Lacing my Sandwiches with Strong Laxative

I’ve just started watching For All Mankind, Season 1 of 5, which is an alternate reality series about astronauts at NASA. It’s on Prime if you are interested. It has some great clips of some of my favourite music tracks of the day on it.

It showed Mission Control (now that’s another one I need to write sometime, I started a company in the noughts called Mission Control) with everyone smoking, in the Apollo days. Even the Astronauts were smoking, except when they were in space of course, although there was a comment from a woman astronaut seeing the earth from space for the first time, saying “I could really do with a cigarette right now.”

The series is really interesting, starting with what really happened and then looking at what could have happened. I remember vividly being allowed out of bed to watch the Apollo landing in the early hours of the morning in 1969, and going to the RAI exhibition centre in Amsterdam to get a look at an Apollo capsule and a replica of the Lunar Landing Module. But I seem to have forgotten a fair bit of what happened after that and had to check my browser to confirm the point where fact in the series gets rolled over by fiction.

The smoking reminded me of the days when I was in the Faults Service call centre. We all smoked back then too. I’ve written before about the fun we used to have in the telephone faults centre in Auckland, playing pranks on people.

We had a pile of clean corporate ash trays to pick from. They all slotted nicely on top of each other. Some people chain smoked and there were times when the non smokers complained and asked all the smokers to sit on one side of the ‘Test Room’. This is where we worked with the Serial Killer, you may have read about here. In that post I also mentioned flatting with three nurses, which had its moments.

One of the things I loved about working evening shifts was that I could work afternoon and evening, and then go to a bar and watch bands, or go to parties after mu shift ended, and sleep in the following morning. It gave us a lot of flexibility in life outside of work.

Depending on who the supervisor was, once the day shift staff had gone home, we could play music, although it had to be in the background. And the music of the late 70s was awesome. I guess we all say that about the era we grew up in.

This was a time when a lot of artists, including this man was often performing in an altered state, as were many of the people in the audience. I saw him at Western Springs, I think it was 1975, which was about the time when I was in the test room.

There were rumors at the time that he was out of it, when he performed in Auckland. Perhaps if, as a member of the audience, you were in the same state, you wouldn’t have noticed or minded. There were certainly pungent clouds of smoke wafting around the stadium. But that’s not what I wanted to share today.

Working on night shift meant you had to bring food with you, and we had a good kitchen for reheating or even cooking at work. Sometimes someone would cook for the team, or there would be a collaborative effort, but mostly you brought your own food.

There wasn’t a huge amount of regular cooking in my flat, because we all did shift work, which was great because we would all get the house more or less to ourselves from time to time, but the nurses I shared the house with, were all nice people, and loved my dog, when she wasn’t eating their shoes.

I would often make myself cut sandwiches to take to work and would put them in the fridge, ready to eat in the early evening. But one night when I went to the fridge in the kitchen downstairs, my sandwiches weren’t there.

This was a problem because there were no food outlets near us, and there was no such thing as delivery services, which made for a long night, if you couldn’t eat. I asked everyone if they had seen my food, which I had put in the fridge in the afternoon when the day shift was still on. Nobody had seen it, and I struggled to think of anyone who might take it. We were all pretty much friends.

Two nights later, it happened again. No dinner, and I was frustrated. It happened twice more that week and I was getting really pissed off. We played pranks on each other all the time, but we wouldn’t drag it out like that, if that’s what it was. This was no joke!

I mentioned this problem to my flatmates and one of them said, “I can get you what you need”, with a mischievous grin. They all agreed, and a couple of days later one of them gave me a little bottle of pills. It was labeled Senokot. She said, “Crunch up a couple of these and spread them out really finely, so that whoever is stealing your food can’t taste it, and I think your problem will get sorted. It felt a bit like laying rat bait, but not quite so toxic.

Well I was feeling pretty vindictive by that stage and was happy for a little experiment. I told my closest friends at the job what I was doing and we all waited with interest. We were hoping to see someone rushing off to the bathroom multiple times, perhaps followed by going home sick. I was kind of happy that I didn’t see anyone doing that, but my sandwiches with ground laxative were gone. Who could have done it?

Well, the following day there was one person who didn’t turn up. In fact she was away for two days. It was the cleaning lady, and apparently she had a very bad stomach bug.

I don’t know if someone told her what had happened or who did it, but my sandwiches stopped disappearing, which was the endgame. I’m kind of glad I didn’t see her turn green, and maybe she needed my food more than I did, but I only felt slightly guilty.

Thinking about it now, if that had happened in today’s world, I could have been sacked for a serious Health & Safety violation. Back then I think most of the leaders would have slapped my wrist (if they had known about it) and had a quiet chuckle when they were out of sight.

Anyway, watching the smokers at NASA brought that memory back to me. I still struggle with how fit astronauts have/had to be and were considered healthy enough to smoke. But if you were around in those days, there were very few people who didn’t smoke. I remember seeing an advertisement like this as a teenager, I think it might have been in a Playboy magazine at a friend’s place.

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