Community Support Officers to get Taser Guns

...well ok, not quite.

But they should, especially the old one who patrols around our Tesco Express, I mean the looks he gets off some of those small hooded children when he asks then to move on and stop clogging the bus shelter up every evening, if looks could kill.

Mind, some of them might be waiting for a bus of course, I mean its not like he ever asks them.

And he told me to move my car once because, and I quote, "its too close to the junction" by about twenty yards it was too close to the junction, but he has a greybeard so he must have been correct and I sheepishly moved it quoting "sorry sir" as mitigation.

Yes news this weekend is that several Police forces in the UK will have Taser weapons issued to non-firearm trained officers, seems ok to me but then I still hold the opinion that police officers are on the whole (apart from our greybeard CSO) reasonable people who are accountable in some way for their actions, I don't suppose for one minute that our greybeard would Taser a whole bunch of 11 year olds just because they are sat in the bus shelter again tonight, then again...

But its upset several rent-a-quote stylee people including Amnesty International who have diverted their attention from freeing political prisoners in China for a while to say "its not fair" or words to that effect.

Electrocuting someone for no better reason than they clutter up a bus shelter is nothing new of course...

...come with me, back to 1975 {screen goes all wavy and we're wearing flares again}...the young Jerrychicken is working in his first job in the office at an electrical contractors and the bit he likes most about his day is when some of the older electricians come into the office to have a coffee and swap electricians tales with Eugene, the estimator to whom he is indentured.

During that period one of our biggest customers was The Star Cinema Group who owned not only cinemas but all of the UK's Hofbrauhous bars and Scamps discoteques, yes they were purveyors of cheesy entertainment - and we did all the electrical work in their outlets all over the UK which was handy for me as I snaffled several flashing disco lights during that time so that my bedroom resembled that scene from Saturday Night Fever with the illuminated floor, but thats another story.

The new Star Cinema complex at Blackpool was coming along fine when one Friday afternoon one of our electricians rolled into our estimating office, took a cup of coffee and sat down chuckling away to himself, a story was forthcoming and we put our pencils down and sat back to listen.

The site foreman, in charge of a workforce of a hundred or so sub-contactors was a bit of a bastard apparently, as most site foremen were, but this one was a bit more of a bit of a bastard than is normally required, and everyone on the site had had enough of him.

The building had got to the stage called "second fixing" where it was almost complete and all of the bits were being fitted to the interior, switches, light fittings, chairs, disco dance floor, all the good stuff, and our electricians were approached with an ingenious plan to show the site foreman exactly what the rest of the workforce thought of him.

It was especially ingenious, and cunning, and painfull

You see the mens toilets in the disco were now connected to the mains sewers and had been fitted out and this was the signal for every contractor on site to use these facilities now instead of pissing on the ground around the back of the site cabins like you had to before the building got to this stage, a tad inconvenient for the population of Blackpool as the back of the site cabins faced onto the promenade, but still.

240v power was now available in the building and the plumbers had just fitted the stainless steel urinal in the gents toilet, and you've probably guessed the rest - a simple flex lead from the nearest socket and a connection to a handy bolt hole at the back of the urinal plate and bingo - a 240 volt heating element/urinal, site foreman for the use of.

The whole site was in on the act and when the foreman went for his morning piss the urinal was plugged in, I won't describe the rest as it will involve every male reading this to clutch his groin instinctively and that might look odd if they are reading this at work, suffice to say that the foreman spent the rest of the morning in casualty trying to explain the blackened tip of his todger to a group of highly amused nurses.

And that was it.

The cable was pulled out, no-one saw what happened, no health and safety officer came to investigate (for they were not invented in 1975), it was just "high jinks", a good laugh, a bit of horseplay on a building site, no harm done, a lesson learned...

The day they Tasered a site foremans willy.