Friday, May 21, 2004

Buzzzzzz

From "Readers' Top Tips" column, Woman's Own, January 1964:

"Girls - a smarties tube filled with wasps makes for a cheap, effective vibrator. Do ensure, however, that the cap is securely fixed on with tape."

I once worked with a young lady who was the daughter of a vicar. Let's call her Liz, because that's her name. She was brought up in the traditional way - church on a Sunday, rather posh girls' school, no pubs, no boozing and definately no hanging around with boys. She thought the word "bloody" was about as foul as you can get, and told me so in her firmest Christian tones. She daren't look down in case she noticed she had genitals.

We had to go through two years of her painful courtship of "My Dave" from engagement, the never-ending "I'm getting married, you know" bit to the hell of the wedding itself. Then they moved in together, and they got a top of the range washing machine as a wedding pressent. How sweet. I bet he was in for a surprise.

Liz, you see, was addicted to laundry. She loved doing the washing. She always, always wore freshly laundered clothing, and went as far as taking in washing from family, friends and little old ladies living down the road. Bless. A wonderful, caring attitude you can only come to expect from someone brought up to care by thoughful, right-thinking parents. So you'd think.

Plied with half a shandy, we got the truth out of her. She had a job in an American summer camp. One afternoon, whilst spin-drying the sheets, she leaned foreward and accidentally nudged the washing machine with her ...um... front bottom. It set off fireworks that she never knew existed, and spent all of July and most of August sitting on Hotpoint's finest with a dreamy smile on her face.

On her return to Britain, she accidentally found she could get the same buzz from a Honeywell DPS-8 disc drive, which resembled washing machines in every way except they contained about ten kilos of rapidly rotating ceramics. The old style industrial-sized dot-matrix printers weren't half bad either, and a sixth-form work experience trip to a rather dull computer room ended up as a job in the dark arts of IT.

Still, the job interview must have been interesting: "So Liz, what draws a young lady such as you to the world of computing?"

"It's the technology..." She left to pursue a career in reproducing the effects of earthquakes in laboratory conditions.

It's always the quiet ones...

The Scaryduck Archive

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