Funeral Fun - The cheese incident

    It was during the WNBull Christmas party that a rather funny and strange incident occurred.  The party was in the company chapel at Newtown, a small but rather nice and cosy place.  We were all seated in little groups around the room with a large buffet table in the centre.  We had all kinds of delicious food, honey ham, potato salad, sandwiches, brad rolls and butter cut into thinnish triangles to put on the rolles and so on.  There was more than enough yummy food to go around.  Everyone was having a great time, both the food and the company were nice.  Nobody was drinking particularly much alcohol as most of us had to drive home.  So nobody was expecting anything too wild or out of the ordinary (at least for funeral directors who are an odd bunch).

    Mid-way through the evening someone came up to me and asked if I had heard about the cheese issue with another co-worker.  I was rather puzzled, how can an incident occur with cheese, especially when nobody is drunk?  He explained that the other co-worker had grabbed a piece of butter from the buffet table and put it in his moth.  Then he complained that the cheese wasn't any good.  He had mistaken the butter for slices of cheese.

    Naturally the news of his adventure with the butter spread, partially because this sort of thing was not out of the ordinary for him.  He once asked "what's this?" while pointing at the spare tire in a car.  Another time I washed the shammy he cleaned his hearse with for him.  He had asked me as I was cleaning mine at the same time so he knew I was cleaning it.  Yet when I handed back he looked at it, paused for a bit and then said it wasn't his shammy, that it was the wrong colour.

    I will say that this co-worker was not stupid or even unpleasant.  With him I never knew when he was serious or joking about this kind of thing.  He would say the strangest stuff, knowing it was a joke but do so with a straight face.  Not someone to play poker with.  The funeral industry is full of people like this, wonderfully strange.  Because of this it makes the whole job and industry so much more fun and interesting.

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