A life of grime
Somehow I ended up doing my work experience with the environmental health department of the local council. The first day started well: our mission for the day was to "sample ice cream" which sounded ridiculous, but I could live with it. Apparently the only case of typhoid the county had seen came from a dirty Mr. Whippy van. Fair enough then.

And then it went bad. Firstly in delivering the ice cream samples to the local public health lab I got lost and blundered into the Level 3 lab. Basically where they do all the TB and HIV work. Ooops

The next day was with trading standards. A farmer had bought a 4x4 with about 20,000 miles knocked off the clock. So we traipsed off to the dirtiest and stinkiest farm I'd ever seen, knee deep in assorted shit and corruption, and then took witness statements while drinking tea made with stale milk in mugs with bite marks on the edge and trying to politely remove the horny pet dog from my leg. At the end of that I just wanted a bath, but we had to go interview the second hand car dealer. The TS officer reverse parking the car "for a quick escape" while recounting the times he'd been stabbed on the job was not a good omen. Once in the office, with the dealer's brick shithouse of a son stood blocking the door, and the dealer having established that he "knew exactly where I live" it got nasty. John "Scientology and Me" Sweeney nasty. It's the only time I've ever considered throwing myself out of a window to escape. Until he got put away for putting aforementioned son in intensive care after he drunk drove a Subaru Impreza from his showroom through the middle of roundabouts and finally into someone's living room a few weeks later I was bricking it that psycho car dealer would hunt me down and cut me up into little pieces.

The final day was probably the worst. I got sent out with the animal welfare officer. That day he was on a one-man crackdown of illegal puppy farms. The day started out with comedy when he ignored a gate plastered with "beware of the dog" signs only to be chased by a pack of Alsatians big enough to be called thou. He got licked to death.

But we ended up in a run down country house waiting for the RSPCA to come help us as the whiff of piss, shit and death had led us to find a shed full of puppies and bitches. Some had died. Some were dying. Two puppies were floating in a trough nearby, quite possibly where the owner had drowned them. They were all mangy, malnourished and flearidden to fuck. Rats were scurrying around feeding on the dead dogs and eyeing us up as if to wonder whether we'd taste nice with ketchup. The owner finally turned up, a charming old lady with a medal for firefighting during the blitz and an utter disregard for the animals she flogged for hundreds of quid each. The Great British public can be honourable and horrible in the same breath.

Which is why I now prefer working with deadly raspberry shaped mutant murder fungi to people.
(mochyn, Mon 14 May 2007, 23:09, Reply)