l TECHNICIANS INSIGHT: REPAIRS AND REGULATIONS I BY ANDY SANSON

REPAIRS AND

REGULATIONS

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.

By Andy Sanson

Some 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.

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.

“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.

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.

“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.

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!

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.

But do we shy from it? Do our stomachs churn at the thought? No, for we have become immune, like the addict desperate for more of his drug without which he cannot achieve the same high and can never be truly at ease.

A recently manufactured, spotlessly clean full upper denture arrives, fractured midline. But what is this? Wherefore the sludge? Wherefore the crusted bile, the aeons worth of built-up saliva, clinging like stone-cladding to a late-Victorian mid-terrace dwelling?

For a split second we are at a loss and cannot proceed - a fish out of water. We are seized by a panic and suffer withdrawal symptoms - Technician’s Cold Turkey.

Gasping for breath, with clammy fingers we tear at the air, desperate for a flash of brown or green until, at last, into our lap is dropped blessed relief in the shape of an eggbound part lower fracture swimming in slime and stinking to High Heaven of something unutterably abominable.

Not one of these people would dream of picking their nose and presenting you with the contents or scratching their backside before proffering a hand of greeting so why should it be any different where dentures are concerned? One for a team of boffins in some research laboratory somewhere I suppose. Somewhere a little more secure and clandestine than Porton Down.

I remain a champion of the little oval dish and tweezers, hydrochloric acid and being there long enough to have minions beneath you who are ‘for’ such things

All of this happened back in the Ordovician Period, when pennies were the size of ice hockey pucks, you could take three steps in a pair of jeans before the flares moved, and the BBC’s alternative to Pirate Radio was Jimmy Young’s Recipe. The Apprentice Dental Mechanic occupied a place in the social hierarchy somewhere beneath Myra Hindley and the Rolling Stones. An attitude prevailed amongst employers that suggested because they grudgingly threw a couple of pounds a week at us (Apprentices) in a small brown envelope, it somehow granted them authority over how we conducted our lives both in and out of work. Sadly, we believed it too. Consensus was that we knew nothing, did less and were a nuisance sent to punish some heinous, but forgotten, past transgression. Although the points below were never actually written out or said as such, we were left in no doubt that it was considered that we neither knew nor cared about any of it so it was somehow telepathically conveyed to us by knowing looks and inference. A short, yet accurate, list, then, of how one was made to feel for merely having the audacity to inflict oneself on The Lab every day:-

• Tea and coffee are liquids intended to refresh and rejuvenate and not some sort of diabolical endurance test. Use freshly boiled water (in the case of coffee, allowed to cool slightly before infusing), fresh cups or mugs (not ‘cleaned’ with a dirty rag or, as practiced by an autumnal character masquerading as a cleaner in a lab of my acquaintance, the same one used to do the toilet rims), and milk bereft of lumps and alien cultures.

• Handles are for turning. They are not devices designed to give you more grip and purchase to enable you to slam things even harder.

• Mops are not blessed with magical powers that automatically cleanse the water in the bucket.

• A broom that looks as though it’s just been inducted into the US Marine Corps is not a lot of use. Buy a new one (this in the face of my former boss’s - possibly urban legend - assertion that ‘Good brush, that. We’ve had it thirty years and it’s only ever had twelve new heads and ten new handles’).

• The shed is a Tardis.

• Lunchtimes are for fetching fish and chips, or, in later years, a Chinese takeaway, for ‘proper staff’.

• It is not a sackable offence to throw away less than 85% of all plaster and acrylic mixed up.

• Do not expect to be paid for overtime - the fact that you have to work late must be your fault for not pulling your weight during the day.

• A dental laboratory does not instantly transmogrify into a pyrotechnics one the instant The Boss goes off to his Round Table meeting. Experiments such as filling Bunsen tubing with various polymers (especially ‘weighted’ material) and blowing them through Bunsen flames or placing the business end of a Bunsen burner into a bowl of soapy water and igniting the bubble thus formed are to be neither encouraged nor recommended.

• It is perfectly acceptable and, in some cases even desirable, to replace a light bulb within twelve months of its failing.

• Plaster spilt on the plaster room floor, although it should not have been spilt in the first place, once it has been, may be swept up and disposed of. It is not necessary to leave it to get wet, go off and become some sort of impromptu and economical rhino flooring substitute for said room.

• Nowhere in your Indentures does it state that it is a condition of your employment that at some stage during the five years of your Apprenticeship you are obliged to - ahem -‘go out’ with The Boss’s daughter.

• Get some normal handlebars on that motorbike. You look like a Hells Angel.

Managerial responses when pressed on issues regarding Apprenticeship:-

• Indentures stating that all aspects of the trade should be taught within the five year term; ‘Oh, that’s just put in to justify their fees. Now, go and get those repair models’

• Upon objecting to being instructed to repair the roof, weed the garden, move the shed, change the oil in The Boss’s Merc, collect the plums off the tree oh and it’s okay to go next door to get the ones you can’t reach never mind about the dog it’s alright really and if the bloke asks what you’re doing there you’re nothing to do with us, ok? etc; ‘It says you’ve got to learn everything, doesn’t it?’

• Over mention made of Day Release to college to obtain City & Guilds; ‘ You don’t want to bother with any of that rubbish’.

The offences below will result in mandatory instant dismissal:-

• Having a better car than The Boss • Living in a better house than The Boss • Going on better holidays than The Boss • Having holidays • Putting Radio 1 on in the afternoon • Sharpening the edge of The Boss’s favourite teaspoon • Fashioning a huge nose out of acrylic and placing The Boss’s spare spectacles on it overnight • Fashioning other body parts out of acrylic and leaving them in the Office as a joke, intending to remove them before patients arrive to have their dentures repaired, but forgetting • Liking the Rolling Stones • Listening to the Rolling Stones • Looking like a Rolling Stone • Having heard of Frank Zappa • Voting Labour • Taking the micky out of fishing, golf or caravanning • Having parents who know about employees’ rights • Having an IQ greater than 50 • Not being as daft as they’d like you to be