Setting The Scene
Today I’m gonna do something a little bit different. I want to take you down memory lane to one of the most formative parts of my life (so far). We’re going to walk back in time to when I was locked in a tunnel for 12 hours a day.
But first, some background. Several years ago my fiancée and I were stuck in a bit of a predicament. I was unable to find work in the country she is from and my savings were slowly dwindling. Knowing that this was not sustainable I started looking for alternatives: was there another country we could both work – and therefore live – together? Was there a way I could boost my savings to give us more time to find one? Was there any way out of this situation?
This was before I fully understood the opportunities to make money online; I was purely looking at traditional routes of employment. If we were in the same situation today I likely would have taken an alternative path – but despite this, we eventually came up with solution.
Australia
The answer came in a country called Australia; land of the kangaroo, Foster’s beer and copious use of the word cunt.
Only two of those things actually exist in Australia – thankfully their taste in beer is not as bad as the warm piss I grew up drinking as a teenager in Britain.
I was afforded this opportunity through a well-known option to live and work in Australia: the Working Holiday visa. If you aren’t aware, this is a 1 year visa (extendable for another year on the condition of doing 3 months ‘regional work’, bringing it into 2 in total) which allows people from certain countries to live and work (with some restrictions) in Australia. Having friends who had been there on this visa, a few of which still lived there, I called around and found out wages were good and work was easy to find.
So I applied for it, booked a flight to Sydney and went to stay with a childhood friend – the man who will be Best Man at my wedding. This solution wasn’t a perfect one. Because of it my partner and I had to live apart, entering into that most common of partnership killers: The Long Distance Relationship.
Despite this, the events from here on in are a case study in what happens when we take action.
Taking Action
Knowing that Long Distance Relationships are a struggle, we set up some rules to help circumvent that possible eventuality and we are still together – so they were successful – but by taking action and finding a solution – not a perfect one – we gave our relationship a chance.
This is where a lot of relationships fall down. When difficulty arises, many look for idealistic resolutions in a non-idealistic world. Relationships are foremost pragmatic affairs.
Back on with the story, when I arrived in Sydney I went to stay with my friend and his then girlfriend. They were in a house share with another couple, but they had a spare room and put me up for a week. I was (and am still!) very grateful for this. However, I didn’t want to seem overbearing so after a week (and some valuable advice from them about documents required to sort out, licenses required to work, tax forms etc.) I moved into a ‘working’ hostel of their recommendation.
And this is where my luck – born from action – came to fruition. I was fortunate enough to be placed in a room with three other British lads from Manchester. I had already decided I wanted to work in construction as jobs were plentiful and wages and hours were good and had been planning to call an agency the next day to set myself up. These guys were also working in construction, but they were all directly employed by a company. On talking with them, hearing about their wages – in particular their overtime pay, something agency staff weren’t entitled to – I soon realised I’d lucked out. If I hadn’t taken the decision to leave the comfort of my friend’s house in order to do what I considered the ‘right’ thing, I would never have found out about this opportunity.
Getting the number of their boss I called up, had an interview 2 days later and was set up for a couple of construction tickets for the week after. As this particular company was working on building underground railways tunnels on a stretch of line on the outskirts of Sydney, one of these tickets was about Railway Safety.
Once that was completed I was ready to go.
Hard Labour
My first shift was a bit of an eye-opener. I had never done any physical labour for work before. In the UK I had worked as – what I liked to call – an office bitch, doing all the photocopying, filing and the shitty administrative tasks no-one wanted to do for a firm of solicitors, and I’d also been a barman for a few years in a music venue (which was a great job, I loved working there).
But I’d never done hard labour.
First-off was a week-long gig drilling holes in a platform to extend it for the new trains (why the government decided to purchased trains that didn’t fit their fucking stations beats me – yet another example of bureaucratic modernity being wildly inefficient) and was a night-shift. Looking back this was a cushy number. We couldn’t do the drilling until the last train had gone through the station, and they had to give us 8 hour shifts minimum so for the first few hours we were getting paid time and a half to sit, chat and play on our phones.
Top banana for us; less so for Australian Tax-Payers.
A few of the lads I met here too I ended up working with for my whole time in Sydney. I particularly liked a Samoan lad called Eddie and another guy, Darren, who was from Scotland.
The next week, however, was when the real work started. I was still living in the hostel (sharing a room with 3 other people whilst working night-shifts was sub-optimal to say the least) and was placed on a day-shift at a station called Bella Vista. This was an hour and a half away using public transport and our shift started at 6am and finished 6pm.
So every day I was up at 4 am (no time for a shower…) made myself peanut butter and banana on toast before walking to the tube station (eating as I walked) bought a coffee and went on my way. Here is when I learned what exactly the human body is capable of, when forced to do so.
Dampers
I was placed on a team installing ‘Dampers’ on the line in the tunnel. This was tough work for a skinny, unfit Englishman. Dampers are heavy blocks of steel elements encased in rubber (see picture below) which are placed between each sleeper, on either side of the rail, to ‘dampen’ the sound of the train. They had to be fitted on the entirety of the 20km of track. This was due to another bureaucratic error, where an Engineer didn’t properly read how quiet the trains had to be in residential areas. As a result, these were a last ditch measure to reduce the vibrations of a train passing (as well as placing sound reduction material all around the tunnel).
Each one weighed around 10kg each and had to be unpacked, placed in a specific pattern on the back of a bug, sprayed with glue, attached to the rail and finally clipped in place. I won’t go into the logistical details of how we set this up, but we unloaded 9 boxes a day (per buggy, we ran 2 buggies) which consisted of 200 bricks each. That’s 19.8 US tons of blocks placed a day, squatting, twisting, placing and pulling. It was HARD WORK.
Now consider, I was 22 years old, skinny and had never done a proper days hard work in my life. Luckily, I’ve never been one to shy from challenge and I got stuck in with everyone, but when you place someone under this kind physicality, you really find out who someone is. And let me tell you, the lazy fucks were soon uncovered.
The Team
Anyone who has been to Australia will tell you it’s an incredibly ethnically diverse country, and our team was no different. There were plenty of Aussies, but they were of Samoan, Arabic, or British descent. We also had other Pacific Islanders, a few English lads, a couple of Scots, Filipino’s, a Japanese guy, Irish, Senagalese, Yemeni, Nepalese and a few others whose nationalities I can no longer recall.
A mixed bag, to say the least and everyone had their own character, which should go without saying; but I’ll say it anyway.
Every morning we would set up a new team and, honestly, it was like being at school picking who you wanted to play football with – everyone wanted to avoid the lazy cunts, as if you had too many of them you knew you would be doing double the work to pick up the slack.
It was also interesting to see different motivational techniques that worked on different people. Some responded well to hardness and shouting. One of the English guys, Sam – an interesting cat – was a typical ‘Alpha’ and could motivate some of the younger British guys, but this didn’t work at all with the Asians. These guys responded better to a softer leadership model and a ‘fairer’ system.
Beyond our foreman, who would come periodically to check our work, we were left to manage our own teams and it worked pretty well, although tensions would flare as any high-stress, highly fatigued group of young men would. This was fascinating to watch and you knew the allies who would take each other’s backs, cliques that formed and split as a constant power-battle between how (hard) exactly we would work.
Some guys would drive their teams to finish as quickly as possible – which would have been great, had we been rewarded for this. The problem was, just as likely as soon as you finished your 9 boxes you would be placed on another job for the rest of the shift. So it was better to finish with a bit of spare time, but not too much. That way you could do another job but wouldn’t be placed on something which was physically demanding or long-term.
I always tried to get us to straddle this line, but it was easier said than done at times.
My Routine
Of course at the end of every shift I would travel back – on public transport – to my hostel, arrive back at ~7 pm and know I had to be up at 4 am. This meant free time was at an absolute premium (including time to cook. I would cook one big meal every Sunday which I’d reheat for 3 days) and I worked Saturdays, leaving only my Sundays free – but I wasn’t there to have fun. I was there to save money to make my relationship work.
And save money I did. With overtime pay (a very generous double-time) I was able to make over $2000 a week after tax. This was crazy money for me – particularly as I would be moving back to Asia afterwards.
Living in a hostel was pretty tiring. I was forced to move out of my room with the other guys working for the same company (I still don’t know why the hostel moved me out, it was convenient as we were all working the same hours, albeit on different sites) and into a room with a guy working in a bar, a French-Canadian stripper and a fourth bed which rotated people. Their hours weren’t the same as mine, which was frustrating. If you only have time for 7 hours sleep (at best!) a night, having people come in and wake you up as they finished their own shifts, particularly when working a physically demanding job, is not ideal.
So, I proposed to my friend to stay back with him, paying for the spare room. Luckily enough, they took me in which was great. I’m always thankful for that. This was great as it meant at weekends and after work I had a bit more of a social life. I also was sharing laundry machines with only 4 other people, as opposed to an entire hostel, and had a proper kitchen where I didn’t have to fight over access to the hob.
But it was still a slog. After a few weeks, my body adapted (I still remember after my first day laying dampers I couldn’t walk comfortably for 5 days, my legs and glutes ached so much) and it struck me that we are all capable of far more than we give ourselves credit for. My general strength improved hugely, although my body composition didn’t. The amount of weight these skinny and/or fat construction workers were able to comfortably lug speaks of the importance of functional strength, as opposed to aesthetic muscle.
Lifelong?
I was also struck by the fact that guys did this their whole lives. There were plenty doing the same as me, working holiday visas, as well as young Aussies who were starting their careers, but there were 40+ year olds who’d been doing it for 20 years. In general, they were pretty miserable and unhealthy though.
I always remember Dmitry, who was half-Russian, half-Irish. Unsurprisingly, considering his background, he was an alcoholic. His idea of a good time was sitting at home in his underwear drinking beer. That’s not the life for me.
I knew all along this wasn’t what I wanted to do long-term, but this compounded it. Being inside a tunnel all day (we weren’t allowed out on our two 30 minute breaks a day) breathing in silica dust and diesel fumes; being unable to get adequate sleep; not having time to cook and eat properly and putting your body through gruelling physical demands isn’t a sustainable way of life, as far as I’m concerned.
But for these guys, it is.
I found that interesting and an example of exactly what people will put themselves through for money – and identity. There was a camaraderie and an ‘us vs them’ mentality of the construction workers. They did hard, real man’s work and outsiders disrespected them, but it was mutual. They didn’t respect soft pencil-pushers.
This was eye opening for me, and I really enjoyed this camaraderie. Overcoming challenge brings people together and this was another example of it.
What I Learnt
I ended up doing this job for only 3 months, but in that time I saved a lot of money and learnt more about what I was capable of than in any other time in my life. It also provided me the opportunity to create the life I did want. It was a hugely valuable stepping stone to the next stage of my life.
It opened the door to realising that I could push my body and it wouldn’t collapse. As a result, I took my health far more seriously when I finished and started exercising more diligently. It also taught me that mentally I was tougher than I thought I was, and had the ability to overcome huge obstacles. It taught me about how to manage different characters and personalities. I discovered that hard times create strong men. I learned that by taking action solutions will present themselves – and your life will improve.
And most of all, I realised that if I set my mind to something – I would fucking do it.
I hope you enjoyed reading as much as I did writing this one.
I’ve also began the very early stages of work on a book. Sign-up to this email list below for first access to all updates: http://eepurl.com/gkoqdD
Thanks, as always.