HARD HATS, HARD HEARTS - PART TWO

One morning I entered the building to see a disorderly scrum of workers surrounding Mattias, with middle-aged mechanics breaking into a trot to join the melee. Fearing the worst, I suspected one of the young German's pithier one-liners had been seized upon and he was now about to feel the full force of a monkey wrench raised in anger. (Incidentally, a monkey wrench in Brazilian is called a chave inglesa, an “English wrench”, which I find acutely derogatory).

I needn’t have worried – it was merely free gift time. Rummaging through his knapsack, Mattias had found various items of tat from his company – cheap plastic ballpoint pens with the company logo on, a couple of rulers and various boxes of matches. They were no ordinary matches, however - they were long matches in a silver cardboard cylinder, which were designed to be struck on the bottom of the tube, not down the side. They became the most coveted item on offer, so much so that a tubby electrician would make a B line for me every day, exchange a rapid morning handshake and demand, with a stony straight face, “What about the matches?” He wasn’t satisfied until I’d asked Mattias, again, if there were any left. I could tell the negative answers crushed him, as if proof that the universe was against him. Once he nodded to indicate a lanky beanpole of a mechanic, all buck teeth and hard hat, who was sitting on a packing box, taking a match out of his cylinder and examining it. “He doesn’t even smoke!” the tubby one spat bitterly, “I do! I smoke! A packet a day sometimes!”

Then, after around six weeks, Erich the electrician arrived on a flight from Frankfurt. He had a characteristic that, in my experience, is not often associated with those of Teutonic descent, at least not in a healthy, non-destructive way – he had charisma. His presence had an interesting effect on Mattias, who dropped any attempt at being a fun-loving Latino and lapsed back into being stark raving German. Almost immediately his guttural tirades increased both in frequency and intensity, and the number of in-jokes in his mother tongue he shared with Erich multiplied exponentially. I even overheard him say to one of the few Brazilians who understood a little English, “I’m not liking England and I’m not liking English people.” I somehow found it in me to rise above his comments, despite his grammatical rashness.

Erich was a class act. He was in his early twenties and had both long blonde hair combed back into a pony tail and a pleasingly dry sense of humour. His work involved traveling to any country with an aluminium industry and doing the electrical installation of the machines, mainly, it seemed, in China, Russia, Saudi Arabia and Western Europe. He had some excellent tales to tell. In Russia, he was constantly plied with drink by his vodka-drenched hosts, even on the work site, and spent the whole six weeks plastered, miraculously without any gruesome industrial accidents to latterly wake him screaming at night. China was the source of many a memorable jape. Once, he reported, on his first day in a factory, he stored his hard hat in his locker and went to say goodbye to his co-workers. Reaching the other side of the machine, he shook hands with a Chinaman already wearing said hard hat – he could tell it was his as it had the name Erich emblazoned across the front. Another time he was disappointed to find somebody had defecated behind his recently-installed control cabinet – toilet facilities are regarded as an unnecessary luxury on Chinese work sites, apparently.

One day Erich asked me to show him the electricity substation. After finding out where it was, I escorted him there and once he saw it, he was satisfied. In China once they had kept promising daily for about two months that he could connect the electricity supply to the machine the next day, only to invariably cancel the arrangement without explanation. Resolving to get to the bottom of the matter, Erich had followed the cable through the factory grounds and out into the middle of a wood where he found the cable simply stopped – there was nothing connected to the end of it.

Erich was a master of winning over the local workforce. Disposing of the usual small-talk, “In Germany we are eating 80% pork”, or, God forbid, making inane conversation about football, he used two artifices guaranteed to have the gathered electricians virtually carrying him shoulder-high from the area in delight - mimed references to beer/getting drunk and carefully chosen knob gags. No sooner had he pretended to attach 440-volt power cables to a hapless mechanic’s genitalia or invited an electrician to place his length on the table top so that he could take a swipe at it with an oversized sickle spanner than he had his audience eating out of the palm of his hand. It was a lesson for all of us who seek to promote global harmony.

PART 3 TO FOLLOW SHORTLY.