TECHNICIANS INSIGHT
REPAIRS AND
REGULATIONS By Andy Sanson
S The second in the series of diversionary and humorous articles by Andy Sanson. Andy is a retired Dental Technician who has kindly offered to share some of his stories and experiences throughout his career.
ome of the next nineteen years, I am led to believe, I spent as a dental mechanic, the rest as a technician. Quite when the changeover occurred I neither know nor care. All I do know is that it never felt any different. In truth, I was never really either. What I was was a bloke who used to go to a dental laboratory and prat about with various stages in the construction and maintenance of false teeth. That is not the same thing.
If there wasn’t a loud pop upon separation, then there should have been. Green as I was, I had already held out my hand, into which the old man slapped the prosthesis.
Eventually I was allowed to graduate from odd-jobbing to doing something in furtherance of the lining of my employer’s coffers. It was the manky repair. Barely sixteen, fresh-faced still, hauled up through garden parties and Sunday school and shielded from the horrors of the real world to the extent where I wasn’t allowed to listen to the News on the wireless until I was fourteen, I was hardly prepared for this greatest of ignominies.
It wasn’t just reeking old vagrants that were the source of such ignominy; respectable businessmen, poodle-walking ladies of the Manor, members of the clergy - all came and all were served. I could never fathom why a chap who wouldn’t be seen dead without a tie, or his shoes shined, could allow his mouth to harbour the foulest, smelliest lump of unholy gunge in Christendom. Aside from the unpleasantness for those close to him or her it must taste vile; half an inch of grease from an abandoned garage floor scraped up and held in the gob all day. Yeukk!
“Go in the Office,” I was told, “and see to that repair.” In I went, smiling, unsuspecting; life was good. I had a job, money coming in - a whole four guineas a week (Bloody ridiculous. How are we supposed to afford to pay the buggers that much? Etc….). Things couldn’t have been better. The patient, a grimy octogenarian, ponging of Woodbines and mild ale, reached, without a word, into his mouth to produce an object the likes of which I had never beheld. Slurps and suction noises accompanied the removal of the obscenity, the whole operation putting me in mind of the birth of a pony. A pair of scissors would have been useful to separate denture from mouth by dint of severing the string-like strands of phlegm and mucus that held the constituents together.
26 DT_AUG 2021_36pp.indd 26
“Can you fix it?” he asked. Fix it? I’d have to neutralise it first. Boiled in a pan of water, with a few onions and a little salt, it might form the basis of a nutritious soup to warm the cockles on a winter’s eve.
Certainly in the modern day lab things are very different. Although I hung up my penpoint and toothpick many years ago I still retain contacts from my old life. I speak as a technician through familiarity and a certain amount of fondness and sympathy for those still ensnared by the mighty daughter of Shelob that calls itself Dental Technology when I say before we ever get to touch the thing it’s been sprayed, disinfected, sterilised, sandblasted, dynamited, so that, by the time it arrives on the bench, every little HIV or Hepatitis B has been blasted to Kingdom Come theoretically. Yet there still lingers, like the shell of a jaundiced armadillo, twenty years of tartar, rock-solid and impenetrable. Acrylic so impregnated with stale greyness that it falls apart in the hands having been held there solely by the filth now removed.
www.dentaltechnician.org.uk 04/08/2021 12:56
