The Idler

Capital Gold

During a summer break from University about 5 years ago I worked a ten-week stint at a Jigsaw factory deflating plastic wrapped jigsaw boxes.

I had just broken up very messily with my girlfriend of the time and was penniless to boot. After enduring the scorn and derision of jobsworth temping agency staff in my home town for weeks on end, I jumped on the first job that came my way at a Jigsaw factory in Watford.

My job was to lean on and thus deflate the plastic wrapped boxes of jigsaws as they rolled out of a Heath-Robinson plastic wrapping machine. I worked 11-hour shifts with two 15 minute breaks for the heady sum of �3 an hour.

I was the youngest person on the factory floor by about 30 years and my colleagues insisted that the radio was stuck on Capital Gold all day long. If you’ve never listened to Capital Gold before, it’s program consists of a moronic middle-aged DJ with 4 records taking requests from oppressed factory workers who could only think of those 4 records that the DJ had been playing at them for the past 10 years.

My fellow workers had long ago been zombified by the sheer monotony of their work, which like my task was more repetitive than what the machines had to do.

One old dear, you know the type - hysterically cackling and cranking out meaningless clich�s and platitudes with a manic intensity, would repeat every 10 minutes, like clockwork “It’s not that bad here, after a while you just switch off”.

The jigsaws themselves were the same ones they were producing 30 years earlier and the pictures on them were shockingly cheesy. They were made from a single piece of card that was cut and broken up by a machine with a flail before being dropped into a bag that goes inside the box. Every week this machine would seize up and when they opened it up, thousands and thousands of jigsaw pieces would fall out, virtually every single jigsaw that came out of that pokey, grubby factory was missing at least one piece.

After a couple of weeks of this I lost the power of speech, and even today I can’t stand to look at a vaseline-lensed picture of kittens without starting to drool.

James Prendergast
james.prendergast@cmc.co.uk