed to chuckle as I thought of the child opening her MLP with great excitement. Her gasps of wonder as she pulled out the toy pony (with tail only slightly askew) and then her bewilderment as she pulled out a strange shiny-wrapped object.
I envisaged the conversation. “Mommy.”
“Yes darling?”
“What’s this?”
Cue madly-darting eyes between mum and dad. Awkward, agonising pause. “it’s, it’s a special kind of sleeping bag for MLP.”
I chuckled again. See you in hell, pony kid.
Jeremy is a Sydney-based writer available for any writing or creative jobs you may have. Jeremys2211@gmail.com
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