A little yucky funny from my truck driving days
(If of a delicate disposition you might want a bucket nearby)
One of my regular jobs was to deliver cooked feather powder to a processing factory just outside Budapest in Hungary.
Cooked feather powder looks like brown talcum powder. It consists of feathers from slaughtered birds (chickens, geese, ducks etc) that have been processed for the human food chain.
So here was I driving my usual route with 16 x 2 ton bags of cooked feather powder on the trailer. When reaching the border into Hungary I would normally be waved though as usual but on this particular day I was asked if I would mind being checked by a new trainee....job experience etc.
"Not a problem" I said.
Parked up the truck, got out and gave my paperwork to the trainee and stood chatting to his boss. The trainee was fresh out of school, around 17 years old. He was climbing around the truck doing a really thorough job of checking everything.
He then asked in Hungarian for permission to open the trailer, that was duly given, and off he clambered around the bags (they are open to the elements, the trailer was a curtainside).
He then read the paperwork, peered quizically into the first bag, checked the paperwork again, scratched his head.....sucked a finger, plunged it into the powder and tasted it. Made some extreme facial expressions. Moved to the next bag, repeated to dip his finger into the powder.
By about halfway through doing this to the bags, I was feeling definitely queasy.
"Don't you think you should let him know what he is sucking off his finger?" I said to his boss
"No...no...he has to learn his job correctly, this is a good exercise for him on how not to do it" said his boss
Eventually and after sticking his finger in every bag, the lad climbed down off the trailer and spoke in Hungarian to his boss. I sort of got the gist of what the boss told him cos the lad suddenly lost all colour in his face, thrust the paperwork at me and ran like a scalded rabbit to the loo.
I never did see that lad working the border ever again.
Not sure why......
(Those of you with horses and ponies, you might want to know that "pony nuts" are made from cooked feather powder bound together by mixed blood from slaughterhouses.....so please do not let your kids learn the trick of holding a pony nut in their mouth to transfer to their horse or pony cos now you know where they come from and whats in them)