Neil Randall is delighted to announce that his short story The
Factory has been accepted for publication by the good people at Ex-Pat
Press. The story is very much based on Neil’s experiences working in a food
factory during his younger days. Narrated from the point of view of the factory
itself – a dark, omniscient presence overseeing everything that happens on each
and every shift – it tells the story of the downtrodden and underappreciated workers
and the mind-numbing, backbreaking jobs they have to perform each day.
Here’s the
opening scene, to give you a flavour of the story:
The whistle blows. Workers from the late-shift trudge out of
the main building. All have that beaten weary defeated look about ’em – ten
till six soon takes its toll, fucks up the body clock, leaves ’em all deadbeat
and disorientated, stumbling from one night shift to the next, an empty,
void-like existence…just how we like it.
The Factory is
watching.
The six till two
brigade shuffles out of the subsidised canteen, a poky little prefab that
serves swampy tea and bacon sandwiches full of gristle. Some take a few final
drags on cheap cigarettes; others chat inconsequentially amongst ’emselves
while putting on hairnets and rubber gloves. Dawdling. Tick-tock. Work-shy
bastards who’d do anything to delay the inevitable, to steal a few seconds, to
diddle us out of our precious man hours. I never take my eyes off’a ’em. You
better believe it. The Factory is watching, my friend, the Factory is watching.
We opened here
way back in eighty-nine, one of those government schemes, a partnership between
local farmers and a big frozen food conglomerate from Scandinavia. Located in
the rural heartlands, we cart fresh produce straight from the surrounding
fields – fruit and veg – wash, chop, freeze, package, and box the goods on
site. Ten thousand square feet of pure factory floor crammed with the latest
cutting-edge technology, a maze of mechanical conveyor belts that rumble and
judder around the clock. Steam hisses. Big industrial vats bubble away,
cauldron-like. Giant extractor fans grunt and whir. Fork-lift trucks career
around the loading-bay – Warning, vehicle
reversing, warning, vehicle reversing – music to my ears. Production,
production, production.
We employ over
three hundred people. In the main, hopeless cases, drop-outs, social misfits,
saddos who never went to school very much, who only got the most rudimentary of
educations, who can barely read or write or recite their times table. We get
’em all here – the dregs. Half are bloody immigrant workers who can’t speak
proper English, the other half are so docile you have to prod ’em with a stick
from time to time, just to make sure they’re still breathing. People so
useless, they ain’t got a chance of being employed anywhere else.
If you want to read the story in its entirety, head over to
the Ex-Pat website: https://expatpress.com/the-factory-neil-randall/
If you like what you’ve read, why not visit my amazon page to
check out my published work:https://www.amazon.co.uk/Neil-Randall/e/B00JYXI862/ref=dp_byline_cont_pop_ebooks_1
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