Today is the day I officially park up the milk float until the next time! I feel strangely like I have just starred in one of those ‘job swap’ annoying bullshit programmes on telly but with less of the Z-list celebrity status and with a hint more sleep deprevation. Having successfully pushed a desk for the greater part of my career it is a bit of variety getting out and about to do a touch of manual labour, just to see how the other side live obviously.
Being out from 9pm until 6 am you see a lot of things that you would take for granted normally. The city really does have this buzz in the early morning time that in a way is much more palletable than the normal hustle of the day. Most of the readers of this would have only experienced this time of the night in Dublin City center whilst partaking in the walk of shame or the stagger home and it’s only through sober eyes that you appreciate how many drunks shuttle in and around the city on any given night. That and taxi’s, the capital is flooded with taxi’s and drunks. The yellow lights on the roof swarm in bunches of 4 and more like they’re in a race to pick up their next cloudy minded punter.
Before
After
Running around dropping the milk at people’s door is really a dying tradition, with doorstep delivery only accounting for a little over 1% of milk sales it’s a novelty aswell as a profession for the remaining few who brave the cold temperatures and the limited radio programming. It does come with it’s small satisfactions, knowing people will be getting out of bed in the coming hours and having fresh milk or orange juice on their doorstep to have their breakfast, to kick start their day while I have already finished mine.
The business does come with it’s downsides however, the darkness and the wee hours brings out the worst of everyone, sober or not. Traffic signals don’t apply to taxi drivers after the hours of 1am, regardless of the rest of the traffic that is obeying that whole stop and go system that was invented many moons ago. There is a lot of suspect people lurking about, casing out houses for easy hits. I actually saw a guy walking up an entire street just trying the door handles on every car he passed, not what you would call a seasoned criminal but it’s like playing the slot machines, your bound to get a winner eventually!
Now that it’s finished I am happy that I will get my routine back on track and look forward to some sleep over the weekend but there is a part of me that did really enjoy being out and about. It’s a weird buzz but there is a feel good factor that goes with being awake and working when the rest of the world is sleeping. Driving through an estate in a very built up part of Glasnevin at 3.45am a fox ran into the road about 20 metres ahead of me. Immediately stopping the van, the fox stopped dead in its tracks in the middle of the road and looked dead pan at me maybe for a second or two. He then scurried away into the nearby bush but for me that made the whole week worth it.
