If You're Gonna Be A Paedophile, Don't Wear A Bright Yellow Jacket.

I worry about the State of the English Nation sometimes. Really, I do.

Working for the council as an engineer meant that very often I had to go out on site and check up on things, take a bunch of photos, that sort of thing. A couple weeks into the job a colleague and myself had to go out and take a whole lot of pictures of various street lamps and lamp columns around the borough.

Now, because of the overkill Health & Safety regulations in England, every time one of us leaves the office to go on site we have to wear these bright fluorescent yellow safety jackets, trimmed with swanky silver reflector strips. It's this seasons must have, dahling.

Very classy.

So we're wondering around the streets taking our photos, marking off things on a big clipboard, checking maps, all looking very official; when we came to a school.

Soccer practice. Goody gumdrops...

One of the lamp columns was up against the fence of the school field, so naturally the school was in the background when we took the photo. Imagine our surprise when, barely seconds after the flash pops, some woman comes tearing towards the chain link fence screaming her head off.

Oh.

She's shouting at us, actually.

"Excuse me, just what do you think you're doing?"

"Pardon?" – (That's me talking.)

"What do you think you're doing? It's unacceptable. I refuse to let you have those pictures."

"What. The. Fvck." - (Wico, my colleague. He's a whiz when it comes to dialogue.)

"Do you really think you can just take photos of the children and expect to get away with it?"

Oh dear sweet Lordy, in the name of everything good and pure. She thinks we're kiddie wranglers...

This woman wanted to know why we were standing outside the school taking photos of the children. She even called the cops. Heh. Whooops.

Not only are we wearing the world's brightest cold-weather safety gear with massive council logos on the back, we also have these nifty ID cards with our name, rank, serial number and sexual orientation on them.

Also, we had a camera full of pictures of streetlights. Whoopy frigging twang. I think I just felt my John Thomas twitch.

Now I don't know what kind of pervert she thought she was dealing with, but it sure as hell wasn't somebody interested in tiny-tot footballers.

I mean, I’d finished the bag of sweets I was carrying at least three roads ago...