To begin my research I needed help from people with the right experterience. My researchers were recruited from within the best brains in the country. To make sure the poisoned duck didn’t get the job (I’d been trying to nobble her knees for years) the minimum qualification was 4 GCSEs or 6 CSSDs. Everyone had to be able to speak in capital letters and speak English - both written and speaking. The basic pay was national PRR rates. I, myself, personally don’t get paid ...... In fact I do it for free.
My team came from a variety of backgrounds and had many strange habits: one smokes like a trooper, another is as bent as a two-bob bit and his friend is as bent as a ten pound note - they’re like two peas in a drum. However, they did score 68% in the selection test ...... I wonder how many that was out of? The team’s previous work experience was as diverse as: being an under-bearer in a funeral decorators; working down a coal mine (where one only gets a pittance); working at Sellafield nuclear plant (where one has to wear information suits); lecturing on PCM (Process Quality Management) and repairing VHSS video recorders. One researcher later went on to become a well known Channel 4 presentator.
All our staff wore distinctive Institution name badgers. Mary Smith was my right-hand man; she used to be a female actress, but you wouldn’t know her from Adam. She’s very charmingful, if a touch retirecent, and took to the work like a donkey to water. She’s worth her weight in salt! We all liked looking down her cleaverage, but we had to be careful, she’s married with a six-month-year-old baby and there was some talk of her belonging to a witch’s coffin! I understand that she was lecturing at the Institution two weeks tomorrow ago and got a standing ovulation.
I set up the first Institution headquarters in a four floor storey building which had been converted from a detached three-bedroomed semi. To ensure that we had enough space, I needed to calculate the metric linear footage. It worked out at two square minutes per letter, but that didn’t seem quite right. Then I remembered that to comply with the current BSI system I should have used square volume.
The HQ neighbour hood was a bit rough to begin with. The next door neighbours three doors away were always having fightycuffs. I had a few cross swords with them and now they’re in a different frame of mood.
Our offices were in a right mess, I think it had been used by tramps and hobos. We had to open all the windows to dississipate the smell. Also it was awful having to clean up all that vomit and theses, but at least we had continuous hot water all of the time. We set to work with an inch-and-a-half-pound hammer and eventually I was able to lay parakeet flooring and get someone to paint the walls with muriels. The floor cleaning team came in and did a bit of splot cleaning and bettering of brud. As a result the velocity of the laundry was bound to increase and the private contractors would be laughing down a drain.
To make our research more like fun I installed a one-armed band machine and arranged to have the crockery centrally-dishwashed. We even had live music outside the HQ from a juvenile jazz band playing their bazookas. Prior to that, but at the same time, my own office was fitted out with a spring inferior mattress. The Institution was looking as sharp as a box of ferrets. At last I was self-independent and on the crest of a peak of a wave. We were getting seven or eight calls a day, to as many as none.
