People say that sailors are superstitious, you should try factory workers. I work at a rubber factory and boy are these guys superstitious. The guys always wash their hands three times when they’re off the clock and on their way home, and one guy even carries around a lucky rabbit’s tail. Me, I don’t believe in any of that stuff. But they’re trying to persuade me.

The other day I walked beneath a kind of folding platform step that gets wheeled around the factory. It basically looks like a big portable ladder but it’s more sophisticated and more suited to factory work. Anyway, after I walked through that, the boys just just dropped what they were doing and gawked at me. Seriously it was like a ghost had passed through the office. They had this look of horror on all of their faces. I go, “Oh, come on, boys. Seriously?”

They go, “You just walked under a ladder!”

I go, it’s not a ladder, it’s an aluminium folding platform, for crying out loud! It’s one of the custom design platforms.”

They wouldn’t have  bar of it. After that, it was like I had the plague. None of them would get eart me,. ?They were convinces that Something was going to fall on me and if they came anywhere close they’d get crushed too. I was cursed. I saw more charms appear around the factory, horseshoes over the front roller door, and more of those rabbit tails. People were throwing salt at me, it was nuts. I’d just about had enough of it by that stage, when one day I was walking straight up to work , just outside the property along the footpath when I spotted something on the floor. I knew what it was but walked up to it casually. First I waved to the guys who were loitering out the front having a ciggie, then I approached the thing I’d spotted on the footpath, bent over and picked it up. I held up a fifty dollar bill and held it up to them. Their instant shock melted into a cheer. I was no longer cursed and worklife could move on.