Have you squished your fish lately?

Last week at work one of our favourite nurses stopped by at 2am to say hello and shoot the breeze. Hey, for us night shift folk, 2 am is as good a time as any for social visits, and all the better since thats when the computers go down to backup, so charting is not a happening thing for at least 10-15 minutes. At any rate, she's abandoned us and gone on to bigger and better things (or perhaps that should be bigger and BADDER) at the local prison. At any rate, she was regaling us with entertaining prison tales, not all of which entailed bodily excretions.

One story was about another nurse at the prison--evidently this woman makes it a habit to "amuse" herself (i.e. self gratification) when work is slow. Aside from the fact that to engage in that activity at work is more than a little questionable, and to do so at a prison full of sex offenders is downright insane, the fact that she makes a regular habit of this while at work blew us all away. Evidently a male nurse at the prison, amused at our fomer colleagues's reaction to the discovery of this particular nocturnal activity, commented "Oh, she squishes her fish all the time--we just ignore it." I've heard a lot of euphamisms before, but this one got us all--it was particularly descriptive, in a rather disgusting and shocking way--the entire night staff on our floor laughed themselves silly. Since this became a new part of our collective night shift vocabulary, if someone appears out of breath from running around or if they come back from a break outside, the standing question is "Were you outside squishing your fish?" Eeeeeeewwww...funny, but eeeewwwwww nonetheless!