[Weekly Critique Thread] Post Here If You'd Like Feedback On Your Writing

(pp2)

After a while I started getting approached for all sorts of quite interesting projects, to the point where I had to start picking and choosing who to work with, despite the fact that I still wasn't making a whole lot of profit. Eventually, I received an email from a guy who'd heard, from a friend of a friend, that I was passable writer, and more importantly, flexible and easy to work with on weird and wacky projects. That I basically worked for free, given my rather naive and poorly thought out monetization strategy, didn't hurt either I'm guessing.

I'd never head of him, but some googling showed him to have a surprisingly impressive international career doing permanent public installations. Light sculptures mostly. Seemed a bit out of my league honestly, but i was starting to get cocky at this point, so I asked for his skype and got in touch. He wanted a formal write up for what was to my mind, a massive sponsorship opportunity he'd already been buttering up on his own, in order to exhibit at a large public-space art festival/lightshow we have here in Australia (Vivid festival, look it up, its pretty cool). I had some reservations about how much i could help, and the scope of the project was an order of magnitude higher than anything i'd worked on previously, but after I told him as much he didn't seem too worried, so I accepted the gig.

 

This random sponsorship application turned out to take a whole lot longer than i had expected, given it was being made to a large corporate not traditionally known for their altruism in the arts, and who wanted written assurances around protection of their brand, minimum levels of exposure of their advertising across a range of media, and all sorts of other arbitrary restrictions and caveats that i'd never had to navigate before. By the time I was finished, I was exhausted, and in my haste to get the proposal submitted by their deadline, I copy-pasted parts of my template into the costing document without paying too much attention, including putting my nominal place-holder 15% fee... onto a 1.4 million dollar proposal.

I figured that the likelihood of our proposal being competitive was slim to none as usual, given the relatively huge money at stake and therefore, I assumed, the likely caliber of the competition. So once it was submitted, I tried to forgot about it, beyond briefly musing on how i would apologize to the client about our failure, and went about my life.

 


 

About this time, i was working at an Elton John concert, and given the size of the event, we'd brought in an external crewing agency to help with bump in/bump out. These guys weren't regular employees, and apparently weren't covered by our companies insurance. Which was probably just fine, as long as they stayed out of the way and pushed boxes around as directed.

About 3AM, we were unpacking the last truck of the night and one guy from the external crewing agency kept trying to avoid the grunt work by insisting on being the "truck guy"... ie, he was standing by the truck and using the remote to raise and lower the tail lift as we brought stuff down. He was told multiple times to stop, not to touch the truck, he was even specifically told that given it counted as "operating heavy machinery", he wouldn't be covered by anybody's insurance if something went wrong.

Seemed like a pretty simple direction:

"Just leave the bloody truck alone, and go find a road case to put away, you lazy prick."

Seemed reasonable, really.

A few minutes later, I was standing at the back of the truck, keeping a few meat-racks of those old school iron PAR 64s with the heatsinks steady. The racks themselves were about 120kg, and, with 12 pars per side, by 2 sides to a rack, by 3 racks, i'd guess it added up to approximately a tonne of metal, on wheels, at about my chest height. Probably not something you want rolling about randomly.

Which is why I was standing there holding it. Not a problem.

 

I was looking over my right shoulder, waiting for my buddy to get back to the truck. On my left side was our lazy rent-a-hand, the same one who had been asked, not 5 minutes prior, not to touch the truck. Unnoticed by anyone, he sidled up to the lift again, grabbed the remote, and without a shred of protocol, nor the faintest warning, toggled the lift. Yet somehow, this time the lift tilted, and and a tonne of steel lurched at me.

I didn't have any choice but to try and catch them. At the time I think was just trying to save the parcans, But in hindsight, it was incredibly lucky that that was my reaction, because if I'd let them roll, there's not the slightest chance in hell that I'd have been able to get out from under them in time.If they'd picked up speed and hit me I'd likely either have been so badly crushed that I would have been a invalid for the rest of my days, or straight up dead. Game over. Thanks for playing.

Whatever the reason, I braced the racks with my entire body, and for a fateful 3 or 4 seconds, before everyone ran in to help, I had the vast proportion of that weight pushing on my spine.

People quickly grabbed the weight of the racks, Our lazy rent-a-hand got screamed out of the warehouse, and while I was a bit shaken, I was otherwise feeling OK. The shift supervisor suggests I go have a smoke and then sign the incident report log.

Cool. Except, office door's locked.

So i came back the next day, and, despite not being payday, I was given my pay, then told i couldn't sign the incident log because nobody currently in the office saw the incident.

OK, seemed.. odd, but whatever, I'll come back another day and do it with a witness.

But I never get another shift with them. They refused to answer my calls, and emails.

Hmm, very sketchy.

Whatever, I'm fine right? I get better shit to do than go to war with some sketchy ex-employer.

 


 

Fast forward a couple of years, and i started having intermittent episodes of not being able to stand up, along with shooting leg pain so bad that i couldn't sleep for days at a time. At first I was thinking that it was a sudden flareup of my usually mild but lifelong sciatica, however soon enough, severe back pain started to accompany each episode.

Doctors refused imaging or treatment of any kind, I guess mostly because I presented as a cliche of a malingering narcotics seeker: Complaining of severe back pain in my mid-twenties. "Naturally formed" (read: filthy and unkempt) dreadlocks (I was a trance hippie, remember?). Torn, grubby clothes mostly bought from festival stalls and which had seen many a dusty dancefloor since. An admitted history of recreational cannabis, ecstasy and LSD on record from previous visits. No recent injury event. Transient pain which seems to come and go every other fortnight (how convenient). Persistent and combative when told to get out.

Textbook.

Hell, I'd probably have made the same call if i'd never seen a fully fledged trance hippie before, and then had to deal with this one, who insisted on turning up in my nice clean doctors office over and over again, ofttimes barefoot, making the geriatric regulars uncomfortable and demanding "treatment" for implausible amounts of "back pain".

For what its worth though i never did once ask for drugs. I mean, its the 21st century. Getting drugs is easy.

Getting medical imaging?? Now THAT turned out to be a process with an unreasonable amount of gatekeepers.

Finally though. I manage to get an x-ray. Apparently it shows nothing. More doctors, more begging, more being written off as a junkie.

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