Kamikaze Kangaroos! by Tony James Slater

Author:Tony James Slater [Slater, Tony James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: (v5), South Pacific, Australia
Amazon: B00IF8QFRG
Publisher: Various Things
Published: 2014-02-12T06:00:00+00:00

Lies That Trevor Told Us

These lies were numerous, and included the following:

“I’ll pay for your Blue Card exams,”

and “I’ll pay for your petrol,”

and “I’ll pay you.”

Trevor did none of these things.

He was a small, wiry man with a moustache any 70s porn star would have been proud of. He was spectacularly weedy for a landscaper, but he made up for his lack of physical presence with his personalities. All six of them.

On our first day he showed up around noon, by which point we’d given up standing around and had pitched in carrying wheelbarrows full of soil. Apparently Trevor liked to stage his site visits at random, so as to keep his work force on their toes. For this reason, they all hated him – and it might have had something to do with him being a rude, paranoid, obnoxious prick.

Although – was he paranoid? Because everyone really was out to get him.

On our second day he refused to speak to us, so we carried on doing what everyone else was doing.

On our third day, he cornered us by a cement mixer and demanded to know what we’d been saying about him.

“I know it’s you three,” he told us. “I’ve got ears all over this site!”

And presumably on a necklace somewhere, I thought.

On the fourth day he came to us and complained that we weren’t working hard enough. He’d never seen us work; more to the point, he’d never seen any of his other workers work, and even we had seen precious little of that. I was starting to see the pattern – when Trevor showed up, a ‘look busy’ mentality electrified the site, and any lack of progress, complete with attendant belly-aching about our boss, was being laid firmly on our doorstep.

Presumably by the same assholes who spent all day complaining when they should have been shovelling.

Trevor told me that he didn’t hire girls.

I told him he’d been perfectly aware he was hiring girls, and that both of them were working harder than any of the blokes on site.

Trevor said that, even if that was the case, he wasn’t really happy about hiring two girls.

So Roo quit on the spot and went to sit in Rusty; later she went back to work at the Underground, cleaning the place from top to bottom every day.

I told Trevor he could give her pay to me, when payday came around.

Which it never did.

We quickly discovered that the vast majority of Trevor’s workers were lazy, mean, back-stabbing idiots – but worst of all, they were incompetent.

The gardeners would complain at the pavers for driving brick trolleys through all the flowerbeds, ruining several days worth of planting; the pavers would go ape-shit at the gardeners for pushing muddy wheelbarrows full of mulch over their clean, freshly-laid patios. Nothing was done in the order it should have been, and overseeing all of it from a distance – badly – was Trevor. In our second week, he gave Gill and I a job levelling the driveways to a street full of houses.

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