A cleaner by any other name ...

What makes a person want to be a dental hygenist ?

I've been back to the dentist with the big pink chair today, back again for a "scale and polish" today, £27 to let some old bint scrape away at your teeth with a steel pick thing then polish them with a glorified electric toothbrush, they see me coming every time, I'm a sucker for spending money with them.

Arrived at the surgery at 8.50am, I was the only one in again, and fawlty Towers was showing on the LCD TV in the waiting room - again.

It was the one with the deaf old lady who used to be in "Please Sir", she's complaining to Basil Fawlty about her room

MRS RICHARDS And another thing I asked for a room with a view
BASIL Deaf, mad and blind. This is the view as far as I can remember, madam. Yes, this is it.
MRS RICHARDS When I pay for a room I expect something more interesting than that.
BASIL That is Torquay, Madam.
MRS RICHARDS Well, it not good enough.
BASIL Well...may I ask what you were hoping to see out of a Torquay hotel bedroom window? Sydney Opera House perhaps? The Hanging Gardens of Babylon? Herds of wildebeests sweeping majestically....


And just at that point an elderley lady with mad hair (think Albert Einstein) popped out of the spare surgery door and called my name.

I thought she was the cleaner so intrigued as to why she wanted me to go into the spare surgery that is never used now I followed her beckoning finger.

She wasn't the cleaner, or rather she was the cleaner, the cleaner of teeth, the dental hygenist.

She uses the old surgery room, with the old chair and the old lights and the old spitoon and its all a bit shabby now compared to the other surgery with the big pink chair and computer technology lined up on every wall, I felt sidelined in here, sort of "hes only here for his teeth cleaning, stick him in the old room with the old bag"

And so she started scraping away at my teeth with her steel pick and I started to wonder, what makes someone want to scrape other peoples teeth for a living ?

She's probably got twenty or so patients to scrape away at today, banal one-way conversations to carry on while scraping and flossing and polishing, why would you choose that as a career path ? Is she a failed dentist ? Did she not get the correct grades at dentist school and her tutor advised her to get a job in a supermarket, or, wait, there might be another way, you could be, you could be.....a dental hygenist.

I'd choose the supermarket career, but still...