Mikey Cahill: Getting home alive is good work if you can get it

Jobs can be empowering, fulfilling and profitable but it’s even better if you can avoid the real workplace risks — including those we may not be aware of yet, writes Mikey Cahill.

Mikey’s had more than 30 jobs in total, including work at a London pub, which came with its own risks.

Have a pithy quote stuck above my computer screen: “To get the right answers you must ask the right questions.” Interviewing people for a yarn is a funny job because there are always a lot of factors at play.

Is your subject in a good mood or have they just squabbled with their partner? Is there a delay in the phone line? How much eye contact do you make when it’s face-to-face? Do I tell them they have a bit of rocket in their teeth or will that ruin the rapport? Wait, do I have some greenery wedged in my teeth?

But I’m lucky to work with some gun journalists who inevitably ask the right questions.

I’ve watched Patrick Carlyon, Tamsin Rose, Cameron Adams, Aneeka Simonis and others up close and you never stop learning.

Recently I was regaling my daughter with what I do at the Herald Sun and ended up counting all the jobs I’ve had: 32 in total. “You’re being boring, Papa,” she said.

Modelling: Good work if you can get it.

That got me reflecting on some of the strangest gigs I’ve had. I was a Commercial Case Investigator for CityLink in the late 1990s. A fancy name for E-Tag distributor. I’d package ’em up and send ’em out, slot them into cars and generally make sure people were hearing the beeps as they drove down the Monash Freeway. But we were getting 300 returned each week because they were faulty, a cluster-truck of a situation.

Another temp role I had, for three days, involved me cold-calling real estate agents to try to sell them the Mahlab Property Guide. It was in the days when friends would send “hilarious” prank emails. I opened one and a clanging alarm blared out of my PC with a giant flashing red message on the screen: “MY BOSS IS AN ASSHOLE.” I finished the next day. Total sales: three.

When I hit London, I found a job as a Bonds underwear model that paid a tasty 60 pounds a day. For three days a dozen of us antipodeans stood around in jocks, singlets and lingerie, drank warm VB, boogied to Kylie and flirted. They made the guys wear two pairs of underwear, one a size too small to keep things in check. Wise. I came crashing back to earth the next week when I began work in a Soho pub and a prostitute was murdered outside our premises.

Asbestos still poses a risk to workers in a number of industries. Picture: Richard Jupe

I’ve had a few shockers. When I was running a pub in New Cross Gate in Sarf London, two girls threw full pint glasses at each other — one went whizzing past my head — and a scrag fight broke out. Another night I went to scoop vomit out of the urinal while wearing plastic gloves and a diamond geezer jumped in front of me: “Stop mate! You don’t have to do this!” He meant well. “Out of the way champ.”

A colleague now in his seventh decade and in good nick had a labouring job in the innocent early 1970s at a company that serviced industrial electrical motors in Birmingham. Once the motors had been dismantled, it was his job to clean and paint the inside of the casings. Each day he’s go home covered in fibres — asbestos as it turned out, which was used as insulation. Cough.

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On a similar theme, last weekend I was at a kid’s birthday party, chatting to a stonemason. Spare a thought and a prayer (if you’re that way inclined) for stonemasons who have been exposed to crystalline silica dust. There’s a nationwide epidemic of young tradies who are dying from the lung disease silicosis. Luckily, the guy I spoke to hadn’t dabbled in that area but he said solemnly: “My competition is literally dying out.”

So maybe next time you’re frustrated by an inane work email, take a deep breath and be thankful you have a safe job.

And keep asking the right questions. Curious people go places.

Mikey Cahill is a Herald Sun columnist.

@joeylightbulb