Death By Looney Tunes

I have one of those jobs that you've heard about on TV or in newspapers. You know, the kind where you need a brain. Basically my duties require intense concentration because my job description basically involves two things:

1. Attaching electrodes to people's bodies and administering a sort of mild shock therapy.
2. Performing ultrasound procedures in high risk areas such as on or around the spinal cord or major arteries.

Anyways, today I had to do the ultrasound thing on this lady's neck and while I was doing it up she started talking to me and she had this really thick Australian accent like that Crocodile Hunter guy if he was a girl. I was trying my hardest to focus on the task at hand because I really wasn't in the mood to kill some old lady if I accidentally ultrasounded her carotid artery and messed up the pacing of her heart. Despite my steadfast effort to concentrate though, my focus wavered and her voice triggered a scene in my head from an old Looney Tunes episode. It was the episode where Sylvester gets the world's biggest and meanest mouse in order to teach his son to be tough but when it arrives it's not a mouse but a kangaroo with boxing gloves.

So here I was, fighting off laughter and trying to keep my hand from shaking which would undoubtedly alert the lady that my attention was not on trying to maintain her position among the living. I managed to fend off the shaking but the thoughts in my mind were building. My thoughts branched out from the single image of Sylvester getting his ass beat by a huge mouse to the thought of whether things like this happen a lot to people who live in The Outback.

I mean, we laugh at the prospect of somebody getting kicked in the face by a marsupial but that's because we've never met a marsupial. But things are different for Aussies and zookeepers. They're faced with situations like this on a daily basis and it's probably not nearly as funny.

Australian big-wigs stepping out of Parliament for lunch and getting ambushed...
Schoolchildren getting trampled at the bus stop...
Brides and grooms massacred when one jumps out of their wedding cake...

It sounds funny but I did a simple Internet search for the phrase "bloodthirsty marsupials" and came up with an article telling me this:

"Steven Shorten, 13, suffered massive facial wounds and cuts to his abdomen, back and legs when [a] 150-cm (five feet) tall kangaroo grabbed and repeatedly jumped on him when he was looking for his [golf]ball in [the] bushes in October 1996."

I'll just leave you with that.