work experience
I did a few stints of what was supposed to be an enriching experience but was seldom thus,of all the places i worked at none of them did i furrow a carreer.

One that sticks out in my mind was for British Gas following a engineer on his travels,the occasional cups of tea and the odd tip from a gratefull customer was ok but one guy i worked with........what a asshole !!!

We went to this one place to extricate a gas cooker and fit a new one,simple enough save the fact that said appliance was CAKED in shit and as we manouvered it down the stairs i felt cold grease run down my sleeves.
Ok so it was a manky BOGGING place but as we drove away the engineer went into a racist tirade opining about how he thought that black people shouldnt be allowed cookers.

Journey back to the depot was somewhat umcomfortable.
(shug, Sat 12 May 2007, 22:56, Reply)

Meat Inspecting
I worked as a Meat Inspector (yea, ha ha, snicker if you must) at a Tyson Plant in my hometown. My first day was devoted entirely to inspecting pig anuses (ani? plural?!)

My hands smelt like shit for at least a week, and I was even wearing gloves at the time...
(Ikarimaru, Sat 12 May 2007, 22:40, Reply)

Im sorry
Im sorry, Im sorry but i think i beat all of you.

For my week at work experience i am going to work at a firm that designs and builds machines that safely take apart nuclear reactors as well as building reactors for submarines!!!

How cool is that!
(bushman, Sat 12 May 2007, 22:37, Reply)

Actually
I had pretty good work experience. At 16 I worked at Nationsbank and got to hang about the trading floor and back room. Then at 17 I did my work experience at Marconi and helped out with development for somekind of fly through mapping software. So not bad really.
However I worked before then as a babysitter, people would leave me aged 13 with their hyperactice, smarties filled 4 year olds for the night. They'd sing Barney songs at me, complete torture. One had an angry rottweiler locked in the garage and failed to tell me, scared the crap out of me when I heard it trying to break the door in and growling.
( moogy boobles, Sat 12 May 2007, 19:05, Reply)

Carpets
Growing up in Kidderminster, Carpets (yawn) feature heavily. (That and Postage stamps cos of Rowland Hill). I had 1 weeks WE at a carpet factory. At the time I had never (NEVAR!) worked so hard in my life. Hats of to the people who do this work. But what got me was somethinig not work related. I was a shy youth of about 14, Id sit in the canteen and mind my own business. Most of the employees in my dept were late teens/early 20's. One morning one of them walks in singing "Get down on it...get down on it" and proceeds to walk up to his mate and breath on him. "Oh you did it then" his mate replies. Yup the dirty fucker had gone down on his missus for the first time AND HADNT BRUSHED HIS TEETH TO PROVE IT.
Still got £5 out of it (supposed to be unpaid) and bought "Scorpions" album "Animal Magnetism". Which is shit.

My other WE was a week in a primary school which was fun if uneventful.
(kitescreech still here, Sat 12 May 2007, 18:56, Reply)

Bad move potential employer
My first work experience was at the local print shop around the corner from where I lived with my parents. I spent a whole day trying to shmooz my way into a apprentice job vacancy they were advertising. I helped out in nearly every dept, even packing my football teams match programmes into boxes. I thought I had been a major success, till I got a call saying they had given the job to another guy from the village as I didn't spend enough time with the printers on the shop floor. I was gutted but less than 2 months later I found out the guy they set on, robbed the company safe of £2000 and stole the delivery van go camping in.

Unlucky! For them. hehe.
(mingmong36, Sat 12 May 2007, 18:15, Reply)

Never work for your parents...
I was 15 and impressionable. When asked to go and pick where to go for work experience i thought it would be glamourous to go and work in London with my dad's rather small accountancy practice. So 3 weeks of work ahead of me i thought i'd be doing general secretarial work. Oh how i was wrong.

I was put at the desk of the son of my dad's boss. Within an hour of being there i was entrusted with the secret that the said son smoked and had got his girlfriend pregnant while sleeping with his dad's PA as well.

The only work they could give me was to put together a database of all clients. Being the computer wizz i was, i completed in in the first day and then spent the remaining 2 and a bit weeks playing on the internet and just going out shopping.

On a rare time i was in the office the son came in and spent the entire day trying to stare down my top, even going as far as giving me his number at the end of the day and trying to get me to sleep with him.

He made the mistake of inviting me to the office summer party where i got rather drunk and just blurted out all his secrets to the entire company. Safe to say my dad doesn't work there anymore, the son has married his girlfriend and the PA is still his bit on the side...
(herpesthedog i can read your thoughts, Sat 12 May 2007, 17:59, Reply)

'Franking'
I've worked since I was 14 years old getting paid out of petty cash before I had my NI number etc... Belter, I was loaded as a kid. So work experience through school and college was lost on me. I thought I was special and shouldn't have had to do it. I still think this is true now to this day.

I took a Business Studies course at A-level and the powers that be wrongly assumed that we all needed to go out and experience the big world of work. My protests about having worked at nights and weekends for the previous four years fell on deaf ears though... Pricks.

I was placed in the administration department of a racecourse which holds a race meeting once a year...

...where they stood me at a franking machine with AT LEAST 8000 A4 envelopes to 'do' to send out to all their corporate clients who maybe wanted to rent out an executive box (I don't know what the verb is 'to frank'. 'Franking' is it?)

Anyway, after twenty minutes of this (literally the most mind-numbing job I've ever done in my life...), I argued I had "experienced" franking now and can I do something else? No chance, this was real life work and this needed to be done. "Bollocks" I cried to the fat blonde secretary who was sitting on her fat arse getting away with watching me do it. It was her job to do it. I was the slave from the local college she was getting to do her job for her for free...

So I walked out and never went back again.

Though only after three hours of standing at the franking machine trying to pluck up the courage up to actually stand up to them and walk out though. Not really as rock'n'roll as I'd like this story to end, now I've typed it out...

Anyway, there's three hours I'll never get back (a bit like the three minutes you'll never get back after reading this) but I've got a hell of a bicep on my right arm due to all the practice I got in 'franking' when I was 18.

My first post, so be as insulting as you'd like.
(jaymierobber, Sat 12 May 2007, 16:55, Reply)

Another co-op story.
At that particular plant there was a labor union, and they had gotten far too powerful for the good of the plant by that time. As I was working as an engineer, more or less, I was not in the union- and if I did something like use a wrench to tighten a bolt, I was taking work away from union members and would get written up.

One day I needed a small metal plate made, four inches square with a 1/8" lip on two sides to keep it in place on the piece of testing equipment. So I went over to the machine shop and requested this- but the shop foreman wasn't going to ask one of his men to stop what he was doing on behalf of a goddam co-op student (he was a redneck with a deep resentment of college educated people), so he told me it would be at least three days before he could get to it.

Well, I knew where the scrap steel was, and knew how to use a bending jig. So I went over there and cut a square of metal, bent one flange and was about to bend another when the union steward for the shop came up behind me and screamed, "What are you doing?"

"Hang on a sec," I cheerily replied, and finished the bend and took the finished piece out of the bending jig.

"Have you been trained to use that piece of equipment?" he roared at me.

"Of course, back in seventh grade metal shop." I said with a disarming smile. "It's not difficult."

I got chewed out for about five minutes before he let me go. It wasn't until after I left that it occurred to him that I had basically hinted that the precious work that a union worker should have been doing for me was something that could be done by any twelve year old.

I got written up and had to answer to my boss, my boss's boss, his boss, and all the way up to the plant manager. By the time I had reached her (the plant manager was a woman about five years older than me), I had gotten quite tired of explaining it, so I may have been a little sarcastic when I reported to her. Fortunately she was equally tired of this sort of childish tattling on the part of the union, so she found my story rather amusing.

Especially when I said that if they spent half the energy doing their work that they spent bitching about people like me who were actually trying to accomplish something, the plant would be running at peak efficiency...
( The Resident Loon Not a demographic. Do not measure., Sat 12 May 2007, 16:55, Reply)

did my work experience with the Scottish Socialist Party.

they said I had to stay for the whole day, but I split.
(apeloverage committed the vile act of onanism on, Sat 12 May 2007, 16:48, Reply)

I was a co-op student in university.
(Bear in mind here that I went back to university in my late 30s, so I was pushing 40 by this time.)

I worked for a major corporation at their plant where they blended polymers and made carpet yarn. (The corporation is internationally known for making a wide variety of products, in particular thermostats. You probably have one in your home- the company name begins with H and is in bright red letters, and they are not as sweet sounding as their name.)

I worked in one of the testing labs where they took molded samples and tested them for strength, flammability and all that shit. As a co-op student I was the guy who got to do all the really odd tasks that no one else wanted, of course- and the women in the lab especially enjoyed doing this to a man in his thirties. Especially as they were about twenty years older than me, and were all divorced. (I suspect that I featured in more than one old lady's wet dream. *shudder*)

As I'm not a small man, if there was something that required some physical strength, they usually called on me to do things like open particularly stubborn bottles of hydrochloric acid and the like. We had the usual latex gloves to wear when handling chemicals, of course.

One afternoon one of them asked me to open a chemical jug for her, so I pulled on the gloves- and had a really gross flash through my mind of having a prostate exam. Dot saw my expression change to disgust followed by amusement. "What's wrong?"

I leered at her and suggestively wriggled my fingers and barked, "Bend ovah!"

She was still a bit red when I put the opened bottle on the counter and peeled off the gloves.
( The Resident Loon Not a demographic. Do not measure., Sat 12 May 2007, 16:37, Reply)

More amusement park stories!
Another ride that I used to operate was calle the Roundup.



The way the thing works is that it spins just fast enough to keep you pressed against the outer walls of that cage, then tilts upward to about a 60 degree angle. The controls are on one of the loading ramps, so you have to stand there the whole time. (In the picture, there's a large pink balloon in about that spot.) The thing rotated clockwise just over your head as you ran it.

So one day as I went by I noticed that the Roundup was sitting idle. Just as I was wondering what was going on, Joyce came around the corner of a building, dripping water from head to foot and looking like she had been crying. "What happened?"

"A kid puked just as he was going over the motor."

Look again at the picture. The motor is right at the bottom. Now picture the trajectory if you vomited about there...

After I stopped giggling I volunteered to switch with her and take over. She didn't know whether to twat me or thank me, but ultimately swapped with me.

And no, no one ever puked directly on me. I think I was the only one to escape that fate.
( The Resident Loon Not a demographic. Do not measure., Sat 12 May 2007, 16:23, Reply)

First real job!
Being American, I didn't have some formal Work Experience program to give me stories to tell. But on my summer vacations from age 16 until college I worked in an amusement park as a ride operator.

Much of the time it wasn't bad, really, but it could get tedious when the bratty kids would escape their parents and be rude little shits to everyone. But what they didn't realize was that ride operators have their ways of exacting revenge.

Ever been on the Tilt-A-Whirl?



Next time you ride the thing, pay attention to the operator. It's controlled by one lever which functions as a clutch when pushed one way (to engage it) and a brake when pushed the other way. It didn't take me long to figure out how to manipulate that lever to make one car in particular spin very hard, the entire time.

So there were a lot of very bratty kids who suddenly found themselves with severe motion sickness, and were much less obnoxious when they were heaving up the candy and junk food they had been gorging on... in fact, at that point I found them to be thoroughly entertaining.
( The Resident Loon Not a demographic. Do not measure., Sat 12 May 2007, 16:04, Reply)

School
Work experience in a Primary School... just 2 words really ..."Big Mistake". I went there thinking 'cute' little children and what i got was lots of 3ft stuck up, big mouthed, horrible critters. And people wonder why I dont want kids!? Well not if you have to put up with at least 11 years of that..no no 2 weeks was well over enuf for me.
(socksandshoes, Sat 12 May 2007, 15:34, Reply)

A few...
My first was work experience in a library. Quite boring apart from the Christmas tree which kept falling on the customers. This happened about five times! Great. Also had to grit the path every day cos the old people kept slipping on the path.

Also 'Gardening', which involved me being driven to nameless motorway services and being dumped with a lawnmower for five hours. One time the van drove off and left me with no fuel, so I had to sit in the f'ing rain for five hours and didn't even manage to mow anything. That was crap.

Printers and graphic design. Involved me sitting down and watch two blokes design stuff in silence for hours on end. This was very boring, although they always bought me lots of dinner.

Yep boring...
(mr-lizard Hell's teeth man!, Sat 12 May 2007, 15:21, Reply)

I had two weeks when I was 16.
(The girl sat next to me is reading QOTW too. Hello there.)

The first week I spent at my local paper (typical headline: Cat rescued from tall tree), typing up all the crappy little side articles no one wanted to do, making tea and pretending to be interested in how a paper is assembled. Also, playing Solitaire and checking my emails.

Second week I went to a law firm in Leicester. This mainly involved sending bills to people "we saved your arse, you owe us lots of money" and being sworn to secrecy about who these letters were for. Sadly I didn't know anyone. Oh, and filing. They looked like they'd saved up all the paperwork for work experience fortnight and there were three trolleyloads of it, all in those yellow folders. It took a fucking age.

Oh, and during that week I was eating my lunch at a desk and looked up to find what I would have assumed was Brian Blessed looking at me.

BB: ARE YOU MARRIED?
Me: Uh, no. I'm 16.
BB: I AM LOOKING FOR A WIFE!
Me: That's... nice.
BB: ARE YOU SURE?
Me: Yes. Thank you.
Other lawyer guy: Ah, I see you've met the office sex beast.
Me : (the face Stan makes sometimes in South Park that looks like ><)

Sadly, he was not Teh Blessed, just someone who really, really looked like him, and the only things I really learned were that I didn't want to be a journalist or a lawyer.
( Maladicta, Sat 12 May 2007, 14:19, Reply)

Yay for Abbot Labs!
My work experience was at a large pharmaceutical manufacturing lab. What makes it memorable is the fact that the department didn't know I was coming to do work experience until the lady from Personnel brought me to them on my first day.

I was given a free card for the drinks machine and spent the week being fobbed off onto whoever the manager happened to meet first. Usually they just found me a paper or magazine to read and somewhere to sit while they got on with the actual work.

The only day I got to do anything was when there was a problem with one of the reactors and the whole process had to be restarted. My job was pressing a button to turn off the alarms that would sound every few minutes.

I can honestly say that it was the most tedious week I've ever spent. When you find yourself reading the Daily Sport cover to cover is when you know something has gone very wrong.
(Uncle Comrade, Sat 12 May 2007, 11:49, Reply)

Not all bad
Working in a factory on a saturday morning was always gonna be a tedious job. shift this chair there, move that cloth into that room, kiss everyones arse. i was getting geared up for the rest of my life in employment.
Me and a mate were busy moving some chair frames around, when we came across some cheeky wags grot mag. as a young and impressionable lad of 15, so i gawped at the (literal) "spread" inside. who needs subtlety when "2 holes for one ho" is on offer. still, i did the honest thing and left the mag there, believeing it to be in safe hands. i was bck the next week, but it was gone.

still, did teach me one thing.

The honest rewards of a hard days work.
(Lordfudgington is hiding the expense report filed on, Sat 12 May 2007, 11:38, Reply)

Websense
My first job was for Websense, and the guilt of working for a company that RUINED EVERYONE'S LIFE prompted me to kill myself, quite rightfully, and I'd encourage my former colleagues to do the same.
( browser still relating boring anecdotes into a void on, Sat 12 May 2007, 9:04, Reply)

my first job was great.
i did experience (and took up a job there later as well) at a national archive library. there was so much (yawn) to do. i was not allowed to touch documents and stuff so i just walked around...great job really, except i learnt nothing at all. oh, except that some lawyers and politicians are thick arseholes with halitosis...
(monporn, Sat 12 May 2007, 8:03, Reply)

at a law firm
i got to do some great stuff, like issuing subpoenas to people, filing documents at the high court, and running (literally) mail between the law firms offices in the city (don't they have couriers for that sort of thing, was a question that was often ignored). Shitty job, so get your work experience guy with absolutely no qualifications to do it!
( Frumbert has no sig, Sat 12 May 2007, 5:47, Reply)

Milk, effing loads of it!
Job placement in Glasgow between school and college was described as work experience, in reality it was to check hundreds of thousands of cartons of long life milk for microbial infection. Seems that one of the three layers of coating on the cartons had been wrongly manufactured which allowed “beasties and bugs” (that was the technical description given to me) to infect the milk and the result was called a “blower” (another technical term) due to the bacterial activity within the milk and the produced gas they made.

Three weeks, hundreds of pallets of milk and a good eye for “blowers” and I was promoted. I got to drive the forklift.

Five minutes into my new position, sticks forklift into reverse, hits the shelving behind, knocks one of the support beams out……57,600 pints of UHT Longlife milk hit the deck, exploding like Peter North on some birds face!

Everyone was completely covered in the shit, and being summer (read the only hot day of the year in Scotland), everyone started to stink within about an hour. This of course did not affect me as I was ejected from the premises within 5 minutes of the incident. After 30 years I still refuse to drink longlife milk.
( fagilliD Fuck I'm good!, Sat 12 May 2007, 5:30, Reply)

I hated my work experience.

I liked the work, but I didn't like being called a cunt, a wanker and a loser with no friends, apparently on the twin grounds that I did role-playing and they didn't like my sense of humour / the fact that my jokes were better received than theirs.

Hang on, that wasn't work experience, that was here.
(apeloverage committed the vile act of onanism on, Sat 12 May 2007, 4:44, Reply)

Dogs Bollocks of work experience
A couple of years ago my sister was still at Uni in England. She starts thinking about the forthcoming summer and how she's going to earn some cash.

Now Mrs Spankengine is a bright spark and suggests she hooks my sister up with a work placement in her company.

Nice idea from the sister in law.

Actually it's an outrageously nice idea when your sister in law works at a famous advertising agency in New York, and lines up a job working for the summer as an assistant to the CEO, for some pretty decent pay. They even helped with the visa.

Post graduation and sister walks into a job at a similar agency in London. For some reason 'internship [for that's what the Americans call them] at prestigious NY advertising agency' looks a bit better on the CV than 'waiter in TGI Fridays'.

Wish I'd had a useful sister in law back in my day.
(Thomas_The_Spankengine, Sat 12 May 2007, 4:17, Reply)

6 years later
On a different note my girlfriend went on a work experience at Maccy D's. Very glamorous and being a veggie she loved it (!) This was 6 years ago.

Few weeks ago, needing food rather quickly, popped in for a burger and she was able to recognise 5 people working behind the tills (2 of whom where Assistant Managers so proof the system works).
(i_am_man, Sat 12 May 2007, 2:21, Reply)

Bahahaha!
I worked at my dad's workplace last holidays (November 19 - December 22). It was awesome. I got to go on the train every day, there was this cafe across the road that sold great food and the work itself was pretty cool. The place of work? The New Zealand Blood Service in Epsom, Auckland. (More like the vampire service, hurr).
(GLC, Sat 12 May 2007, 2:12, Reply)

If at first you don't succeed . . .
Job 1 - Data entry for a company sold toy cars through mail order.
They wanted me to move customer data from one computer system to different computer system. They were imagining that printing the data and keying it back in was the way forward, and were looking to use me for couple of weeks. I wrote a script that did the job in 10 mins. Was promptly fired.
Job 2 - Newspaper cashier.
First day was on new years day and after celebrating birthday the night before (I'm a new years eve baby) was turned away as I stunk of alcohol and "had a bad attitude".
Job 3 - Plant Hire Site.
They told me most people quit on the first day. First day consisted of jet washing port-a-loos that had just come back from a gay music festival. Quit after first day.
Job 4 - Deli Sandwich Maker.
Had a 40 year age gap on the rest of the staff. Head sandwich maker shouted at me because I wasn't making sandwiches fast enough. I said I prefered to make good sandwiches rather than rushed ones. Asked not to come back.

At which point decided that going to uni was a good move.
(i_am_man, Sat 12 May 2007, 1:58, Reply)

Hotel
This is rather long sorry, but its a theraputic process writing this down. This is all true, no matter how made up it sounds. Believe me, I was a mess by the end.

First real job I had was working as a waiter/general dogsbody in a small hotel in Portugal. I'd basically got the job on the strength of my speaking Portuguese (I'd just spent 6 months living in Rio de Janeiro - spent the millenium there woo! - working at a school helping kids learn English), and the fact I was willing to be lowly paid as it would get me out of the UK before I went to University the following September.

Anyway, I arrived at the hotel, very nice location, the owners seemed a bit odd, but the rest of the staff (2 Australians and an English guy) seemed nice enough. I move into my room, and start work the next day.

The hotel had a sunken veranda out the back, behind the kitchen, that was covered by a corrugated iron roof. First day I'm working in the kitchen Liz* the Aussie cook, asks me to go and get some more butter from the freezer, as there was almost none left. She also warned me to be careful of the owl.

OK, I think, theres an owl that lives near the freezer and I have to be careful. I go to the chest high freezer, open it, see the butter underneath a shapeless mass of plastic bags. Easy, I think, picking up the plastic bags.

They felt odd. I unwrapped them to find a dead barn owl. In the freezer. I sincerely, wholeheartedly, promise you I'm not making this up. The owner was a big bird fan and had found the owl dead by the side of the road and wanted to get it stuffed... only he hadn't got the time so decided to put it on ice, as it were.

Things went downhill from there.

One week we had a party of 7 German couples on marriage guidance stay. Firstly, they would have massive screaming arguments in German at all times, secondly they rutted like rabbits whenever they got the chance (ever tried clearing away plates from the 'romantic' veranda when two Germans are humping on the table?), thirdly, being German, they came in to dinner and to the bar in ridiculously small speedos - one guy of about 60 had a leopard print pair.

Shortly after this the owner decided staff quarters would be knocked into one large room so he could fit a pinball machine in. We spent a week knocking walls down, and then discovered that there was actually no where for us to now sleep. The two aussies slept in the back of the car for about a month, before climbing on the roof and knocking a hole into the hotels attic so they could sleep. The new canadian gardener built a shack next to the chicken pen, and I was given a scythe, a candle and a tent, and taken to a small patch of ground 1km from the hotel, where I could "pitch [my] tent without bothering the guests." I had to scythe down the knee high scrub, and then level the ground out. I slept there for 4 months. I took a thermometer in there once - it got to 55C during the day.

What else? Oh the other English guy got the sack whilst we were building a boathouse - he tried to behead the owner with a spade.

We were hired out to clean a cowshed - still in out waitering whites. 8 hours late my trousers were ruined and we all stank of cowshit for the next week.

I painted their house, walked and de-flea'd their dogs, and babysat their children, as well as fixing the generator (I was, at the time, 19, and a prospective history student) and their tv, and on one memorable occasion, covering for them to the Portuguese police.

The owner would also tell me, in lurid details and at random times, all about his sex life. He and his wife did far too many drugs and were masters at fucking with your head. She became convinced that I was trying to kill her and told the other members of staff this. For one whole week she either avoided me, or carried a stick, or on one memorable occasion an axe, to, as she put it, "fight Zapiola off."

By the end of it all, we were working 18 hour days, although the longest I worked was 6am to 9pm straight, then 9.30pm to 4am straight, then back up at 6am to serve breakfast to a pair of departing Americans.

The single worst moment was burying one of their dogs. It fell in the lake and drowned, and we were told to bury it. The ground was rock hard and even with a pick axe it took ages to dig a hole. When we tried to put the dog in it had gone into rigor mortis and we couldn't fit it in the hole. I had to hold it still whilst the other guy broke its legs with a spade so that we could squash it into its grave. The sound of wet dog leg snapping, and then twisting, will probably haunt me forever.

I realised, along with the Aussies, that I should leave, when my daily diet consisted of marijuana and whisky for breakfast, tequila at 10am, whisky at noon with some tuna (we were allowed to eat tuna and chickpeas, and whatever was left over from the guests meals - but we were forbidden on pain of death from using salt, pepper, or balsamic vinegar on the grounds they were expensive), then continued the drinking and smoking all through the day.

We all quit on the same day, told the owners to go fuck themselves, and drove from Portugal to the UK, stopping off in northern Spain for a break.

Almost 6 months I was there. Can you guess how much I was paid a day?

£3... or 23p an hour on the longer days.

Ah... to be young, naive, and high most of the time again.
(Zapiola zip-zap-zop, Sat 12 May 2007, 1:50, Reply)

child abuse!
My own experience of school-ordered work experience was being sequestered with a classmate to a primary school, where we had tuck shop duties. They didnt tell us what our duties entailed so when we weren't selling subsidised sweeties and crisps, we were cleaning up the stock. Literally. If I ever see another package of 2 oatmeal cookies I'll puke. I think we filed stuff for a bit, except we mostly took it in turns to smoke too much in the staffroom. And to smoke the fun stuff behind the outside stores.

In the last few days they decided I was the trustworthy one so I got to supervise classes while the teachers left for sanity breaks or boozy lunches, or whatever reason it is they have to leave the class for in the middle of the day. I was hip and cool and funky and chatty until one of the kids got mouthy, a few others followed suit, and I got one mouthy kid point blank in the middle of the forehead with the blackboard duster and walked up and down one row of mouthy kids slapping them all on the forehead then the back of the head with a ruler. The real shocker is that they loved it. I was cooler than ever, then.

The school gave us £20 each at the end of it. Presents from kids and staff too. Suckers!

And I was so hip and cool (what with being a 16 yr old white chick with big boobs and multicoloured dreds with bells wound in) that they wouldn't report me. Certainly not back in them days.


Our work experience guy is a champ. Not in the great worker sense, more in that he'll take 3 months off and then come in completely fucked off his face and demand pay for the months that he didn't do, for a job he does for free. Because he's that fucked up, he's forgotten. He amuses us all greatly which is why when social services come in, we pretend he still does his obligatory day a week, and more even, because he's just that keen! Really, we just like to see him cowering in front of his social services examiner trying to make like he knows what we do every day and feeding him all the wrong lines. I have no idea how he manages to stay on this course. I think social services would rather have a forgetful stoner work for them than a paedophile, just to have a guy employable in childcare.
(posthumous mince is tiptoeing through the tulips, Sat 12 May 2007, 1:47, Reply)