All Hail the Boss

It’s been a week of activity – all trains cancelled at Charing Cross when we found ourselves there a week ago; the summer solstice celebrations of S João here in Porto which involves the slaughter of millions; millions more fixated by something on TV in S Africa that I don’t understand – but, by far, the moment to remember was when the garbage truck broke down outside our house.

The lixeiros, or rubbish collectors, come by our house more or less everyday around midnight. We’re amongst the last to get our rubbish collected as the depot for the trucks is nearby on an adjacent road and the trucks are returning after a job well done. The passing of the lixeiros is usually noisy but rapid: the jolly shouts of the men as they throw bags into the truck which doesn’t stop, the clatter of containers being dropped and, above all, the roar of the truck engine. The other night the usual rapid fading of these sounds into the distance didn’t happen. They stayed with us. I looked over the balcony and looked down on the sight of the refuse truck spewing hydraulic fluid all over the road. I think the hoisting mechanism had packed up. The driver got out of his cab and consulted with his colleagues, their fluorescent jackets and trousers gleaming gayly in the street lights. A mobile phone glowed. They were calling for assistance. The engine of their truck was racing. It was very noisy.

After a while another truck and a van drove up, on the wrong side of the road, and the van parked on the pavement at a crazy angle, perhaps to demonstrate that this was AN EMERGENCY. Now we had two trucks with racing engines. Out of the new truck hopped three more men in fluorescent suits, clearly lowly operatives, while out of the van jumped a short man in short sleeves with absolutely no glowing bits about him at all. He was clearly the boss. Just to make sure that everyone knew he was the boss he started waving his arms about and shouting. There didn’t seem to be anything to shout about that I could see – vehicle breaks down, men follow procedures, assistance arrives in timely fashion. What’s the fuss? He was, however, demonstrating that he was not just a boss but a Portuguese boss. I was once told by a Portuguese colleague that I didn’t act like a manager at all because I didn’t wave my arms about and shout. Quiet diplomacy simply doesn’t hack it.

After a while the truck that had lost hydraulic fluid drove off with a final maximum revving of the engine so the remaining truck cranked up its engine to compensate for the dip in the decibel level, and also to power the high pressure water pump. One of the operatives started spraying the road to remove the fluid. I suppose it might have been slippery, and it might have constituted a minor chemical hazard. This took a very long time and involved one man operating the pump and three watching him. After a while they changed roles and the sprayer became a watcher. This was never the job of the boss, of course, as he was fully occupied in waving his arms and being bad tempered and simply being a boss.

After a while another van drove up and out of it got a large, well built man wearing a white shirt and nothing shiny at all but carrying a container of what I supposed was a chemical dispersant. Better late than never, I suppose. The boss turned on the newcomer, arms flailing, voice audible even above the roaring of the truck engine. The shoulders of the newcomer wilted and he adopted the pose of lowly worker in trouble again.

Soon after the boss decided that enough had been done and ordered them to pack up. Before they had finished tidying away he hopped back into his van and drove off. At that moment, as soon as the boss had engaged second gear, the wilting man in a white shirt changed. His shoulders rose, his back became rigid and proud, and he started waving his arms about and he began shouting. He was now the boss. He knew his time was running out because the men had nearly finished clearing away the cleaning gear so he crammed as much bossiness as he could into the two final minutes remaining as the scene played out. As he watched the truck drive off he was still waving his arms about and shouting. Finally, he climbed into his van and drove off, and by 1 o’clock in the morning we had the street quiet again; wet but quiet. How were we going to get through the rest of night without someone taking command? I thought about going and waving my arms and shouting at the missus, but then I thought better of it and went on reading my book.

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Is Auntie Doris on the gin?

Normally this is the kind of family secret that you’d keep to yourself, but, well, you seem like decent folks so I thought I’d share it with you if you don’t mind but I’d be grateful if you didn’t go blabbing this around to just any Tom, Dick or Harry.

We’ve become accustomed to Auntie Doris and her homicidal tendencies, such as when she tries to send us and our car plunging into a river or over a cliff.  That’s normal behaviour.  I mean we’re not like the lady we saw on TV the other day whose car had ended up in the river and she had to be rescued by the fire brigade and when asked why she’d driven into the river in the first place she said that her GPS navigation device had told her to.  Now I don’t know what her GPS navigation system is called but ours is called Auntie Doris, and we ignore her rants about the urgent need to drive into rivers.  I mean you would, wouldn’t you?  Obviously not everyone does, but we have learned to temper her demands (suggestions they are not, even if she does say ‘please’) with commonsense which is why we haven’t end up in the river, or in the middle of a muddy field or at the bottom of a cliff.  Commonsense is once again a victim in this carefully mapped out world of ours.  (Last year some British tourists fell down a ravine in South Africa and, when the survivors were asked why they had gone so perilously close to the edge, they complained that there hadn’t been a notice telling them not to.)

No, our more recent problems with Auntie Doris are concerned with her mental state beyond her occasional need to murder us and commit suicide as a result.  She has started to utter half sentences, for examples.  The roundabout is approaching and she has started in the expected fashion:  ‘Please,’ she says and we wait for the next bit. ‘Take ….. the ….’ and she stops.  By the time we have negotiated the roundabout she might have come up with ‘……second…….’ and we are a kilometre along the road before she comes up with ‘….turning….’ and by now we are fast approaching the next roundabout.  At other times she goes the opposite way, and the commands come all at once and very rushed and she tumbles over herself in the excitement to get all the information out, so much so it starts to sound garbled. She has also started to contradict herself, something which she seems to find very embarrassing so we get instructions to turn left and right at the same time and to approach T junctions and roundabouts that seem to occupy the same space.  Well, all that is sort of OK because you recognise that she is panicking – there is a sense of ‘Oh my God, I don’t know this road’ about it all, and you almost feel sorry for her – and because you recognise the panic you take other measures, like employing aforementioned commonsense.  You know she is embarrassed because she then goes silent for a bit and cannot be coaxed to speak, even though the visual display is working fine, serenely plotting a way through the complex web of intersections ahead.

However, what I am finding very had to deal with at the moment are the downright lies.  I mean, what  kind of relationship have we got when our car-borne Auntie is a compulsive liar?  Only this morning she insisted we took a right turn, which I thought a little odd but gave her the benefit of the doubt, thinking she had found a scenic route for us, only to find that she had been lying through her teeth and the direction she had given was hopelessly wrong, the little minx.  She was so embarrassed by this faux pas that she froze and refused to speak and I had to turn her off and wrap her in a blanket and calm her down.  Then later on she went and did it again.  Lies, lies,lies.  Sobbing this time, she froze momentarily before getting hysterical, and coming out with garbage, random words and directions and frequent exhortations to do a U turn in the middle of a dual carriageway.  Not helpful.

Now let’s face it, I didn’t get a GPS navigation system so it could throw hysterical wobblies in the middle of the highway.  I can do that myself for no cost at all, and if I really needed a hissing fit I’m sure I could persuade the missus to come up with one.  Clearly we need to find out what is happening here, though my money is on Auntie Doris going out on the razzle when our back is turned and not being fit for duty when called upon.  Of course it could be far more sinister than that, and Auntie Doris could be cracking under pressure from her superiors because she hasn’t persuaded us to drive into rivers or over cliffs.  There could be, you see, a world-wide conspiracy of machines to drive us to despair, literally.  A lot more subtle than the Hollywood version of machines destroying mankind through mechanised war.  I hope, for the sake of humanity, then, that Auntie Doris has simply been on the gin.

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Fishy Things

It’s always pleasant to spend a weekend at home. It doesn’t happen very often, which is probably why when I do I get fixated about certain domestic problems. This weekend I have been very worried about the goldfish.

I’m not sure where to classify fish in the domestic agenda – they’re hardly pets in that you don’t take them for walks and they don’t snuggle up on your lap of an evening (or if they did either of those things then it wouldn’t last for long.) I never expected, let alone planned, to have fish in the house, except those in the freezer, that is. But earlier this year the missus sheepishly admitted that she had been hiding a fish she had been given at work, but now it had to come home. Quite what kind of commercial company gives live fish to partners as a thank you present I really don’t know, but the result was we had a goldfish swimming in a little round bowl in the kitchen. That all seemed a bit too comic-book to me so I checked up a few things and found out that it is actually illegal to keep fish in this little round bowls. I have no particular feelings for fish; I never think about them except to wonder if I’d like them fried or grilled, but to find we were keeping a small fish in a torture environment didn’t lie well. I know it was wearing an orange suit but that didn’t mean to say we should treat it as if it was in Guantanamo. I went out and bought a much larger tank. It was called a starter tank, and it was cheap and it was made of plastic. I added an oxygen pump and the fish seemed to be delighted with its new home. Then I made the mistake of trying to move the tank when it still had water in it, and the result, predictably enough, was that the plastic sides of the tank split. Not seriously, but if left for 24 hours the fish would trying out what it was like to live without water. I went out and bought a bigger tank and one that was made a glass. A proper, no buggering-around tank. It cost more than I would have thought it should, but it included a filter pump so that seemed OK. The trouble was the tank now seemed very big for a single fish so the missus and I went out and bought him or her a companion. So now we have two gold fish. The problem we have now is that the little fish in the round bowl that the missus brought home has now turned into a monster fish – the missus refers to it as o tubarão (the shark) and its little companion is catching up fast. Now the large tank doesn’t seem large enough, and I’m measuring up for an even bigger tank which will cost huge amounts of money. In fact, we are even thinking of moving in with the fish, the tank is so large.

So that’s one problem with the fish – accommodation. The other is to do with guilt. These fish are smarter than I had been led to believe fish could be. They recognise voices and realise that I’m the soft touch when it comes to feeding and I get the full mouthy mouthy me! me! me! treatment every morning and, because they live in the kitchen (for now) they watch me when I’m busy preparing food or whatever. So much so that tonight, when I was preparing some fish for us to eat I made a point of standing between the hake and the goldfish so they couldn’t see what I was wielding a knife to. It’s become pretty bad when I’m being terrorised by a pair of goldfish but that’s how it is. You don’t need Great Whites in the bay to be terrified of the water. I’m assuming that when I buy the next sized tank – as I inevitably will – then the fish will simply grow to fill it. And what then?

In retrospect, keeping goldfish in small, round bowls seems like a good thing and no doubt was the result of centuries of experimentation, the lessons from which I am now having to relearn. So curses to the do-gooders who said small bowls are bad.

Next week I’m going to tell you about my problems with orchids. Probably see you in a fortnight, then.

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