(no subject)

[rivka]

hobbitbabe recently posted questions about work - including asking about the oddest or most unpleasant work people had ever done. It got me thinking about my monkey job.

Then the monkeys came up in conversation today on our way home from work. "I didn't say anything about the monkeys in my list of 100 things!" I realized. "You could post an addendum," curiousangel suggested. I gave it a try:

1. I shaved the monkeys.
2. I dyed some monkeys red and green with Manic Panic hair dye. But I only did it once.

"Hey," I said. "This has potential."

So, without further ado:


1. I shaved the monkeys. I used a regular Gilette safety razor.
2. I dyed some monkeys red and green with Manic Panic hair dye. But I only did it once.
3. We carried the monkeys around in Playmate Coolers.
4. I once got in trouble with my housemates for leaving monkey blood in the refrigerator overnight.
5. I am all too familiar with the euphemism "self-mouthing."
6. The monkeys all had numbers tattooed on their arms in blue ink. No one but me seemed to think this was creepy.
7. I've spent much too much time looking after monkeys who had recently been anesthetized with ketamine to be able to conceive of that stuff as a party drug.
8. I am one of the world's experts on methods of testing infant monkeys' vision.
9. Even now, seven years later, when I see parents buying Corn Pops for their children, I am briefly shocked. That's monkey food.
10. It comforted me to reflect, from time to time, on the fact that my horrible, evil, cruel-to-the-monkeys boss used to have to jerk them off.
11. It comforted me even more to know that that would never, ever be part of my job description.

[Note: I don't really want to get into a debate about the validity of animal research. Something I once wrote about the topic can be found here. My opinion hasn't changed substantially since then.]

Comments

[rivka.livejournal.com]

a little squicked about the monkeys getting jerked off

Sheesh, who isn't? (Other than the monkeys themselves, of course, who apparently liked it fine.)

By the time I started working there, the experimental protocols in our lab no longer called for the collection of semen samples - but in any case, they had switched over to collecting samples with a piece of equipment called an "electro-ejaculator."

and generally found this fascinating reading.

Some aspects of the work were really fun. Other large swathes of it were achingly hard or mind-bogglingly tedious. I left out the tedious parts. *grin* Glad you liked it.

[kalmn.livejournal.com]

a piece of equipment called an "electro-ejaculator."

...which you will never again have to explain to anyone who watched last week's er episode.

(it wasn't used on a monkey, however.)

[trinker.livejournal.com]

Oh, *that's* what I've been missing by not watching TV. -sigh-

I'll catch up on ER eventually.

[geminigirl]

See, I thought of rivka's monkeys when I watched ER last week....

It was disturbing.