Patience was an Imposed Virtue
My much touted patient personality (and I don't mean that sarcastically) was, for all intents and purposes, likely forged from having to find ways to occupy myself around the Onehunga factory during those long hours between after-preschool and journey home.
With both parents running the company full-time, my mother would slip out to pick up my brother (M) and I from Kindergarten or pre-school and run us back to the factory until it was time for the family to collectively pack-up work and finally head home for some dinner. It may have only been chronologically 3-4 hours each day, but for me it felt like half the day, and for M the afternoon probably felt like a full week in a sensory deprivation tank!
Distractions were always welcome. After all, there's only so many minutes in an hour that a boy can sit on his hands and not (a) annoy his brother, (b) fight his brother, or (c) unintentionally break something.
In the car heading to the factory from a fun day at pre-school or kindergarten, anticipation of the pending boredom was marginally offset with the prospect of a bottle or two of fizzy drink (i.e. Soda for my American friends).
Like so many factories of it's time in the 1970's, there was a little tearoom (i.e. cafeteria) upstairs; next to the main offices. It could probably sit a couple dozen burly male welders, brickies, and sheet metal workers during their breaks. The room also had a couple of sinks (one for dirty dishes, and the other not) with a large hot water cylinder that maintained a tank of boiling water for on-demand cups of tea or instant coffees.
I remember staring many a time at the vertical gauge on the side of the cylinder that told you not only how full the tank was but, through the intensive jiggling up and down of a little red ball within the gauge, roughly whether the water was at a serviceable boiling temperature or not. For Kiwi's, like their British cuzzies, preparing a cup (or kettle) of tea from anything short of viciously scalding and boiling water is tantamount to sacrilege.
As a non-tea-drinker (which incidentally gets you marked for life as "a little bit weird" in any historically Commonwealth country!) the go-to for M and I was the soda vending machine - also conveniently located in the tearoom.
Now, unlike tech companies in the US but like all well managed and profitable colonial businesses, sodas from the soda machine were never free. Mum would give M and I each a 20 cent coin to grab a fizzy drink. Yes - that was the regularly anticipated highlight of the afternoon!
To be honest though, the marginal sugar-high of the fizzy drink was only a piece of why anticipation ran high. There are so many things you can do with an empty glass bottle! Especially if the next most entertaining thing in the room is the box in which all the teabags are kept.
It's something that my own kids will never truly understand. Nowadays, with soda bottle being all plastic, you can't really get in to trouble sucking.
As any kid of the glass soda bottle age will know, the more you suck, the further your tongue gets pulled out of your head and deeper in to the bottle. The trick has always been (1) can you suck hard enough that you can lift and waggle the bottle just using your tongue without chipping a tooth and (2) how loud can you make that sucking pop as you quickly extract your tongue from the bottle. There's also a lesser known and experienced (3) where you suck so long and so hard your tongue gets lacerated by the uneven and slightly sharp neck of the glass bottle, then your tongue swells and with no amount of personal tugging will the bottle come off!
I must admit, (3) was my ultimate goal more times than not. When not, my goal was to have M experience (3) instead. Ah brothers eh!
Now I'm sure some millennial or one of my own kids will argue that they do the same with their plastic bottles. But, as any equivalent expert of the glass bottle age will point out, no matter how much sucking and tongue pushing you do with a plastic bottle, you can always physically squeeze the plastic a little more with your hands and help expel your tongue. For us glass-bottle-tongue-suckers, no such option exists. The much feared escape option was that you'd have to try smash the glass of the bottle in order to free your tongue - and to do it in such a manner that you didn't (a) lacerate your lips on broken shards or (b) chip a tooth or two on the rim of the bottle as you swung your head wildly about.
Of course there were lots of other things you could do with an empty fizzy drink bottle.
One of my favorites (and likely least favorites of my parents) was to see how many of the wooden stairs that led downs from the tearoom to the factory floor the empty bottle cold roll down before (A) it smashed midway on a step, (B) stopped rolling, or (C) spun enough to roll the wrong direction on a step and took a terminal shortcut down the back of the stair slats to the concrete floor below.
Surprisingly enough, after several weeks of practice you could get pretty good at reliably getting the glass bottle safely to the bottom of the staircase. "Reliably" being quite objective in reality.
At some point in time I stumbled over the ultimate fizzy drink scam.
Having been unsuccessful at getting my empty bottle to the factory floor intact (and likely dreading getting another kick-up-the-backside-all-in-one-responsibility-lecture) I grabbed a broom and shovel and swept up the broken shards and a sizable (visible) area of the factory floor before anyone could notice. [Note that not only was I dreading the repercussions of my actions, but I was so bored that even sweeping a few thousand square feet of factory floor felt fun.]
Without knowledge of my broken glass antics my Dad saw that I'd swept the factory floor and gave me 20 cents for a second bottle of fizzy drink. And so began my two-bottle-a-day soda after-school employment contract for many years. Aren't there child-labor laws against that kind of thing? Anyhow, I guess you could say that by the lofty age of 6 I had my first regularly paid job - 20 cents an hour. Woohoo!
-- Gunter
With both parents running the company full-time, my mother would slip out to pick up my brother (M) and I from Kindergarten or pre-school and run us back to the factory until it was time for the family to collectively pack-up work and finally head home for some dinner. It may have only been chronologically 3-4 hours each day, but for me it felt like half the day, and for M the afternoon probably felt like a full week in a sensory deprivation tank!
Distractions were always welcome. After all, there's only so many minutes in an hour that a boy can sit on his hands and not (a) annoy his brother, (b) fight his brother, or (c) unintentionally break something.
In the car heading to the factory from a fun day at pre-school or kindergarten, anticipation of the pending boredom was marginally offset with the prospect of a bottle or two of fizzy drink (i.e. Soda for my American friends).
I remember staring many a time at the vertical gauge on the side of the cylinder that told you not only how full the tank was but, through the intensive jiggling up and down of a little red ball within the gauge, roughly whether the water was at a serviceable boiling temperature or not. For Kiwi's, like their British cuzzies, preparing a cup (or kettle) of tea from anything short of viciously scalding and boiling water is tantamount to sacrilege.
As a non-tea-drinker (which incidentally gets you marked for life as "a little bit weird" in any historically Commonwealth country!) the go-to for M and I was the soda vending machine - also conveniently located in the tearoom.
Now, unlike tech companies in the US but like all well managed and profitable colonial businesses, sodas from the soda machine were never free. Mum would give M and I each a 20 cent coin to grab a fizzy drink. Yes - that was the regularly anticipated highlight of the afternoon!
To be honest though, the marginal sugar-high of the fizzy drink was only a piece of why anticipation ran high. There are so many things you can do with an empty glass bottle! Especially if the next most entertaining thing in the room is the box in which all the teabags are kept.
It's something that my own kids will never truly understand. Nowadays, with soda bottle being all plastic, you can't really get in to trouble sucking.
I must admit, (3) was my ultimate goal more times than not. When not, my goal was to have M experience (3) instead. Ah brothers eh!
Now I'm sure some millennial or one of my own kids will argue that they do the same with their plastic bottles. But, as any equivalent expert of the glass bottle age will point out, no matter how much sucking and tongue pushing you do with a plastic bottle, you can always physically squeeze the plastic a little more with your hands and help expel your tongue. For us glass-bottle-tongue-suckers, no such option exists. The much feared escape option was that you'd have to try smash the glass of the bottle in order to free your tongue - and to do it in such a manner that you didn't (a) lacerate your lips on broken shards or (b) chip a tooth or two on the rim of the bottle as you swung your head wildly about.
One of my favorites (and likely least favorites of my parents) was to see how many of the wooden stairs that led downs from the tearoom to the factory floor the empty bottle cold roll down before (A) it smashed midway on a step, (B) stopped rolling, or (C) spun enough to roll the wrong direction on a step and took a terminal shortcut down the back of the stair slats to the concrete floor below.
Surprisingly enough, after several weeks of practice you could get pretty good at reliably getting the glass bottle safely to the bottom of the staircase. "Reliably" being quite objective in reality.
At some point in time I stumbled over the ultimate fizzy drink scam.
Having been unsuccessful at getting my empty bottle to the factory floor intact (and likely dreading getting another kick-up-the-backside-all-in-one-responsibility-lecture) I grabbed a broom and shovel and swept up the broken shards and a sizable (visible) area of the factory floor before anyone could notice. [Note that not only was I dreading the repercussions of my actions, but I was so bored that even sweeping a few thousand square feet of factory floor felt fun.]
Without knowledge of my broken glass antics my Dad saw that I'd swept the factory floor and gave me 20 cents for a second bottle of fizzy drink. And so began my two-bottle-a-day soda after-school employment contract for many years. Aren't there child-labor laws against that kind of thing? Anyhow, I guess you could say that by the lofty age of 6 I had my first regularly paid job - 20 cents an hour. Woohoo!
-- Gunter
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