Methadon't

My Dear Princess and Dear Fellows,

I am writing this on Saturday because I got distracted yesterday evening. This is a mistake because I am fecked if I can remember what on earth happened yesterday.

I'm sure I had a Friday. I think work things happened.

But in lieu of a story, here's something that Caro recounted to me a few days ago, that I have been saving up.

She was talking about a little employment hiatus she had between jobs a few years ago. Actually, about 15 years ago now I think about it. She took a temp job up at Haymarket, still working for the NHS. She was basically the admin for a bunch of researchers looking into health issues in Edinburgh.

"They were FUNNY little people," she told me. "They were all these research types, with science hair," she explained. "I felt like Snow White with the seven dwarves," she went on.

I imagined lots of nerdy little researchers with unfortunate glasses and Red Dwarf t-shirts.

"There was one man who was keeping a banana as a project," she told me. "I asked him if he wanted me to put it in the bin, but he asked me not to touch it."

Apparently one of the projects the team was working on was the effects of smoke in enclosed places. You have to remember that this was in 2004(ish) so a couple of years before Scotland banned smoking in pubs.

In order to perform this research, the team would take one of their vans and drive it over to Glasgow. They would drive to areas where you could find good, smoky pubs. You know the kind. The sort of auld gadgy pubs where you could find Bokhara smoking a rollie, or Auslaender holding a cigarette next to his ear.

"They had these things that could aborb the smoke in the air," Caro said. "They were fairly unobtrusive. They looked a bit like tampons. These guys would sit in the pub and have an orange juice and then take their tampons straight back to the van so they could immediately put them into special plastic sample bottles before they got contaminated with non-pub air."

I'm not sure how unobtrusive a bunch of blokes sitting around a tampon actually is, but you get the idea. It was Caro's job, she told me, to correctly file the tampons when they went to the lab.

The plan worked fine, she told me, except for the van itself. She was present for a meeting about the project where the research nerds talked about the process. The vans were supplied by the NHS you see, and they were the same vans that drove to the more "Trainspotting" areas of Glasgow to supply junkies with methadone. 

Consequently, when the researchers were in the van waiting for the samples to come back out of the pub, they found they were being mobbed by junkies, banging on the side, trying to get an extra dose.

"It was like 'Dawn of the Dead'," said one of the nerds. He claimed that they would drive away being chased by gangs of junkies down the street. Anyway, the outcome of that meeting was that they changed vans and the research went on uninterrupted.

Oh! And wait! That story has reminded me of something Lemon told me yesterday! She said that she worked in a petrol station for a while with a big stoner. The pair of them were put on special training on how to deal with armed robbers. 

Essentially, that meant a bit of role-playing, where two loud and rough men came into the shop and THREATENED them! "Give us all the EFFING MONEY!!!" they cried while brandishing fake weapons.

"You're just supposed to give them everything and not panic," said Lemon.

The pair of them passed the training and neither seemed alarmed, even when they were being screamed at by the two burly men in masks. 

But two days later, the stoner guy freaked out.

"EFF! EFF!" he cried out.

"What is it?" asked Lemon.

"Those two men! They came in here! And they came IN here! And they were like... robbing us..." said the stoner guy.

"I couldn't believe it took two bloody days for it to register with him," said Lemon. 

She went on to tell another robbery story. This one concerns her auntie who used to work in the post office. She was apparently quite a fearsome lady. "We daren't go in there to ask her for our money," explained Lemon. "Because if she disapproved she wouldn't let us have it."

Apparently it went like this:

LEMON: Hi Auntie, can I have twenty dollars out of my savings please?
AUNTIE: (Suspiciously) What for?
LEMON: Some lippy and a CD?
AUNTIE: No. NEXT!

When the post office was robbed, the Auntie was similarly unfazed.

MAN: I've got a KNIFE! Give me all the money!
AUNTIE: Get a job. NEXT!

Lemon told me the man apologised and shuffled off, embarrassed.

Good. That feels better. Things other than work happened yesterday. I am grateful to blip for reminding me of this.

S.