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[billybuzz]

Since I started this line of work a few global truths have emerged from the interactions I've had with my fellow co-workers namely:






What I was taught in teacher training college and my fefl course was not anywhere near enough .

The more work you do the more you are expectd to re-double your efforts .

People who say they want to be your friend usually have a more sinister agenda .

The most intelligent people sometimes say and do the stupidest things .

This just a small snatch of what I have learned from bitter and sometimes rewarding experiences , what if anything have others learned ?

[Baba Alex]

[billybuzz]

I have also learned that some people need more time than others to think about what they have said before they say it .
I have learned to step aside from responding in a likewise manner to comments such as yours .

[dmb]

I have just learned that A Duckbilled Platapus is the only poisionous mammal.

[Baba Alex]

[Golightly]

Oh, I don't know, I've met many poisonous mammals in this job.

[Baba Alex]

[Doctor on a Helicopter]

The Duckbilled Platypus

In 1799 the naturalist George Shaw, Keeper of the Department of Natural History at the British Museum, received a truly bizarre animal specimen from Captain John Hunter in Australia. It appeared to be the bill of a duck attached to the skin of a mole. Shaw dutifully examined the specimen and wrote up a description of it in a scientific journal known as the Naturalist's Miscellany, but he couldn't help confessing that it was "impossible not to entertain some doubts as to the genuine nature of the animal, and to surmise that there might have been practised some arts of deception in its structure."

Despite Shaw's doubts about the reality of the animal, he gave it a name: Platypus anatinus, or flatfoot duck. The scientific name was later changed to Ornithorhynchus anatinus, but it popularly remained known as the Duckbilled Platypus.

Other naturalists were equally suspicious that the creature was just a hoax. The surgeon Robert Knox later explained that because the specimens arrived in England via the Indian Ocean, naturalists suspected that Chinese sailors, who were well known for their skill at stitching together hybrid creatures, might have been playing some kind of joke upon them. "Aware of the monstrous impostures which the artful Chinese had so frequently practised on European adventurers," Knox noted, "the scientific felt inclined to class this rare production of nature with eastern mermaids and other works of art."

It was only when more platypus specimens arrived in England that naturalists finally, grudgingly, granted that the creature was real. This made the platypus one of the more famous instances of a hoax that proved not to be a hoax after all.

[thrifty]

What I have learned from TEFL colleagues:

Get out of TEFL and get a real job or you will end up like them.

[Golightly]

[justme]

Where does a platypus keep its poison? Do they bite? Are they ill-tempered?

Is the plural of platypus 'platypi?'

[Sheikh Inal Ovar]

[justme]

I wonder if platypus tastes like duck or if it has a more mammalian flavor?

[Golightly]

no - it tastes like a plate o' pus

[Baba Alex]