Ultan,
It was quite often difficult to sort out the truth from the humour with many of the people we met over the years, mainly in London.
My father told of when he was working for a firm called McAdams in Stevenage, the toilets were a long trench with a plank resting on two upturned oildrums, inside a corrugated hut. The trench was regularly treated with disinfectant until eventually it was filled in and re-sited on another part of the site.
One day (he claims) he walked into the hut to find one of his workmates wading in the bottom of the trench with his arm buried deep in the morass. He asked your man what he was doing and was told that the man's jacked had fallen off the plank and had sunk, and that he was trying to find it.
My dad said, "surely you can't wear the jacket after its been down there".
"No" replied your man, "but my sandwiches are in the pocket".
Jim Carroll