第25期:My Job我的工作(A) 参考文本：

I'm a gas man. I work for Yorkshire Electric right, but I'm a gas man reading gas meters for Yorkshire Electric. That's the way it is. So I knock on people's doors & say "Morning love, I've come to read your gas meter". And they say "but you work for Yorkshire Electric" and I say "yes, that's right, you buy your gas off Yorkshire Electric" and they say "so we do" and I go in their houses either right down into their cellars or into their pantries but in Yorkshire, they seem to call glory holes so the number of women who tell me "ah you're welcome lad; you've got to climb into my glory hole though". And I climb into their glory hole, in the back of it there's a gas meter and I read probably about 300 of them a day in a 7 hour day. I make about 300 visits a day, I get into about 200 houses. It's a job that works on a bonus system: to be earning a reasonable wage you need to keep up a certain percentage of meters read per day ... plus a certain number of houses visited. It keeps you on your feet & it can be quite a good job, it can be quite good fun. It's got that competitive element of needing to make a certain score, you're outside all day which I enjoy, you get to know a city very well, you see things you would otherwise never see any other way, you're in & out of people's houses all day right? You see a lot of the underside of the city. You'd be surprised at the depth and levels of poverty in the U.K plus of course the contrast with wealth: one day you can be working somewhere where you have to trek up a drive for 5 minutes past 2 or 3 swimming pools, a team of gardeners and the gas meter's stuck behind a suit of armor , which is true, it has happened, and another day you might be gingerly picking your way over discarded needles and syringes round the back of a load of squalid houses…there are some quite extreme things, especially in a city like Leeds, an old industrial city which has lots of people who used to be workers. Erm ... shit job in bad weather!