Lyons Maid ice cream factory, Liverpool late '60's. Service visit on some electronic control gear.
Flock of women in the canteen. None of them saying a word. Just sitting clutching their cups of tea and looking contemplative. Strange enough for me to ask the foreman what was going on.
He smiled and said *the factory refrigeration compressors are on the floor below*
I served my apprenticeship (five years long - and a very long time ago) in a place with over two hundred of them - and you think you had it bad with only four?
Try working when all you can hear is who they "f***ked" and how they did it and when they were on, and christ how it hurt - for bloody hours on end! And when a few were pregnant,,,,,,,,,,,ear defenders were the order of the day.
Taught me a thing or two about the female psyche and their hormones and how to combat them though - and the oats were very plentiful once I found out about the facts of life and that it was too high to eat grass and it needed feeding regularly! ;-)
Best five years of my working life.
Cash
Who actually married one of them - and is still married to SWMBO some fifty years later.
Yes, well, I get it, but nowadays gossip continues on mobiles while walking down the road at very loud levels of some quite personal things, seemingly not caring that everyone in earshot knows what the ladies shot list of best vibrators was in her, apparently considerable field testing. Its just far too much information in my view.
Is it that when on the phone people actually assume the phone sucks in their voices so nobody else can hear them?
Reminds me of the Max Miller joke (you have to imagine the maestro delivering it - it doesn't come across so well when read out):
Bloke comes home from work; says to 'is wife: "Hello dear. I just called in for a half at the pub. Chap there said he knows the milkman round here. He said that he's made love to every woman in this street except one!" "Ooh!" she cries, "I bet it's that stuck up cow at Number 41!"
Give yourself a treat and listen to this:
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I have to say: in all my considerable life, I have never heard women gossiping openly, in an intimate way. I'm sure it's not me: it must be that Northern girls are more civilized than your Southern trollops!
When I was a student, many years ago, during vacations I worked in WD & HO Wills cigarette factory in Bedminster, Bristol (now a shopping centre).(*) One huge room in the factory was where the hand-rolling tobacco was weighed, by hand, by hundreds of women. The room was called the BUR (Beating Up Room - really! I have no idea why.) Some of the men in the factory were afraid to go into the BUR - I once saw a shrieking group of about 20 women chasing a half-naked man out of there. The women had the spooky ability to gossip and simultaneously weigh tobacco to huge accuracy at great speed, but my word, the conversations were much as you describe.
(* As a fitter's mate. Great times! There's a picture of the factory here;
I once visited an office where the female receptionist was sitting on a phone book placed on her chair. When I asked her why she said the corduroy covering on the seat was getting to her.
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