Off of Private Eye...what a pile of crap

"If they'd offered us sugar or sand, maybe we'd have kept quiet," Dr Yury Zotov told reporters in Vacha district hospital, in Russia's Nizhny Novogorod region, "but manure? I'm a surgeon, what do I need with manure? It's an insult."

Dr Zotov was complaining on behalf of the hospital's three hundred workers, after the authorities decided to pay them their entire monthly wages in dung. "We understand our country's economic problems, and we try to be reasonable. The Massandra vineyard in the Crimea has been paying its workers in bottles of wine for years, and the Podolsk sewing machine factory once paid everyone in sewing machines. But there's a limit to what workers will accept. When the government tried to pay Arkhangelsk lumberjacks with packets of tampons, they went on strike, and we're going to do the same, because we aren't prepared to work for shit wages. It's hard enough for me to feed my children on the 1,300 roubles a month I'm supposed to get paid, but this? We have a saying, 'when shit becomes valuable, the poor will be born without bumholes'."

But Vacha Mayor Alexander Abrosimov defended the offer of manure. "Maybe the associations are not pleasant, but it's a much-needed commodity for every resident. Many people survive on low wages by growing vegetables in garden plots or at their dachas, and we were trying to prevent them from becoming anxious about finding enough to feed their potatoes. Anyway, we are being paid in dung by local collective farms, who owe us money for tractor fuel, and we have to pass it on. Dr Zotov is psychologically sick. In fact, come to think of it, lately I've had a lot of psychologically sick people coming to my office to complain about being paid in manure." (Moscow Times, 15/5/01. Spotter: Charles Price)

-- Anonymous, June 29, 2001

Answers

Acceptable Payment

-- Anonymous, June 29, 2001