The clincher

I've always been a sucker for clever marketing ploys.

When you see the three of them all nice and quiet on a sunny Saturday afternoon, you'd be tempted to try and populate the Raheny area with...well.. little Rahenies. They thankfully resumed their usual bickering shortly after.

And then this New Improved Smell claim caught my eye while cruising the aisles of my local Tesco (this piece of marketing genius is best viewed LARGE). How could I have resisted the temptation? Some things just have to be tried to be fully appreciated. Personally I find it hard to believe that they managed to top the "old" smell. Some of my best memories in life are closely associated with that overheated latex smell of a warm spring night...
There is no way I could go for the snip just yet*.

That new improved smell (thanks to the special way they make their condoms. Can anyone can be more non-committal and vague than this?) reminds me of an early student job, during the summer of 1991.
I worked for a week in a latex gloves factory. Just a week I hear you say. What a wimp.
Yes and no. The conditions were really tough. You work under the ovens (the temperature was 42° C) where the gloves are "cooked" and the smell of liquid latex is overwhelming. Porcelain hand-shaped puppets are mounted on a giant bicycle chain and they dip into a bath of liquid latex before spending a little while in the oven. Our job was to pluck them off the hand puppets after the latex had cooled a bit (only too marginally for my liking). One hand per second, for an 8 hour shift with two 15 minutes breaks. After the first 20 minutes my index fingers had got burned, they had blistered within an hour, they were bleeding by the end of the night (it was a 10pm - 6am shift) I'll never forget the pain (ouch - 1 second respite - ouch - 1 second respite - ouch - etc.), the noise (there was a compressed air blower supposed to help you detach the top of the glove from the burning hot porcelain mould), the heat, the frenetic pace, the anguish when a glove could not be snapped clean off the hand and it was headed for a second bath, leading to an even harder-to-remove mess a few minutes later.

I stuck it for just a week but I learned a very valuable lesson about work and work conditions in general, and time spent in university made a lot more sense: not for what it afforded you to do, but for what it afforded you to escape from.
I counted my blessings after that week's work in the latex gloves factory (the first blessing being that they had stopped manufacturing condoms. I could have otherwise spent whole nights pulling on hot mickeys, a different one every second...)


* I don't have the balls for it...