Five things you didn't know about me

Lots of bloggers round here have been doing the 'Five Things You Didn't Know About Me' meme. Being a conformist from way back, here's mine.

1. Never liked tagging. My only tagging adventures as a youngster involved the Mangere train station, where a mate and I spray-painted 'PUNK' in huge red letters on the walls of both North- and South-going stations on the way home from school one day. That is, I spray-painted 'PUNK' in the South-going station, but he was interrupted in his and painted only 'PUN.' The words stayed there for many years, and on reflection 'PUN' seemed rather better. More layered.
   
2. As a youngster I used to work in Foodtown packing groceries for about $1/hour. Ric Salizzo started as a checkout operator while I was there: he used to come to work dressed as a Mod (anyone remember the late-Seventies Mod revival?), riding a small scooter -- not a Vespa so much as a beige Vespa-ish sort of thing. One night we decided it might be fun to pick up the scooter and park it in amongst the trundler bay for 'safe-keeping,' placed as I recall in a fairly difficult-to-extricate part of the trundler bay. We thought it was hilarious. Ric didn't. Our boss, agreed with him. :-/
3. I worked for a short while at the Mangere East Service Station, behind which a small band called Herbs used to practice. They were pretty good as I recall, and they were one of the biggest purchasers of our pies. I sometimes forgot the exact prices when I took their money.
4. The Mad Butcher's first shop was at the top of our street (just a few houses along from David Lange -- but that's another story -- David Lange diving into a small swimming pool!). When lamb flaps and Povi Masima started being big sellers for him and he started to expand, I started delivering circulars for him for a short while. Turned out however that his plans were rather bigger than a few thousand circulars around Mangere and Papatoetoe. Ask me later about his sausages.
5. I started out on building sites as a labourer, at a site in Leys Crescent, Remuera in which the sewage had to be pumped up to the street. All waste went to a large man-hole where an eviscerating pump chewed it all up into small pieces and then pumped the stuff uphill into the main sewer. The eviscerating pump was, however, rather temperamental, and even years after the house sold and the buyers moved in, my boss and I used to take turns climbing down into the sewage repairing the pump when it regularly malfunctioned (he was a very humane boss). The problem was that no matter how many times I reminded the residents before I ventured down into the manhole, they would still forget and go right ahead and flush ... right down onto my poor, over-worked head. Uughh.

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