The jigsaw challenge

Now it HAS been said before. I have, maybe too liberally, used the phrase "worst job for the club ever" even on this blog - but we now have a new winner. The competition seems fierce at a first glance: handling hundreds of drunks, carrying tonnes of boxes and/or furniture, in rain, hail or desert storms we do things we couldn't care less about (re-sorting fence bits for five hours!). But there's a new number one: the jigsaw challenge. It includes a football pitch, seven naive rugby players and just over 700 pieces of a floor puzzle - to be assembled without gaps in any direction since a small gap would start the biggest fucking domino effect in history. This was estimated to take six (6) hours. As the hours went by, we realised that wasn't gonna happen.

In a way, jobs like these are nice. They bring people together in a way that just hanging out at the club never will. It usually starts with a lot of joking around, yesterday was no different. An unnumerable amount of puns was thrown about, there was a food buffet paid for by someone else and Coke in a cooler. But when a half hour remains of the said working hours and only a fourth of the floor is in place you end up in a totally different context. You reach a whole new level of friendship when you've seen the kindle in someone's eye die and heard them honestly say I've lost the will to live. Eventually (way past midnight and still not finished) you reach level 3 - where you take turns to giggle at nothing or to keep working with clenched jaws and a devil's stare. It's the kind of bond you have if you've been stranded together on a desert island or maybe been held hostages in a bank robbery - where there is only the present and no future. Now this is club spirit! I might've gone straight to work and slept only three hours on the sofa before starting my Monday, but at least in retrospective I'm glad to have been there.

We all learned one thing or two yesterday, but I think the most important thing was: you're never too old or too white to answer your phone with a yo!

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For a few lookbacks at awful jobs for the club, read about Pacman and the hefty cock, the bar desk in the spiral stairs or the five o'clock blizzard.