Had a mate round today and we were laughing about my phone escapade (see last blog entry) and it got me thinking about about all the stupid situations I`ve found myself doing - I seem to live a life puncuated by random acts of stupidity, in my youth most revolved around jobs.

I once worked in the Co-Op Department store in Dunfermline (it`s been knocked down a few years now), I was on the top floor in the pet deptartment. One of the Saturday girls had a bit of an accient sexing the hamsters and put a male in with the females, we ended up with about 30 hamsters. We were running short on cages so had to put some in an old cage, this was fine until we came in one morning to find that during the night the inmates of the old cage had managed a mass prison break. We now had 10 missing hamsters somewhere in a very crowded pet shop, we had to empty out every single bin of rabbit and dog food (you could by it by the pound in the good old days) and if we found one we had put on the gloves (I hate hamsters to this day - the savage little finger chomping wee buggers!!) and try and grab them. We managed to find a few this way, some we found floating in the goldfish tank (just picture me standing in a customers way, trying to block the crime scene  while little Bobby tried to pick which fish he wanted  " Can I have the brown one mummy??"). We managed to get them all accounted for apart from one, which I spotted a month or so later on the floor of the store room - I promptly shoved a bucket over it and sat on the bucket for good measure - see lightening reflexes I tell ya!!

There was also the time we had a fire in the building and we had to evacuate all the animals , we got them all into cages (we`d used the cages that were on the shelves for sale) but only after we realised that as fast as we were putting the zebra finches into one cage , they were magically disappearing - until we realised that the cages was missing the little seed boxes and the birds were merrily being put in through the cage door just to hop out the other side.

 I left the the Co-Op and went to work at the Marshalls Chunky Chicken factory near Edinburgh, whilst nothing remarkable happened in the 3 days I lasted there stuffing boneless chickens for M&S, I did manage to look like a complete plank waiting for the company bus in my blue welly boots and hair net.

Rather than be unemployed I got a job at a local school as a cleaner and this is where I think I can honestly say I reached the pinnacle in my career as a plank.

On one occasion I was happily working away in my classrooms (I worked on my own on the top floor) I was amazing myself at how much work I was getting through, until I went onto the landing and looked at the wall clock. This is the point I realised my watch had stopped and I should have finished work 15 minutes ago, "No worries "says I, the janitor will still be around as I quickly put my mop away and walked down into the entrance hall. Unfortunately for me the janitor had cleared off too and as I walked into the entrance hall I set the burglar alarms off, the door of course was locked. I was let out by the janitor 15 minutes later just as  the police arrived, needless to say the boys in blue had a good laugh at my expense.

At the same school the day we broke up for Easter hols, I thought the Janitor would pick up the bin bags like he usually did. Unfortunately as I got down to the hall the janitor informed me that I should have brought them down earlier and it was too late for him to get them, I went upstairs and put the full black bin bags into the cleaners cupboard and went off on my Easter break. On returning two weeks later I went into the cupboard as usual at the start of my shift and picked up the bin bags - only to find the floor underneath them moving with maggots, I don`t just mean one or two , I mean a seething mass of maggots. In my freaked out panicked state I chucked some bleach on them and whacked my mop around , which was fine as they seemed to disappear, so no problems there. Until that is a few weeks later and I went in to work only to be greeted by the janitor asking if I`d noticed anything unusual in the cupboard. I put on my best puzzled expression and denied knowledge of anything unusual, he then went on to explain that he was only asking because a teacher had gone into the cleaners cupboard only to be met with a cloud of bluebottles!!

I left the job a few weeks later but only after I`d managed to kill the escaped classroom pet hamster between a book cupboard and a hot water pipe!!

Oh yes those were the days!!