The dreaded gastro virus has sparked its head in the last couple of months with some mums I know and their children being struck down. Being sick and overflowing out of both ends of the body is never fun. For some reason it sparked a memory of when I got sick from doing a plumbing job when I was an apprentice.
Years ago when I worked as an apprentice plumber, our family business was busy doing commercial work. The bulk of the work we did was disconnecting bathrooms and kitchens in commercial buildings and then doing the new fit out.
I would work with any number of our sub-contractors that we had working at the time. One particular job that was allocated to me and a subbie was to disconnect the male and female bathrooms in an empty building at West End in Brisbane.
For some reason I was dealt the male bathroom while the subbie worked on disconnecting the female bathroom.
The male bathroom had a wall urinal that needed to be disconnected and unhung from the wall. In order to disconnect it, I had to undo the bolt underneath the urinal. I couldn’t (or possibly didn’t) want to lay my head under the urinal so I could see what I was doing so I worked by ‘touch’. I concentrated so much on getting that bolt undone that my mouth came dangerously close to the edge of the urinal. I remember jerking back and wondering if my lips had grazed across the urinal.
That night and well into the next day I had a gastro like virus. My husband had to take me to the doctor to get an injection so that I could keep water down.
I rang my dad to tell him that I couldn’t work and he rang the subbie to let him know he why I couldn’t work.
The subbie rang me to find out how I was doing and joked ‘I told you, you shouldn’t have licked that urinal’.
I didn’t want to admit to him that I possibly – accidentally did.
