The horror of earning £2 per hour in deepest darkest Somerset.
In 1992 when I was 14 my overprotective sMother thought it would be a good idea to get a job in a war zone. Well ok, it was the local Clay Pigeon Shooting club. I would be a "trapper" operating a "trap" that fired "clays" into the air so that the "inbred gun-toting carrot crunchers" could blast them to smithereens.

The trap is a menacing piece of equipment, basically consisting of a steel arm attached to a tripod by an industrial spring that you have to heave back, insert a clay and when the shooter shouts “Pull!” or “Trap!” you release it keeping all body parts away from the deadly swinging arm.

On my first day I was in for a treat. I was to operate the “Rabbit”. The rabbit was a bigger kind of trap that sent a special clay rolling down a long rubber mat to be obliterated a few meters away. I was replacing Simon who was undergoing facial reconstruction because he had caught his face in the rabbits swinging arm (they got through more trappers that way).

A short list of incidents in the next 2 months:
Hands & gloves ripped to shreds on the sharp swinging arm of the trap.
The protective hay-bale wall collapsing on me.
Spent lead shot raining down on me.
No ear protection because I “might not hear instructions”.
Receiving a shrapnel wound on the hand from a disintegrating clay from a nearby trap. Obviously no first aid kit, so the wound was eventually bound with a paper towel and electrical tape.
Gun fire control that makes Dick Cheyney look like he has an exemplary health & safety record.

The crunch came when I had been sat in a hedge for 2 hours, shivering in the pouring rain operating a trap that was desperately trying to take my head off because the trajectory bolt was loose and nobody could (or would) find a spanner to tighten it. The ghost of Simons missing front teeth & nose cartilage appeared to me and told me to get a Sunday morning paper round, and ‘yes’ chthonic, those Sunday papers are a bitch to carry.
( Colonel Dracula Two manky hookers and a racist dwarf, Wed 22 Feb 2006, 10:40, Reply)