… and at number 4: Lab Rat

When I was a student at Bristol University I used to spend the summers there because as soon as I left home, the last as the youngest, my parents immediately moved out of the family home to a small flat in a different town and didn’t tell us where it was. (They did really… eventually)

Anyway Bristol is a very cool place to be and it is lovely in the summer.

I was sharing a house with my friend L who also had no where particular to go. Being the summer the dearth of rich students, who were off backpacking around Timbuktu or wherever rich students spend their summers, meant the pubs around were mostly empty and the pub I was working in could only take me on part time. L could only find a part time job in call centre.

“I have idea to make some money!” I said one evening “Let the University do experiments on us! Apparently they give you money and you don’t have to do anything!”
“Win-win” said L “Let’s do it.”

Unfortunately the University Hospital wasn’t running any experiments that summer. But we got a lead that the Psychology Department were running one.

“We want to test out these new serotonin based anti-depressants on you, see how they affect your sleep patterns and eye-hand coordination.” explained the researcher.
“Cool!” we said.

So every Monday evening we went to the Psychology Dept where they dosed us up with pills and glued metal electrodes to ours brains, wired to a recording device tied to our waists so they could read our thoughts. The overall effect was one of a scruffy cyborg.

They always drove us home. Presumable to minimise the risk of us being spotted sprouting a new limb when walking down the street. Or maybe because they were worried that if the locals saw us leaving the laboratory like that, they would assume monstrous and unholy experiments were going on inside and an angry mob armed with pitchforks and flaming torches would be on its way.

The next day they took us back to the Psychology Dept. Where we spent all day doing tedious eye-hand coordination tests.

It wouldn’t have been so bad if I got anything off the pills but I clearly got the dud placebos. The electrodes were incredibly itchy and the recording device made sleeping uncomfortable so I never got any. The tests were so mind numbingly boring I kept falling asleep during them so I must have screwed up the results. They could have at least given us Lara Croft or something.

L had a great time. He got the decent ones and was whacked out, off in la-la land every time.

Working out the hourly rate it was less than my bar job which is not a lot considering I was risking my life for science.