The Adventures of a Small Businessman in the Forbidden Zone - страница 13

“Do you think she’s checking her account balance?” Andy inquired from everybody watching.

His mate Dave had a bright suggestion: “Perhaps she can’t remember her PIN number and he’s trying to jog her memory.”

This idea had all of us howling with laughter. All of us except Julie anyway.

“I’m going to kill the cheating bastard.” She announced. I believed her too. Julie was a big, big girl.

We didn’t have time to find out if the girl’s memory received a lot of jogging or only a quickie jog, as a furious Julie snatched the tape from the machine and left in tears.

I believe the divorce was uncontested. Judging from Darren`s concept of foreplay, his wife was better off without him.

One delightful morning I arrived at work to be confronted by one of the cleaners, a right old battleaxe called Ingrid. It was difficult to form any sort of working relationship with Ingrid because she was never actually at work. Ingrid was ‘bad with her nerves’. She got stuck into me as soon as I got through the door.

“I’m not cleaning up bloody rabbit shit. Says nothing in my contract about rabbit shit. If I liked cleaning rabbit shit I would get a job in a bleeding pet shop.”

Brilliant, I thought, the daft old cow has lost the plot altogether. Maybe she really is bad with her nerves.

“Have you been putting the vodka on your rice crispies again Ingrid?” I asked. “Run out of milk this morning, did we?”

Before I got a reply some of the girls came over holding six gorgeous fluffy white rabbits.

“Look Sean, look what somebody left in the speedbank machine room last night. If nobody claims them I want two for the kids.”

“Hang on, hang on a minute, I’ve just got in the door and already the day is going pear shaped. Nobody is taking any rabbits anywhere until we check the security tape and find out which cretin forgot he was carrying a box of rabbits. Honestly, do all you people here still have lead water pipes or what? How the hell can you forget you are carrying a box of rabbits?”

That lunchtime we avidly checked the security tape. We ran it through twice and at no time did we see anybody bring in six fluffy white bunny rabbits. It was like they had walked into the speedbank room through a rip in the space-time continuum, from a parallel universe where rabbits use cash machines as a matter of course. There was just no other explanation for how they got there.

I tell you what was funny though. It was absolutely hilarious watching a couple of drunks reaction to six little bunny rabbits gambling about their feet while they were trying to use the cash machines at four o’clock in the morning. You could tell they were convinced they had the DT`s. The cleaner was right to be upset about the rabbits. They might have been fluffy and cute but they could shit for England – it was all over the place.

Truly you could make a movie about the stuff captured by our security camera, but that is not the purpose of this book. Its purpose is to educate the novice small business traveler in the ways of a nasty dangerous planet. Go on then, I will tell you one more tale before I move on to describe the next dump I worked at.

This was pure Buster Keaton. We were watching the tape one lunchtime because the cleaners had complained that somebody had superglued a leather jacket to the front of one of the cash dispensers and they could not get it off for love nor money.