Osgood Tarsiers

Osgood Smiths is a confectionary warehouse in Colchester where I worked for a large part of my teenage years. I continued working there during my first year at universisty to pay for my fees. It was a miserable place, with tedious, backbreaking work assembling sweet, crisp, drink and cigarette orders for local newsagents. I still dream about the place now and again, and the dreams are always just as boring as the reality. Last night I was back, post university, pursuing the same relentless, mindnumbing order assemblage. This time there was a difference, in that Sam Hearn, a former university friend, also had a job there. We were communicating through headsets, despite it being his day off. 

A typical shift would involve taking a paper order from the tray on the boss's desk and having to hunt down the items in the warehouse, keeping them on a pallet ready for packing They would then be strapped up into bundles on a machine, shrink wrapped, then labelled, scanned, and entered into an invoice on an old LED computer with a black screen and green letters. There were now animals in the warehouse, primates and parrots, which customers could order to buy. I was going through my rounds when I noticed an order for two tarsiers on my clipboard. A tarsier is a small, nocturnal primate from Southeast Asia. I found the ones I was looking for in a corner of the warehouse, near the Coca Cola bottles. They were clinging to a long wire branch, covered in cobwebs and clumps of their moulted, woolly grey fur.

I was a little bit scared of these bug-eyed, scratchy-clawed critters, so rather than attempt to pick them up directly, I took hold of the wire branch they were clinging to and carried it back to my pallet. On the headset, Sam Hearn was talking about how his favourite animal order to assemble was a 'blue monkey.' My sister, Fallon, was hovering near my pallet, slacking off, and she came over to inspect the tarsiers. We noticed that they had shed their tails. These were eventually found on the dirty warehouse floor, like little brushes. I was able to re-attach them to the primates, as though with velcro. The tarsiers leapt onto my chest and I began to wonder how I was supposed to get them ready for packing. I did not want to ask In the Corner, the giant boss who ran the warehouse.