I once shared an office with the Highways Maintenance people, the School Dinners monitoring mob, Parks department, abandoned vehicle wollahs, skip licencing experts and the Cleansing blokes at a time when my borough had been subdivided into 7 mini councils. What this meant in reality was that we got 7 very expensive chief executives and lots of managers but the staff who did the actual work did more tasks than usual, but over a smaller area. So the people mentioned above numbered 3 or 4 in total.
So the man in charge of all the above 3 people looked after the general dustcarty type stuff, but also clinical waste, dead animal disposal, winter gritting and the washing of shitty clothes for ill people. The last was used to wash our building's union flag which was briefly on display until mobs appeared on a protest saying it was racist against the local Indian population. My comment from the back of the room that it had been their flag for a few hundred years were ignored.
One day I heard this bloke take a call from a distressed resident who's Alsation had died at home. They wanted to know if the council would take it away and dispose of it properly. He asked where they lived and said that he had to walk past their flat on his way home for lunch so he would drop a form in to them which they needed to fill in before he could arrange it.
So he knocks on the door and it opens. A tearful woman took the form from his hand, then before he could turn away, the man of the house appeared and plonked a blanketed dog's body into his arms so quickly it was grab it or let it fall to the floor. He had to get quite stern with them before they finally took it back off him. Put him right off his lunch he said.
A short time before I had shared an office with the Planners and Environmental Health. This meant that whenever I went to the fridge to get milk for tea making I would see things like a dented tin with BOTULISM written on it in magic marker. One day one of the EH ladies came in (the lovely Sandra from Brum) and asked if I had a magnifying glass. When I asked what for she said that she had just been putting sticky tape down on someone's bed to capture samples of whatever was living in it, she showed me a wallet full of bits of tape. I thought for a while and then it came to me. The Microfiche machine! That made things big. Sure enough we popped a bit of tape in and this shadowy image came up in startling detail.
She had a bug ID book and you worked through from head to tail on any bug, ticking things off as you looked at each part and eventually arrived at what it actually was. Something like a red chicken mite I think, how that got into a bed I have no idea.
