A new day dawned, and I headed off once again for the Exeter office.
It was chaos as usual, so I mingled my way into the control room to find out what I was going to be doing that day.
"Ah, just the man we need!"
At last! I was going to be doing something useful.
"Get yourself down to the epidemiology office straight away. They need to talk to you about what you found yesterday."
I walked the length of the open plan office, and found the epidemiology room at the bottom. Three earnest looking men were starring at a computer screen and mumbling to themselves.
They hadn't even noticed me walking in, so I let them know who I was and asked why they needed to speak to me.
"We just wanted to confirm the information you gave yesterday" one of them said.
"I can't understand how those pigs were missed by the other staff, I mean, 200 pigs in one field and no-one else spotted them."
"What bloody pigs?"
With that one of the other 'earnest'' looking men thrust my map in front of me and said:
"Those pigs! You've written it down there, '200 hogs........ "
Confused, I stood looking blankly at the man. Suddenly, it dawned on me. He had an american accent!
"Those 'hogs' aren't pigs, they're sheep!"
"If they're sheep, then why the hell have you written 'hogs' ? "
I took some deep breaths......
"They are Hoggets. I wrote 'hogs' for two reasons. Firstly, there wasn't room on the map to write the whole word, and secondly because in Devon, Hoggets are commonly known as 'Hogs'. How was I supposed to know that we had yanks here who couldn't understand English!"
Hurt, the man in question fired a shot back at me:
"If you knew the chaos you've caused here this morning you'd understand."
Now starting to get really annoyed, I walked out with one last passing shot:
"Haven't you silly sods heard of the telephone? All you had to do was give me a quick call and I would have clarified it for you!"
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