Today I started my new job. I was in bed last night for half 9 and typically I had a headache and couldn’t sleep. I woke at least three times (I know because on three separate occasions I went downstairs for a drink, some headache tablets and to use the toilet). My alarm went off at 4:45 and I got up not long after. I didn’t have to leave until 6 but I don’t like to be in a rush. After the best part of an hour drive I arrived on site ten minutes early. I briefly ended up in the wrong tent but once I realised the management meeting wasn’t for me I made my exit and one negative covid test later I was deemed fit to work and made my way to the induction tent. While filling out some paperwork I was asked by the site manager if I had done the online induction and as soon as confusion showed on my face I saw anger show in his. I was never told to do an online induction nor that I would be sent an e-mail. I asked the company that set the job up multiple times if they needed anything more from me or if I had to do anything else. “Nope, you’re all set” was the reply I got. I offered to do the online induction there and then but the angry site manager told me the on-site induction was starting now and the online one, which takes an hour, has to be completed first. So within an hour of arriving for my first day I was kicked off site and told to come back tomorrow with the online induction completed.
I got off lightly; another lad I got talking to earlier had travelled two hours across two trains, one bus and a fifteen-minute walk to get there and was in the same position as me regarding the online induction. He too was sent home and told to come back tomorrow. Despite the wasted journey and hassle of it all I came away feeling oddly positive. The sun was shining, I now knew where the site was and where to go, I’ll only have to do four days instead of five on my first week (and the first day, with inductions and finding your way around is usually quite easy) and most of all I felt like I had gained a day that I should have been working. Now this might sound odd for somebody who has had the amount of time off work that I have had but today was a taken day, it was out my control and had been filled by something I had to do rather than want to do. But now this taken day has been given back and it is mine to do with whatever I so choose.
While I could have gone somewhere to eat, grab a coffee or even just chill I only wanted to go home. I only got five or so hours with Penny (and only one or two of those were without kids) after she got back from her hen weekend yesterday and only two hours with Spence after he got back from his dads. In my head the plan was to get back and write. I’m not sure where it came from but I had the idea of a gang where three of the members become disillusioned and branch off to start their own, or perhaps go legitimate. The whole way home I’m playing this out in my head with the characters and different plot points but it feels more suited to a TV show than a collection of short stories or even a novel. I would like to write for TV or film in the future but for now I want to write stories so I’ll write this out as such rather than looking at how to succeed at screenwriting.
And just like that all of a sudden, in a quiet and fairly empty house, tiredness has just hit me like a train. I could quite easily fall to sleep right now. It’s not even 2pm yet and I can not wait to get in to bed in around 7 hours.
My brain is pretty fried trying to think back over how the weekend went so I’ll summarise. I dropped Penny at the train station around 11am Friday, got home with both kids and Rosie was so tired but refused to nap for over an hour. I eventually got her to sleep, fed Spence and we relaxed for an hour or so before Rosie woke up and came back downstairs. Spencer’s dad picked him up at around half 3 over the next two days Rosie’s chickenpox, and directly related grumpiness, got worse before it got better. The weekend consisted of not eating much, one small walk around the area and playing on an empty field as to not infect anybody, interrupted naps and not the best night’s sleep. I was very happy for Penny to return even if she was hungover and her return was actually 2-3 hours later than I thought it would be. I will admit this annoyed me and, to use a very British idiom, I threw my toys out the pram.
Speak of the devil and he shall appear. Penny and Rosie have just returned home from the shop and while Rosie naps Penny is watching Love Island so at least the option of watching rubbish on TV has been taken away from me, and she has bought snacks so that’s good! I’ll try to get some writing done but I reckon it will only be a basic outline so it probably won’t be posted any time soon online, as much as I really want to get more actual fiction content online. I am constantly disappointed by the almost-zero amount I have posted here at the moment. I was thinking maybe I would do some writing prompts from Reddit and post them as they shouldn’t even be as long as a short story, and in most cases will only be a few paragraphs long. An alternative option was to just focus in on one aspect of a story and write a first draft of that section to post. We shall see.