Throughout this project I will be working from the text “The Fat Workie”. The story focuses on a work who is as the title suggests, overweight. The text tells the story of a worker who works hard, lifts heavy thing and overall exerts himself a lot more than those in the office blocks he sees around him. He is both jealous and confused as to why the office workers are so much slimmer than him even tho the only “work” they do involves them typing on a computer screen. My work hopefully will encapsulate some of these elements.
THE FAT WORKIE- by Brian Limmond
There once was a fat workie. You’ve seen him before. High-vis jacket, helmet, steel-toe capped boots. And a belly like a space hopper. He grafted all day, every day. You might find him lifting scaffolding poles out the back of a van, before carrying them halfway across the site, two at a time, to wherever they were to go. Or you might see him walking around with a wheelbarrow of building bricks, stacked high like a pyramid, as he shifted them from here to there. Or he might be taking an industrial-sized drill up to Mick on the third floor. Or pulling a thousand litres of water out of a hole, one bucket at a time. Or shovelling concrete for four hours straight.
Yet there he was with a belly like a space hopper.
He’d see the office workers, the men and women in suits, with their slim, toned bodies. He’d see them from the site, from a high point. He could see right in their windows, as they sat at their computers. They’d barely move a muscle, other than their fingers, to type. They’d sometimes move one of their hands to their mouse, to click a button, then move it back to the keyboard again. Sometimes they’d turn their neck a bit to look at somebody else, then move their mouth to speak. And that would be them, all day, every day, until it was time to leave. He’d see them walk to their motors and trains and buses, where they’d sit down again until it was time to get out, then walk a short distance to their houses, where they’d sit down in front of the telly for the rest of the night before lying flat in their beds for eight hours until it was time to get up and go to work and not move a muscle once again.
Yet there they were with their slim, toned bodies.
And there he was with a belly like a space hopper.