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CHILLER LAD
 Supermarker Freezers - fit for the dreams of a Chiller Lad
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The first rock came though my living room window at 3.30 in the morning of Wednesday May the 8th last year. It was followed by an open tin of paint, another rock through the dining room window, and more paint through the second shattered frame as well. Both rooms were trashed. The damage came to £6,000 - and something like that's going to change your life. You're going to have to deal with it.
It meant giving up writing. In fifteen years, I'd had eleven books published - and all of a sudden it felt like, for all the good it had done me, I might as well have been building a rope ladder to the moon. Book twelve? - I could not go on with it. I was in the toils of the justice system, and the Kafkaesque murk of local government bureaucracy, and there was a criminal thug out there who meant me great malice - so I had to deal with it, and writing books went by the board.
But what are you going to do, when your life's all changed like that?
I'd get application forms for the obvious stuff - copywriting this, marketing that - and my heart would sink at the jargon. Then I was in my regular supermarket and I thought, well - I like shopping for food, I like cooking it - why not work here?
So now I'm a Coldstore Assistant, Fresh Foods, Band 2. Or, as the job is more properly known, I'm a Chiller Lad.
There are two of us - one for the night, one for the day. He hands over to me at six or seven in the morning, and between us we deal with the fresh food delivery - which sounds simple enough, except that 'the fresh food delivery' is a gigantic daily avalanche. I work in a place, after all, where 33,000 people spend over £1,000,000 a week.
It takes two or three whole wagons every day to feed them. 2,000 cases on a quiet day, well over 3,000 on a busy one - whole tonnages of ready meals, pasta, soup, sauces, pies, pizza, salads, dips, cooked meats, yogurts, puddings, cream, milk, fats, fruit juice, bulk cheese, fancy cheese, sausage, bacon, fresh meat and fish - all this gear comes through the back door every day in a veritable tsunami of protein.
As the Chiller Lad on shift, I takes this anarchy of stuff and make sense of it. I get it in the coldstore, I sort it, I pick it, I tidy it up and make it ready for the floor - until, over the months, it's become a passion.
Me and the night lad, we're the keepers of the People's Larder - and contrary to what some may think about supermarkets, I'll tell you, it matters to us that everything is clean, it matters to us that it stays in the cold, it matters to us that there should not be any waste.
So we mash our hands between the rollers crammed against the racking, we wedge our fingers under knuckle-crunching loads of butter and lard, we watch those sell-by dates with gimlet eyes, we keep the code check file religiously maintained, we sign the Alteration In Price file every day, we stack and condense and rotate our stock with fanatical precision - and any careless body who goes in that chiller and gets messy in there, they're going to get their head bawled off.
Oh, I'll tell you - sometimes I go on shift and someone's left it disorderly, ooooh, I get the shudders clean down my spine. I go in there and find something's been left scratty, I could scream. I do scream. I bawl, I emit vivid cascades of bluntest Anglo-Saxon - but that's OK.
In the chiller, no one can hear you scream.
Because the fans on the refrigeration units are too loud.
But consider - we have 533 different kinds of cheese, we have 398 kinds of yogurt - you'll need a sense of order to stay on top of that.
So every day I go in there, and another wagon's on the back door, and 54 more roll pallettes each one taller than I am thunk and clank onto the metal-plated floors of the delivery bay, and I breathe deep and go to it.
Out the front the good people of West Yorkshire are spilling through the door, loading their trolleys, and the holes start opening up on the shelves down the aisles. I work at a sprint, monitoring traffic with an adrenalin fizz. Cherry flavour Muller Light's off sale? Two-pint semi-skimmed is low? Has anyone tidied the eggs up lately?
So I clear the delivery, I do my best to keep shelves full and folk happy, I tidy up, I file the code check, then I go home and I sleep and I come back and I start again.
Funny - who'd have thought there could be so many kinds of yogurt in the world? And who'd have thought you could have a relationship with it all?
But I do.
By Pete Davies
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