Tuesday September 27th, 2016

The exercise:

Write two haiku about: the sweatshop.

My training shift at Public Works went pretty well this morning. I think I'm setup to take care of the rest of the week now... but I guess the coming days will let me know for sure, one way or the other.

Definitely a different atmosphere than the other town locations I've worked in. It's kinda like being in the office of a garage. Not sure I could do it full time, but covering for part of a week is certainly doable.

Mine:

Wall to wall treadmills,
an obese man on each one;
we make all the sweat

*     *     *

She works from dawn to
dusk, earning what I could make
in seven minutes

2 comments:

Greg said...

Do you know what you'll be doing at Public Works? The list of things they look after is impressive (and varied enough to make me hope they never get mixed up with what they should be doing!). The cemetary maintenance stood out on the list as one that would be fun to explain to Max :) (Ok, so I'm thinking the conversation would go something like, "Well Max, everybody has to keep things nice and tidy-" "So Mummy doesn't get upset?" "...close enough. And that goes for dead people too, but if they get up and start tidying up the live people get a bit worried-" "Like your television show?" "...you're too young to know about the Walking Dead Max, that's for when you're older. But yes. So Daddy has to go and tidy up for them." "Do they give you tea and biscuits afterwards?" "...sure, why not?")
I like your first haiku better this week because it's the route I was thinking of when I saw your title! You've delivered it very nicely (and with a suitably unpleasant image as well!)

The sweatshop
"Ye Olde Sweatshop"
Supposedly a typo,
It's still slavery.

-----
Barrels of fresh sweat,
Forty dollars a litre,
Good for what ails ya!

[Couple of notes today: "Ye Olde Sweetshop" is still quite common as a shop-sign in the UK, and Olde is always pronounced "Old-ee" semi-jokingly. The "Y" is actually a reference to the letter Thorn (fallen out of use, sadly) and should be prounounced "th" but next to no-one knows that. And the link above is just to images, because they convey the message perfectly!]

Marc said...

Greg - just covering for the clerk there, nothing too exciting :)

Though you're not far off how that conversation would actually go...

Hah, your second one wins the day for that link alone. Well, I suppose for how it pairs with the link. Either way, nicely done.