Mud in your eye
Back the days of yore (mum), a tiny simiankid wasn't sure what he wanted to do for his work experience, so was cast unto the lottery of 'letting the school choose'.

Rather than being selected to work in one the area's many fine retail establishments/accountants' offices/backstreet knocking-shops, I was selected as a gopher in an industrial mud lab. This was cool – not your normal mud, this stuff. When they drill for oil, it's what they push down the pipe to stop the drill-head from tearing itself to pieces.

Part of making sure this oil did its job was to test how it reacted to immense heat and pressure. So samples were duly loaded into 8-inch lengths of steel pipe, with a threaded cap and a pressure inlet on each. These were then lobbed in the testing machine to be subjected to 'mad pressure' (around 1,400 psi) and some hot hotness.

Once they had cooled, Yours Truly was given the enviable task of cleaning out the sample carriers. Each end of the sample container had eight or so allen-key screws to release the pressure cap. Even wearing the protective gear they'd given me to protect from the nasty acid cleaning fluid I had to use, the allen-keying was easy, so I set to work, while the bloke in charge tootled off to do something else.

Undo the first end -PSSSSSH - pressure released - undo the other end - clean. Simple. So simple that I raced through the first two in no time.

Just undoing the screws on the third one when a tremulous voice from the other end of the lab says, 'Simiankid, I did tell you to open the capsules from the end marked 'P', yeah?

'No, why?'

'If you open the other end first they explode in your face'.

In effect, I'd just played 50/50 Russian roulette, twice, and somehow managed not to blow my head off. Gulp.

At the end of the week, some of my other friends got hard cash for their work. I got a baseball cap with the company logo on it, presumably to remind me how lucky I was to still have a head.
(SimianKid internet faffer, Wed 25 Aug 2010, 13:08, 3 replies)

My eyes!
The goggles do nothing!
(The Incredible Sulk Finally remembered his password on, Wed 25 Aug 2010, 14:52, closed)

I got stood on by a horse. And a bad review sent to my school. That was it. Not hat. No money. Not even a thanks.
I'd spent the whole week arriving before everyone else and trying to pitch in whenever I could, which was met with nastiness and insults saying I'd never done it before so how would I know how to help (em, show me?). They promised me all week a free horse riding lesson and I didn't even get that.

I never found out the nasty things they'd said about me and my friend until the next year when my "guidance" teacher brought it up.
( vix0r was not Matthew on, Wed 25 Aug 2010, 15:31, closed)

All
I got to do for work experience was to work at the local airport scraping grime off the underside of the wings; one bloke was such a posh-holier-than-thou character who couldn't help but belittle the two of us on WE, that we scraped "IAM" and "ACUNT" on each wing respectively on our last day.

Didn't get to see that plane fly though sadly, so he may have noticed - but I doubt it, and I like to think it was there for some time before anyone actually told him ;-)
(dchurch bah, Wed 25 Aug 2010, 20:15, closed)