Sunday Scribblings.

G'Day,
This weeks Sunday Scribblings prompt is Quitting. Well here is another of the stories from my memory. One which was unpleasant at the time.
Quitting is something I nowadays like to say I don't do easily. I like to think I don't stand up and fight but I don't give in, is that a passive aggressive trait?
Anyway my first job after leaving school was at a dirty old commercial laundry at the back of the main street in Wagga. It took me a while to get a job as I was a timid and self conscious teenager, not confident in any way. Apart from that jobs weren't that easy to get in a small country town, as Wagga was then. It wasn't a nice job or nice people (I could write lots of other stories about them too) running the business, but I hung on in there for about a year before I quit. The job involved sorting and processing dirty linen from restaurants and motels around the district. Not nice, especially when you shook out a table cloth from the Chinese restaurant full of prawn heads that had been waiting in the sun since yesterday and they went in your face. While I was there I had quite a few experiences, like seeing a workmate get pulled into a big ironing machine and have her arm and shoulder dislocated and have asbestos pipe covering float through the air when there was a steam blowout, that was absolutely deafening. Or when the foreman was welding the petrol tank on the delivery truck and it exploded, that was pretty loud too. I also worked pressing pre- shrunk jeans which covered me in blue denim dye.
Anyway, back to the day I quit. I had been sick for a few days with a bug of some sort or other and I knew things were bad at work. I went back to work even though I was still unwell because they were short staffed, so I was feeling horrible anyway. My boss called me aside and accused me of having a sickie because one of the other girls had been doing the same and had been caught out. He gave me a huge lecture etc etc. So I went back to my work station upset and thought for a while and stewed, as I do when I am upset. I went back to the office, gave him a piece of my mind, quit and walked out the door and did not return. Then I had to face my parents. I walked home, which was quite a way, and on the way home I stopped in my favourite park. The park is the Botanical gardens up the hill from my parents house. I stayed there a while and worked it all out in my head before going home to face the music, which wasn't really as bad as I thought it was going to be as my parents knew the people running the laundry and their reputation.
Funny though, years later I got a job working with someone that worked with me at the first laundry (Debbie) and she remembered me leaving and said the boss used to look for me to do some special job (where is Linda) then remember.. Oh! She said she always remembered me when I first started there too, because they had bets going on which interviewee would get the job and he always chose the pretty blond dolly birds, not girls like me, but they didn't stay very long, hmm I wonder why, he was known to be like that. ( I won't talk about his slimy brother though.) Small world catching up with her and working with her again all those years later.
Anyway back to Debbie. I got to see her meet her husband to be, and years later meet up with her again to see her have her first baby and second, buy a home etc, knew some of her family and its stories, saw her loose her dad. He actually died in Junee hospital while I was working there. Funny, though not a real close friend, still a friend and I run into her in Wagga sometimes. She invites me over but I have never followed up on it.
Other times I have quit. Well one in particular I remember was on a bush walk, up a steep hill to get to the top of a waterfall. I was too fat and unfit, too puffed and too tired and carrying a small child so I gave up from exhaustion. Other things I give up on are mind puzzles and jigsaws I hate them, but not word puzzles I like those. O.K. now I am rambling on and I had better give up. So Bye .
Love Linda.