CLANCY OVERELL | Editor | CONTACT
Local bricklayer, Ernie Trevino (42) has today reluctantly turned down all of the vast high salt and high sugar options available to him from the worksite smoko van, instead settling on a packed lunch.
It’s not so much a financial or dietary decision, it’s because he appreciates the domestic labour undertaken by his wife to include him alongside the other lunches she has packed for the kids before school.
If it was him making his own lunch, he’d be throwing this shit in the skip bin and lining up for a battered double kransky, or cheese and curried steak pastie.
But the missus made lunch for him, so he has to eat it.
However, that doesn’t mean he’s not gonna complain about having to do so.
“Look at this rabbit food” says Ernie, as he opens his lunchbox and unveils the most exquisite assortment of both fresh and savoury fillings ever organised between two slices of multigrain brain.
His workmates – who either don’t have wives or don’t have wives willing to wait on them hand and mouth with the most soul-nourishing, healthy, flavoursome and hearty packed lunches to ever suffer the indignity of being eaten with dirty hands on a construction site – look on in disbelief like this is some kind of gee up.
“Fucken hell” Ernie continues.
“This is like hospital food”
“Deadset”
His foreman, currently tucking into a bag of burger rings and a chiko roll, has had enough.
“Fuck up Ernie” he says.
“That’s better than what you’d get in a cafe”
Ernie, still committed to this whinge, sneers.
“Yeah… Maybe a cafe out in woop woop”
“What even is this shit? Jarslberg?”
“I’d much prefer that”
Ernie points to an apprentice who is halfway through eating a butter chicken pie that will cause him insurmountable grief in the portaloo several hours from now.
