When Donna Oluban answered a job advert for working at Cadbury, she had no idea she would still be working there 20 years later. Not only that, but she still loves it.
The 59-year-old is a chocolatier at Birmingham's Cadbury World attraction and can make pretty much anything out of chocolate. And anything does mean anything - from dinosaurs to aeroplanes, the moon landing to William Shakespeare.
Far from melting under the pressure of piping and moulding all day, Donna looks forward to her work every morning. She said: "It's the best job I've ever had and I have been here for 20 years. There was an advert for the job in the Birmingham Mail so I went to the open day and saw a demonstration.
"I thought: 'I could do that'. They start you off with a working buddy and then you learn on the job.
"The first thing I noticed was the overwhelming smell of chocolate from the big tanks. It fills the air, I had never seen so much chocolate in my life.
"You have to be artistic and creative as you will decorate with a piping bag a lot and everything is hand-made. Luckily I went to art school and you didn't need a degree as all training is done on the job."
On a typical day, Donna and her team will create plaques, teapots, shoes and other chocolate items for the shop or personalised gifts. Workers put on their hairnets, white jumpsuits and operate their machinery for the day, BirminghamLive reports.
It can take up to three days to finish a big job. The most meticulous creations have included a baby diplodocus in time for the Birmingham leg of 'Dippy on Tour', the giant recreation of a dino skeleton which used to sit in the Natural History Museum.
The team's unluckiest moment came when a custom chocolate aeroplane for Birmingham Airport dropped its wings thanks to a bumpy journey. Scrambling to fix the piece, they created chocolate clouds to stick under the wings for support.
Donna said her wackiest structures had been Halloween-themed, including a skeleton coming out of the grave, an octopus and huge spider. She said: "We don't really sketch anything or think about measurements.
"We just think about how we are going to do it by eye and look at the shapes. We have a box of household items such as biscuit containers or yoghurt pots as moulds.
"For Christmas we did a traditional log fire with Santa Claus, we used trifle pots for candle holders and plastic soufflé cups for the fire grate."
Does constant chocolate sculpting make her back ache? She laughed: "The only ache you get is from laughing so hard your stomach hurts, it is such a fun job.
"The other day we heard some people outside the factory talking about us saying: 'Everyone here must love their jobs because they wont stop smiling.' That was so nice to hear. Most people think we just sit and eat chocolate all day and that's not true. I'm staying put unless they fire me."
