National Health Shennanigans!
When I were but a lad, my Mother worked in Personnel for the NHS. And, as such, when I wanted a holiday or weekend job, she'd put out some feelers to find out if there was anyone in the hospital who needed help.

And thus it came to pass that I held several positions within the trust. Everything from filing monkey in Medical Records to Helpdesk Support (which I actually stayed at for a year).

During the course of my few years there, I came across the following people:

1) The Catering Manager who looked as if he drank the grease out of the fryers. He smoked in the kitchen too, and never flushed the loo after he had done a poo.

2) A few times I did a night shift cooking simple food for the on call doctors. The other guy I worked with had little or no idea how to cook. 'Rare' chicken was his specialty. Thankfully, I think I always caught him before he killed someone.

3) The hospital porter who, after I had just walked in to their cabin, asked the dazzlingly insightful interview question "Do you wank or what?"

4) The poison dwarf who managed the helpdesk who had never seen a computer, let alone fixed one. She bollocked me for resetting a senior consultants password (when he had asked me to), and made me go and apologise to him. He called her a 'stupid bitch', which I thought was an understatement.

5) Dr. De'Ath (seriously) told me off in a corridor for having my mobile on. I know that was wrong, in fact I was turning it off, but the killer was that he was having a conversation on his at the time.

6) The porter who was caught having relations with a sheep. I don't know if that's true or not, but you could believe it of him.

7) Finally, there was Graham the Sweep. Graham was a porter too, but all he ever did was sweep floors. He actually had been an eminent professor whose wife had left him, and he had a complete and catastrophic breakdown. He used to ballroom dance with his broom. He had a brilliant mind - he would talk with me about Shakespeare and Theatre and Science and Education and Politics and Philosophy and Physics and all kinds of things. Some morning's he'd be on top of the world, whereas some mornings he would actually growl at you like a wild dog. He wasn't a bastard, he was fascinating. He lived with cats in a caravan, but due to his state of mind couldn't look after them properly, and the RSPCA had to take them away. I've never seen a man look so broken as he did after that.

He once told my mother she had all the grace and subtlety of a prima ballerina. My mother has all the grace and subtlety of a brick through a window.

Ah, the NHS. Best in the world for weirdos and bastards.
( Devil_In_Tights the *real* DiT!, Fri 25 Jan 2008, 17:12, Reply)