Someone I worked with had spent some time working in a fish canning factory in north-east Scotland. Conditions were horrible and the employers were utter arseholes. Come one Friday afternoon, she and a friend beside her on the production line took off their socks (worn under rubber boots all day in a hot, steamy atmosphere reeking of fish guts, oil and sweat), stuffed them into the bottom of a few cans, spreading fish over the top to disguise the contents, and sent them on to the sealing machine. It never made the papers. Perhaps people just expect canned fish to taste like that.

One that did make the papers: I spent a month working in a New Zealand ice cream factory owned by a large American corporation. It was not a happy place to work (you were covered in sugar and blasted with clouds of steam all day long). One day two guys got into a fight on the factory floor and one got a tooth knocked out. It was just about possible to re-implant teeth back then, so they looked for the tooth but never found it. I left that job and went to my home town 80 miles away. Three weeks later there was a paragraph in the local paper about somebody finding a tooth in their ice cream. It was weirdly satisfying to know that I was the only person in the world who could explain it.