Airports, Chunky Alan and 80’s celebrities

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH! A bomb!

Not really, just trying to get your attention.  It worked didn’t it?

I used to work as a bag handler at terminal 17 in Manchester Airport.  What a great life, carrying bags and stacking them tetris-like.  Clearly my youth spent wanking away my time on a GameBoy wasn’t as useless as my aggressive ‘knuckle happy’ father led me to believe.

The varying sizes and shapes, the multitude of colours and quality of the containers for travellers paraphenalia was remarkable, many fabricated from materials I didn’t even know existed and designed by chaps/ladies with foreign sounding names!  The crux of the job, and what we got paid for was lifting.  Some of the cases you could lift by yourself, others you need your bulky colleague (‘Big Stan’ or ‘Chunky Alan’ on Wednesday-Saturdays Night shift) to give you a hand.  Whatever happened, the stuff needed loading on the plane 1 hour before take off otherwise little Jimmy wouldn’t get his flip flops for the Corfu beach.

Now the fun part was the ‘left luggage’, the stuff that people left behind.  If it didn’t get claimed in 5 years, we’d get free dibs on what was remaining!  We couldn’t keep the cases themselves, something to do with a piracy law dating back from the domesday era and connected with the King etc.  I forget the facts.  But we could keep the junk kept within.  Anyway, the assortment of shit we’d get our filthy, thieving mits on was out of this world.  Knickers, belts, shoes, dog leads, snow globes, shark fins, bush meat and pickled duck were all par for the course.  Rocking horse shit, chickens lips and honest South Africans rarely turned up but were not unique.  The most outrageous thing I came across (and subsequently sold on eBay for £433.91) was Morrissey from off of The Smiths, you know, that singer?  I couldn’t quite believe my beady eyes when his coiffured bonce sprung forth from a mound of y-fronts, singing one of his more popular hits from that “Meat Is Murder” album.  Whichever one it was, I’m sure I’d heard it somewhere.  We kept him in a shoebox under the bed in the spare room, keeping him in as near as mint condition as we could.  He was in surprisingly good nick for being shut in a bag for over 5 years with no food, water and light.

The bidding went clinically on eBay and we got a few bob for him.  He went to forlorncatcatcher9, somewhere in Sussex.  I posted him 2nd class to save some reddies and I was over £400 better off!  Lovely stuff.

Anyway, I’d spent the money I procured from flogging the asexual Mancunian on a rug and the beginnings of a loft conversion in my Stockport pad.  Kept me in the wife’s good books and let me get some much need work done on the house.  Good times, and an anecdote I’ll never forget.  It’s coming up to the next round of stealing next week, and I’ve got my fingers crossed I’ll stumble upon Max Clifford, so I can punish the cunt in the most unimaginable ways for the rest of his sorry, prolonged and painful life.

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