So every Christmas people at home and at work here in the UK give and receive boxes of sweets and one of the most popular are Mar’s Celebrations. Now Celebrations contain miniatures of all the best Mars sweets and I’m assuming they do other versions around the world? People in the UK all have their favourite sweet but they also have a clear ‘least favourite sweet’ and the debate normally features miniature Bounty bars or miniature Snickers bars as to which is the worst. This debate always reminds me of a young Polish gentleman I used to work with.
So several years ago I ended up having to take temporary factory work during the day alongside my normal gig as a bartender to make ends meet. I was working at a dairy but I was on the packing side of the operation. This basically meant I was on a twelve hour shift where I would either be stacking milk, yoghurts or throwing out the rubbish. All of these jobs were both mind numbing and physically draining but I needed the money and beggars can’t be choosers as the phrase goes.
Now in any job there were people I liked and people I just had to put up with. Being a factory job there was a cross section of people from different nations across Europe and the world. I ended up making friends with a lot of the Polish guys and girls who were working there. I travelled across Europe as a boy but never visited Poland so I enjoyed talking to people from another nation and finding out about their country and customs. On twelve hour shift where we were not allowed music in case we did not hear the fork lift trucks reversing there was nothing to do but talk and people always seem happy to talk about their home town no matter where they are from.
Of the guys I got to know, one of the most memorable was a fella who I’ll call Steve. Now Steve was the quintessential lovable rogue. He was about six foot tall, with a goofy gap toothed smile and everything else was all muscle. His build screamed curtesy of Her Majesties Prison service or maybe a jail back in Poland, but I never quiet had the balls to ask him. When the belt bringing down the milk stopped for even a moment, he’d load up a broom stick with several six pint milk cartoons either end and start doing dead lifts. He was the first person to ever give me a cup of barszcz (beetroot soup) it was dark purple and surprisingly good. He also gave me a slice of an apple cake made by his wife, when I remarked how good it was every other person in hearing started to tell me how their wives cake was just as good if not better and for a week after I ended up being gifted cakes and biscuits to eat and compare. He told me the story of the dragon of Krakow which with my love of folklore I found very interesting. He also introduced me to a Polish rapper called Popek Monster who has to be seen and heard to be believed.
All in all Steve was a good guy to have on your side and I was glad to call him a friend. He did though have one bad habit he could not stop smoking weed, not that this necessarily was a bad thing as Steve was one of those rare people who functions perfectly fine if not better when stoned. He’d simply nip off for five minutes and reappear with a big soppy grin and start working twice as fast as anyone else. That is unless he was hungry and he had a terrible sweet tooth, if that was the case you’d see him climbing over crates and into places he should never have been all to remain off of the CCTV system in order to eat as much yoghurt and ice cream as possible without being caught. Worst or maybe best of all as everyone loves an anti-hero the managers knew he was both high and stealing from them but they could never prove a thing. This drove our foreman crazy and he was always trying to catch Steve out. He could not make anything stick though and as a group working all together you grow to know each other very well and Steve was loved by everyone, even the older English guys who hated foreigners deemed him as ‘alright’ and an exception to the rule of everyone from Europe stealing our jobs etc.
Now in time I left that job and managed to get better hours working only as a barman. One of the other guys I worked with came into my bar a few months after I left; so I cracked him open a bottle and asked him how things were going back at the dairy. He told me that Steve had been sacked and this brings my tale full circle to the Celebrations debate. As I was told Steve snuck out for his normal midday smoke and was stopped on the way back in by the boss. They never found any drugs but in the pocket of his fleece was one mini snickers bar. Snickers contain peanuts and peanuts are a prohibited item which cannot be onsite in a food making facility. Steve was sacked on the spot a week before Christmas . Which given all the things he had done against the rules, there was a definite irony to his dismissal. So when people debate which is the worst sweet, I always think that I’ve never heard of a bounty bar losing anyone their job or any other sweet for that matter and I know for a fact in the most unexpected of ways that a Snickers bar has.
Picture source - Dragon of Krakow from Www.crazypolishguy.com