h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

As a student I didn't seem to get cushy jobs where you got to chat to pretty girls and get a tan. (See incinerator operator)

My other worst job (I think I declare them equal worst) was Back Corridor Porter in a hospital.

When you went into hospital for an operation the theatres were set between two corridors. The front corridor was known as the clean or front corridor while the other was known as the back or dirty corridor.

Patients never enter the back corridor - or at least only parts of them enter the back corridor. This is another job with a fair bit of waiting around. There is nothing to do while the operation is going on (and things have probably changed a lot since I did it as it was about 30 years ago!). When the operation finishes, though, things get busy. The trolleys of used instruments and waste are pushed out through the back doors of the theatre for the back corridor porters to start work on them. The general refuse is disposed of and the bloody instruments are counted. Generally speaking if you need things in an operating theatre they come in 5s and 10s. Forceps and other instruments were kept together with something which looked like a big safety pin. Our first job was to count them. The theatre sister would have counted them in the theatre before passing them out but we had to count as well. There were not many places in the operating theatre for these things to go other than inside the patient so we would check that if we needed 10 Kelly Frazer's there would be 10 Kelly Frazer's (a type of forceps mamed after the surgeon who invented them). If we only found 9 we were supposed to let the theatre staff know pretty sharpish.

Even the gauzes were counted in 5's and 10s and we had to count those, the clean ones were easy as they were still in their bundles. The used ones were a bit harder but generally the theatre sister would have left them in little bundles of five for her own benefit. Each gauze had a very thin metal string running through it so that if it were left inside it would show up on an X-ray.

Under the trolley would be the nasties or sometimes in a kidney dish on top of the trolley. I remember going particularly green when a poor old lady had had her foot removed. It had gangrene. The item we received in the back corridor was a green, towel swaddled bundle with a severed bone poking out of the top.

"You'll need to unwrap that so that we can keep the towels," my colleague said. I went a bit white and didn't rush forward to carry out the task. He looked at me and could see I was not keen so he said, "Oh don't worry just put it all in a bag and we'll send it to the incinerator."

On another day I was working with a different person who was more of a practical joker. "Here you go," he said, holding out his closed fist. "For you!" I opened my hand and he placed some unspeakable offering into my palm, "It's a set of varicose veins, just what you wanted."

I put the veins into the waste bag and carried on working. I didn't want him to know that I wasn't as hardened to the job as him.