Contract of the day

**Zippy** · 13 May 2010, 23:02

Unfortunately I wasn't able to apply because I don't meet the requirements, namely:

"YOU MUST PROVIDE YOUR OWN STEEL TOE CAP BOOTS."

And at £10ph I'm not too sure if I could afford ones soon enough...[/QUOTE]

Bobtastic!

**thunderlizard** · 13 May 2010, 23:08

Been there mate.
When I was an undergrad and needed some money over the long vac, I was looking for any work I could get. Didn't meet the requirements for most of them, then saw an advert for roadsweeper. "There's one I could do!" I thought, but the advert went on to say "must have experience and own boots" and I failed on both counts.
Then I saw a job doing Excel and Access, which I had at least 4 hours experience of, and that turned out to my first of 12 years' worth of contracting.

**NickFitz** · 14 May 2010, 02:23

Some years ago a friend of mine wrote the real-time software for a system that weighed freshly-slaughtered pigs. It seems that the unfortunate swine are killed, slung up by their hind feet onto an overhead conveyor, sliced open and eviscerated, and then pass over the sensor that determines the weight of what remains, before being conveyed to the place where they will become those nicely-packaged bits you find in Sainsbury's. They do a pig every three seconds or so.

The room containing the hardware on which he was commissioning the system was just after the sensor bit. Whenever he needed to enter or leave the room he had to wait as a carcass, still steaming from within, glided past and then dart through the gap between that and the next one.

Oddly, it didn't put him off pork: he used to take advantage of the onsite employees' shop to buy large, freshly-slaughtered joints at heavily discounted prices. However it put him off bacon. He reckoned that a freshly-slaughtered pig carcass smelt of bacon, which suggests that though one assumes that the distinct aroma of bacon arises from the curing process, this may not be the case

Contract of the day