Caelainn Hogan
The student job can be one of the most degrading experiences of your young life, but it is none the less a rite of passage. Forget those few lucky students who land a promotional job paying 15 euros an hour to hand out free Blackberries, the real student job is one that gives you a renewed sense of purpose in college out of pure fear that you will have to work in that sad, mind numbing occupation for the rest of your life. Past Trinity student Gregg, who once worked in a factory matching left and right pairs of shoes, can surely empathise with the latter.
My first student job was working at a Centra deli. I still have scars from having incorrectly manoeuvred the giant oven trays while cooking Cuisine de France baguettes by the hundred and rounds of sausages, bacon and hash browns for the breakfast rolls. The giant walk in freezer was a daily nightmare, haunted by the thought of being accidentally locked inside. My second job “selling bins” was a conversation starter during awkward Fresher moments. In fact, it was a promotional job with Greenstar, the private refuse company, going door to door wooing people into rejecting their common council bins and signing up with us. Bin politics and rumours of Panda spies made for daily excitement. The strangest moment had to be during a day’s work in Shankill’s Rathsallagh Estate, when I ended up being invited in to a “living wake”. I gave my spiel in a living room smelling strongly of whiskey, to two jovial woman and a man stretched out on the opposite couch under a heap of blankets, who I was informed would soon be dead.
Maynooth students, it would appear, are the pioneers in morbid and indeed gruesome part time work. Now graduates of Maynooth College, Francis Balfe and Ronan O’Braonáin both worked in slaughterhouses during their time as students, to make ends meat (pun intended). Francis worked for a local turkey farmer, Cathal Higgins, and had to “feed and clean out turkey houses. There would be thousands of them. They drank from drinkers suspended from the roof and with the mix of water and excrement some would become lame and would eventually fall foul [the puns abound] to the other turkeys sitting on it till it died.” Continuing with the gruesome details of the job, he described how “the pluckers would be sitting on a stool and would hand-pluck the turkeys. The turkeys’ nerves would still be going so they would kick, shit and jump out of your lap even though they were dead.” Ronan’s job in the summer of second year was equally macabre: “I was working for a company called Farm Relief services that basically hire you out to farmers to give a hand. I got sent to this crazy intensive pig farm that kept tens of thousands of pigs in these big long sheds. I had to spend the day cutting the teeth and tails off a few thousand piglets. Wasn’t the nicest thing I’ve ever had to do.”
McDonalds, is it really such a bad option?
Most students are, like Trinity student Paul Kelly, “happy with basically any job”. Paul had no idea what exact occupation he was applying for when he went for the interview, “they just fed me some bull about meeting with important clients and that kind of marketing language. I had to go for a day of training where I basically just shadowed someone doing the job before I started. I found out then that I was selling make-up.” He explains that “We’d go door to door and in suits looking exactly like Jehovahs Witnesses, which was actually one of the start up lines one of the lads used on basically everyone he tried to sell to! The pay was awful, as it was 100% commission so unless you got ridiculously good at selling make-up you didn’t make much money.” He says he expected to get the door slammed in his face more than he did, which only happened once or twice, but mostly “people just found it funny that I was going around selling make-up and you’d usually have a bit of craic just joking to people about it when you made your pitch.”
DIT student Peter had varied jobs during college, from a ‘mover’ in Boston to maintenance guy in the Caribbean, including a stint working on a trawler in Howth. Work in the trawler consisted of being “deep in the fish hold grinding steel mostly, it was an absolutely filthy job. At one point I was using a Jackhammer to get concrete out of the bottom of the hull. If you imagine the noise of a roadside jackhammer, multiply it by ten, you’re probably still not close to the noise levels experienced in a closed steel hull.” He looks back on it fondly however, claiming “That was a great job though, I loved it. Nothing beats a hard day’s labour, with the exception of a well earned cold beer afterwards.” Peter, seemingly the jack of all trades, realised his limit when he and a friend “got speaking with a manager outside a well known adult venue. We were offered the jobs on the spot, but sadly our initial interest waned as the details [which included mopping any spillages] unfolded!” Proof that, though they may be low, there are limits to what students will do for money.
