Poot-em-up

A pooter is a device for the field collection of animal specimens. They can be full-on proton pack-type mechanisms that will suck-up small dogs but we never had anything like that for Mr Stuchberry’s biology class. The ones we had at high school consisted of a jam jar with two tubes coming out of the lid. By sucking on one of the tubes it created a vacuum and pulled whatever you’re pointing the other tube at, into the jar.

I don’t know what we were supposed to be learning (might have been sampling methods or something) but we were sent out into the fields of the school grounds, instructed to randomly drop a setsquare and told to collect all the insects within the grid. We were 14 year-old boys so there were a whole heap of pooter-related blowjob jokes and hilarity surrounding the dropping of our setsquares on top of other boy’s squares/pencil cases/heads.

Then came the collection of the poor beasties. One guy quickly sucked up a spider and then a number of ants, slaters and beetles. He then spent the rest of the lesson lying on his back, watching the carnage and playing Emperor to his insect gladiators. Another sucked too hard and managed to swallow a ladybird. A third had to go back to class for a replacement pooter when he got a slug lodged in his in-tube.

I’m not sure where this story is going. I don’t have a moral or punch line to neatly close off this anecdote or relate it to something I’ve been doing in the present. I just remembered an afternoon running about in the sun sixteen years ago and felt the need to share.