Musings on a sausage factory regulation

Recently, for a whole variety of reasons, I’ve been asked some quite bizarre questions. No, not the police wanting to know if I’ll ever follow through with my threat of shooting Myleene Klass out of a cannon (seriously though, that woman has taken the simple task of reading an autocue to new lows), the questions have been official ones.

Yes, official questions that seem perfectly sensible when written, but when put into my head sound ridiculous.

Recently we moved house and amongst the questions on the form for my mortgage protection policy, about my health one asked: ‘Have you seen any suspicious moles recently?” Of course it meant skin irritations, but all I could think of was some sort of twisted Tim Burton version of Wind in the Willows. A mole with an eyepatch carrying a sword, something like that.

Another question, I swear, asked ‘Have you ever had a terminal disease and then recovered?’. Erm. It wouldn’t have been terminal if I recovered would it?

Sometimes the questions just set my mischievous nature off.

A while back I was helping my missus fill in a job application (for her current job, before you ask) and I offered to complete the final HR questions at the end, the ones like ‘ Are you qualified to work in the UK’ etc. Thankfully she wanted one more proof before pressing send and spotted that on the question “Do you have any criminal convictions?” I wrote “I DONE A MURDER.” She did get the job incidentally.

Today though, I had my favourite question I visited a sausage factory (there’s a line I never thought I would type) and before I could get in the door I had to fill in a brief questionnaire. Question one, was it my name? Nope? Who I was visiting? Nope. The first question was ‘Have you had a bowel related illness, such as dysentery, in the last 2 weeks?”. Health and Safety, of course, but still a hell of an opening gambit. Try that as an openter the next time you’re on a blind date.

I was hoping, later in the questionnaire, there would be a note saying ‘Please do not touch the bacon slicer…because she doesn’t like it’. Sadly there wasn’t, as this was real life and not a Tom O’Connor joke from 1978. Shame.