I've seen lots, in my job at tech support.
a couple of years ago i used to work for the police, I was a field technician, which meant I got a car and drove about the city to each police station or police desk (court house, forensics, etc.). It was an ace job and most police are really nice and friendly (I don't live in the UK). Also girl detectives in pant suits with guns turn me on. Anyway... I was happily going about my business installing printers and restarting network switches across the city when I picked up a job for the morgue. I’d done a few jobs already so I figured it would be the usual. The police had two computers in the reception where officers could catch up on paper work while they were waiting to drop corpses off, or waiting to be called to a coroners hearing (which was upstairs above the morgue). I was very, very wrong about it being the usual. Most police have a rather dry sense of humour, some would call it bad taste, but they deal with a lot of crap and I think if you can’t make light of the bad things in the world they will drag you down (imho).
“Hello, I’ve come to fix the computer, it won’t print or something?” I said to the Police Liaison officer.
“Hmmmm” he said, looking me up and down, “you’ll need to suit up, you’re ok with bodies right?”
I thought he was joking, as far as I was aware their were only two police computers in the building, and neither of those were near so much as a whiff of formaldehyde. I replied, playing along, that yeah it was fine and I’d been here before.
Then he gave me one of the white paper suits, booties, gloves and a mask. At that point I figured he might not actually be joking.
“It’s busy in there today, let me know if you feel ill”
“uh, yeah ok, erm, busy in where?”
Then he lead me into a room the size of a basket ball court, it was bright, airy, smelt strongly of hospital and had 18 people in it, only 6 of them were alive.
Turns out, today was autopsy day, I guess every day is autopsy day, but for some reason I reckon the head doctor was coming round so everyone was looking busy.
All 12 big steel tables were occupied, some were still in bags/big tray things as they had decomposed a fair bit and would have slimed off the table if they’d been let out. Others just looked like they were sleepy and needed a tan. It reminded me very much of madam taussauds, though for some reason, less realistic.
I was led through this area to a littler room, this was where the computer was, this was also the room where they do dental identification. I’d never really thought about it, but turns out, the easiest way to do dental ID’s is to remove the jaw. Though the guy could have been pulling my leg when he said that, as the room was empty. There were lots of other guys pulling legs out in the main room. Turns out the computer problem was a fairly tricky networking issue, so it took me about 20 minutes to get it sorted. Thankfully it required a fair bit of concentration which stopped me from looking up and staring out through the glass partition into the main room. All the staff there were very friendly, but it was a surreal environment, a chap walked in, said hello tom me, opened a draw and took out the biggest fucking dremmel I’d seen in my life, any larger and you’d had to have called it an angle grinder. He gave me a wink and wandered back to his table, where a lady in her late 50’s lay.
I tell you what, I’m not a big fan of the noise the dentist drills make. I like it even less now that it reminds me of that day.
When I’d fixed the computer I walked back through the room to the exit, I said goodbye to the chap with the dremmel, who thankfully wasn’t using it anymore, he gave me a friendly goodbye and thanked me for fixing the computer, then pulled the top of her head off to an accompanying sluuurping noise. Brians are more pinky than they are on TV.
Mmm spicy brains.

I figured I would not be able to sleep for weeks, but I was ok, and I am squeamish person (less now though :0). Though for weeks afterwards little snapshots of that day would pop into my head at random times, mostly the lady, mostly as I was about to bite into a sandwich.

On the plus side I did get a couple of those little dental mirrors on sticks which are great for checking hard drive and mother board jumpers.

No apologies to anyone except your mum
( KittyWaste lives at Sleepingplanet.com, Sun 2 Mar 2008, 0:35, Reply)