Editor Lyndon Keane says it’s difficult to whinge about your job when you consider the employment conditions protection athletes, pictured swooping to help out bull rider Jake Simpson during last year’s Weipa Rodeo, are likely to encounter on western Cape York on Friday and Saturday. Photo: Cape York Weekly.
We’ve all had jobs we’ve hated to the point they nearly broke us.
You know, those gigs where you end up spending most of your time daydreaming about scenarios that would represent an improvement in circumstances. Things like attempting to extract a piece of bread from a toaster with a knife and tongs, for example. Or cleaning out a clogged and extremely ripe septic tank with nothing but an ice cream container and your bare hands.
I’ve had a few jobs over the years that found themselves on the significant regret end of the employment opportunity spectrum.
One of my all-time stinkers was pretending I could sell during a brief stint for a well-known marque (it definitely wasn’t Toyota) upon my arrival in the big smoke of Brisbane as a 20-year-old. I had all the attributes the dealership was apparently looking for: cocky, clueless and, most importantly, willing to work a six-day week for a $500 base salary just because I got to drive around like a pompous wanker in a flash new offering from the well-known manufacturer that absolutely was not Toyota. I was from western Queensland and had scuffed RMs, a combination the sales manager seemed to think made me perfect for selling four-wheel drives to unsuspecting prospects.
During my first fortnight on the job, a family came in to look at a new four-wheel drive, the flagship of the fleet. Let’s call it a HandBruiser. It was their first outing to check it out, and they sure as hell weren’t going to part with about a hundred grand on day one just because their salesman hit them with the country boy puppy dog eyes. We swapped details and shook hands, and I told them I’d follow them up in a few days.
Apparently, this approach wasn’t what my sales manager was expecting. As I walked back to my desk after seeing them off, he bellowed for me to come to his office. When I entered, his apoplectic stare and the throbbing vein in his forehead suggested he was less than enthused with my performance.
To cut a long story short, I knew my automotive sales career was over when he told me in no uncertain terms how useless I was as he threw a ring binder that weighed the same as a masonry block in my direction. As other staff intervened, I identified the part of his body he could acquaint with his chosen projectile before storming out of the showroom, never to return to the land of car sales.
As you lean back and ponder which dalliances with gainful employment over the years have left you permanently traumatised, spare a thought for four blokes about to be on the receiving end of a whole lot of bull when they clock onto the job at the 20th Weipa Rodeo in a few days.
They go by many names. Protection athletes. Bullfighters. Rodeo clowns. Well, maybe not so regularly the latter these days, but what hasn’t changed is that their primary occupational function remains making themselves a more appealing target to an enraged side of beef that can tip the scales at 1,000 kilograms than the cowboy that has just come off its back, either voluntarily or in a manner completely bereft of panache.
Suddenly, working a bit harder to close a sale doesn’t seem so much of an impost.
To Joel Fabiani, Liam Wellby, Zac Maher and Jared Borghero, the intrepid foursome set to put their bodies on the line to keep rodeo competitors out of harm’s way on Friday and Saturday, thank you – please be safe.
If you happen to cross paths with any of the lads over the weekend, make sure you take the time to let them know what an incredible job they do in a role most of us wouldn’t want for quids.
Also, maybe don’t complain just so much about your employment situation the next time Deb from accounts payable starts munching too loudly on her tuna, egg and lettuce wrap in her cubicle. It could be worse. She could weigh the best part of a tonne and have her sights set on skewering certain parts of your anatomy with her horns.
