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

"Mon chou", yeah I guess we use that word because it sounds nice (it means cabbage... cauliflower is close : it's "chou-fleur")

(an old shopping list)

I posted these elsewhere, but thought I really should post them here.....

It was while I was working at the Museuim of Civilization that I discovered that I have a severe allergy to Ocelots....

For the bulk of the time I worked there I was a "Preparator" (read: "Glorified Mover"). I was involved in packing and moving the artifacts from various storage facilities. In one of the cold storage facilities were a lot of materials such as sealskin clothes and other items made from sinew and fur. There were also a number of fur coats, stored at one time by some MP or other.

There were 2 Leopardskin, a Tigerskin, and an Ocelot fur coat. As these are now illegal, they were more of less abandonned, so became part of the collection. While packing the coats, I started sneezing and wheezing, and had to leave the room. When I came back and started packing again, I started wheezing and sneezing again. Process of elimination, we tested me around each of the coats, and discovered that it was the Ocelot one that was the culprit.

Mind you, unless I become a Big Cat trainer, it is very unlikely that I will ever again encounter and Ocelot.

The cold storage facility was in the basement of what was the National Museum of Man and Nature. It is now the Museum of Nature. In order to move the artifacts out of the cold store, we had to load them into morgue storage tubs.... (new, never used for their original purpose) and down the main hallway where people went on their way to the cafeteria.

The hallway was usually filled with schoolkids who were, of course, interested in what we were up to. We made a point of answering any of their questions about the artifacts and our job, and what we were doing.

Quite a lot of what we were packing were Inuit clothing collected by the Arctic explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson somtime between th 1900s and the 1940s. Apparently, he had been forced to leave the furs at a Hudson's Bay post over a summer and they were all bug eaten and covered with fly poo.... Lovely to handle, as you can imagine.

The kids were all very interested in everything until we started showing them the Inuit clothing. At that point we would have a chorus of "It's wrong to kill animals!"

You would try and explain that, first of all, these were very old clothes and that what they were made from were all that was available to the Inuit at the time. Secondly, they ate the meat and used the bones and that it didn't make much sense to simply throw away the skin.... However, they just couldn't get past the current prohibition against fur. Even when you told them that there was a difference between someone hunting to survive and someone killing 150 minks to make 1 coat. Nothing we said took.

Even their teachers would answer the question "Miss, it's wrong to kill animals, right?" with "Yes....". Here was an excellent opportunity for them to learn something about how people once lived and that there are different ways of lining, and the teacher only confirmed their black and white view of the world.... Ver sad, really....

I recall when I worked at the Children's Museum spending days writing tiny accession numbers on things like entire Playmobile sets, right down to tiny little tools... You would put a little bit of nailpolish on the item, let it dry and with a quill pen, write on the number in tiny, tiny characters. Then you would cover it with another bit of nail polish.

About 2 weeks later, I went in to the Museum and one of the volunteers was holding something and scraping it with her nail.... "Can you imagine" she said "someone went and wrote numbers all over these toys!" She had been scraping all the numbers off.

AH! Ain't edufimication a wunnerful thing?

Zantic

So none of those kids wore leather shoes or ate meat in the cafeteria? But good to see those kids have been properly integrated to not question authority.

I just thought i would share with everyone that I just had my work performance review. I approached it with quite a bit of trepidition as, in former job at Chapters, I got consistendly terrible reviews (as I mentioned before, I later discovered that they were marking on a bell curve).

I was pleasantly surprised to learn that I got very good comments from the various project managers I have done work for, and I am confident that my term will be renewed. I may even get a rise in pay!!!!! Yipee!

To my former employers, I say PTHHhtppppthththtpppp!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Well done!

Based on everything you've told us in this thread, I'm sure you deserve every penny. Cent. Unit of currency. Whatever.


Geggs

(genuinely meant, but also serving as a pseudo-bookmark)

Thank you... as a matter of fact, I went up to speak to the owner of the company about the renewal of my contract immediately after posting and I did, indeed, get the raise. They are also going to give me more responsibility.... eekkk!

I forgot to mention. I spent the morning in court. I had to give a victim-impact statement (not related to my job) during a sentencing.

Over the last few years I have had occassion to be in court, either as a witness, a juror, and as a defendant in a Reg. v. Me case (I won....). Every time, I have seen people I have encountered at Chapters. Every one have them have been defendants.

The first was up on a sexual assault charge. He used to bug all the female staff and once accosted me in the Rideau Centre.... I was not entirely shocked to see him in the dock.

Several weeks ago, while waiting for the current case to be heard, I saw this guy who I have seen (and reported) on the buses... ummmm getting "happy" with himself. I can only assume this was a sexual assault or lewd behaviour or something.

This morning, Lo and Behold! There is this weird little gnome-like creature who I kicked out at least 5 times for trying to view child-porn on our internet cafe..... bbbbrrrrrrrrr.....

A Dutch supermarkt was being robed for about year by its own employees. the ringleader was the manager and about 25 other employees were his helpers. all were arrested this week.

when I had a job shelf stacking at a local supermarket when at school, one of the managers was sacked for stealing from the supermarket after hours.
Caught by the security guard.
The really stuypid thing is, he was trying to steal a mattress at the time. Not exactly the sort of thing you can shove up your jumper!

Someone I know is the manager of a supermarket. The security team just completed an investigation where they found that one of the cashiers was assisting a ring to steal.

They would come thru the cash with cartloads of goods and she would only scan a few items out of the whole order. For 5 carts, she would ring up only $20 or so. When they finally charged her, they reconned that she had stolen something like $50,000. worth of goods. Apparently, she owed someone for a lot of drugs and had been coerced into helping them.

They arrested about 50 people.

I used to work for a supermarket. The manager got arrested over £60,000 embesslement. HE managed to convince the payroll computer that his girlfriend (who was off on maternity, oh and he was mirred BTW) was working 24 hours shifts, 7 days a week.

Only a random accounting check caught him, he had managed to program the computer to not print her paycheck and to hide her under a managers code (so regular payroll employees cannot see what the manager is making) despite her being a regular shelf stacker.

All in all quite clever, but ultimatly doomed.

Strange thing is, looking back I believe a lot of his bawling at people and shouting orders over the tannoy was misdirection. I knew people (shoppers) who took asprin before go shopping there beacuse of his "announcements".

Odd thing was he did some bonehead things that he blamed on other people, like ordering 3 times the normal amount of chips so they wouldn't fit in the storage freezer. He caught someone putting the ice-cream freezer (this is illegal, they're at different temperatures) in the back and shouted at him and was surprised when the guy shouted back.

BTW something else I learned there: if you're wondering, the worst smell on this earth is; it's a mixture of coffee, mint sauce and salad cream. It's worse than boiling coke.

I used to know a man who ran a management consultancy. He reckoned that it didn't matter where he went or what he was called in to investigate/correct, he'd find fraud without having to look too hard. One place he went to, he looked in an employee's desk for some stationery. The woman was responsible for payroll, and he found a stack of employee data cards for employees who didn't exist. She was drawing pay for these people every week, and it amounted to a tidy sum.

with a yellow post-it

I'm glad this thread's revived

I'm a sinner. I dog-ear the pages. But I can't use bookmarks, I tend to eat them!

Kind of related to that, my dog ate one of my bookmarks. It was lovely supple leather in an unusual mottled tan colour, and can't be replaced. I still haven't forgiven him, although it could be argued it was my fault for dropping it in the first place.