The 2084 Precept

by Anthony D. Thompson

  At lunchtime, Pedro came into my office. I am astounded, he said. Every single one of our customers, except for two of them who haven't yet replied, say that twice per week is more than sufficient to cover their needs. They have no need for a daily shipment service. I can't understand why Alfonso always insisted that everyone demanded a daily service.

  That's O.K., Pedro, I said, you were only 99% sure. And I gave him a broad smile to let him know that I wasn't being serious. It was interesting information, that's for sure, but it didn't tell me what I should now do about it. Mothball one of the ships? And no change in revenues?

  In the afternoon I had a meeting with our dockworkers. I explained the company's situation in some detail, exaggerating—probably unnecessarily—the extent of the predicament and I told them that severe and painful cost reductions were unavoidable. Unfortunately these reductions would have to affect all areas of the business including cargo operations. I would like to discuss, I said, the extent to which we could reduce the headcount requirement for loading and unloading our ships.

  No, they replied, that is not a matter which is open to discussion. I told them that we had no option. If we could not reduce the number of people handling our cargo, then we would be obliged to reduce the number of times they had to handle it. Another lie, honest person though I am. Bad for them, bad for the company, I continued, but if there were would be no other options. No, they said, there was no point in discussing it.

  Typical communists, they would rather see all of their jobs disappear instead of sacrificing a few to save the rest.

  Well, I had tried. I was not really getting anywhere at all; a consultant who could find no solutions. Life is hard, but we shall, of course, plod on for a while.

  The captain, Antonio, came to fetch me twenty minutes before departure. I picked up my suitcase and we strolled over to the ship. He showed me to his cabin and when I protested, he said please not, this was tradition, the ship owners' representative always got the captain's cabin, and he was insisting on it. The cabin proved to be little more than a cubbyhole and a fairly humid one at that. It had a dank smell to it and the sheets on the bed felt damp, but I suppose I should have been grateful. Antonio slept here every night for five months on end until he got his month's shore leave. I decided I didn't want to see what the crew's accommodation was like.

  DAY 37

  The cabin contributed to my spending most of the night on the bridge, despite the Tramontana which started blowing just after midnight, that violent north to north-westerly wind which comes down from the Pyrenees and not infrequently at storm strength. This made the sea pretty rough and in these ships you knew all about it—they were not cruise ships—but, thank goodness, no storm arrived on this occasion. Which was good news for cowardly creatures such as myself.

  It was interesting on the bridge. The radar screen was covered in small dots, most of which at this time of the year were recreational yachts and other small vessels en route from somewhere to somewhere else. The seaman on the bridge had me worried at first. He spent most of his time sitting on a stool watching the television, which was on a table at the rear of the bridge station, in other words he had his back both to the bridge window, if that is what you call it, and to the radar screen. I, however, watched the radar screen like a hawk and called him over whenever one of the dots appeared to be approaching or about to cross the path of our ship in close proximity. He would get up, stare at the screen for a while, say no problem, and go back to his television. In the end I gave up, I was obviously merely annoying him.

  And so the ship continued for most of the time on auto-pilot and nothing much happened. Antonio eventually appeared and took over to guide the ship into Barcelona harbor. We docked at around 6 a.m. and Friday had become Saturday.

  Antonio took me and my suitcase to a seamen's café and I paid for two of his carejillos as thanks for his hospitality. I personally stuck to cortados, those espresso type coffees with a splash of milk. Around 7 o'clock our Barcelona supervisor walked in. Then there was more coffee while he and I introduced ourselves to each other and talked about this and that. His name was Fernando García Hernandez and he came from Andalusia. His skin was that pleasant permanent tan colour which a lot of Andalusians have. He spoke with his region's dialect (they pronounce most 's's as 'th' and so on). He was a tall, gangly young fellow, smartly dressed and hair glued into place by one of those gel products with which I am not acquainted, and with which I never will be acquainted, thank you very much. I didn't much like him. He struck me as a guy whose job here involved him in minimal work, for which he was—as I had determined from the payroll summary María had given me—overpaid, and which, I surmised, allowed him to lead a happy and enjoyable life in this exceedingly personable city, probably in female company for most of the time. He was, how should I put it, too facile for my liking. All of which might be pure unadulterated crap, sheer invention on my part. Just my initial impressions, is all.

  He had nothing of any value to say other than to complain that seventeen dockworkers for ships of this size was ludicrous. He was right about that at least. I asked him to fix up a meeting for me on Monday with the dockworkers' boss. Preferably around midday if possible, I said, I have an insurance company meeting in the morning and a visit to our pallets provider in the afternoon. Shouldn't be a problem he said. And then he drove me to my hotel—a cheap one, I have to set the tone, I am sacrificing myself because of the company's situation, and the rest of them will soon start having to do the same—and I went up to my room and straight into bed to catch up on some sleep.

  I slept like a dead rat until Jeremy's phone woke me at three in the afternoon.

  "Great news for you, Peter," he said.

  "Ah, it's always good to hear something like that, Jeremy. What is it?"

  "My professor has communicated that, in view of developments, in view of my practical involvement in this planet's affairs, all further interviews with you can be voided. He said that I am already strongly on track with my research and that my doctorate dissertation is likely to turn out to be an outstanding one."

  "Well, Jeremy," I said, politeness to the fore, "I can't say I am sorry about that, much as I enjoy your company."

  "I thought you might say that, Peter. I knew you weren't enjoying our meetings at all, relatively short ones though they were. And of course, the fact that there are no more interviews means that all conditions have been met for the remaining €400,000 as per our verbal contract. I will be transferring that amount to your account before the end of the day."

  Unbelievable. Unless something went wrong, I would now be receiving a total of €700,000 sometime next week. Which just goes to show that although you would never particularly want to meet deranged persons, let alone have a relationship with them, business or otherwise, there are exceptions to every rule.

  "Jeremy, let me say that I appreciate it very much. And let me say also, that because my participation has been considerably more restricted than originally envisaged, you have erred somewhat on the side of generosity."

  "Perhaps, Peter. But let me say that your assistance was invaluable. It was concise, it was precise, you triggered the summit meeting and it has benefitted me just as much as if more work had been involved. So…congratulations! Spend some of the money and take good care of the rest! And goodbye for now. Enjoy the asteroid!"

  Well what do you do? I mean really. Huge amounts of money. Asteroids all over the place. One of them massively impacting the planet. But hurting nobody. Well, in my case, what you do is you avoid some major foaming at the mouth by closing down the hatch on all neuron functions, you go out to eat in the late afternoon, you drink too much wine and you come back to the hotel and you slide languidly into one of their plush barstools and you sink three of their inferior single malts. Enjoyably, needless to say, even an inferior single malt is still a single malt. And if someone should say that alcoholic abstinence is a good thing, I would reply that I hold the same view, providing, as with
many other things, that it is practiced in moderation. And while I was being moderate, I was thinking about the piles and piles of banknotes heading my way and I wallowed non-stop in that glorious and sumptuous feeling I assume most rich people enjoy. Or perhaps they don't, perhaps only some of them do. Rich people, after all, are simply poor people who happen to have a lot of money.

  And then I went back to my room, I read my book and I fell asleep waiting for Sunday to arrive.

  DAY 38

  Which it did. Arrive, I mean. Nothing had occurred to interrupt our habitat’s twirling and spinning around on itself. The day of rest. The day for which Americans have rooms. The day on which, according to certain religions and their various correlated sects, the creator rested after a job well done. A job which apparently required some serious repair work eons and eons later, the success of which each individual has the right to judge for him or herself. This right was provided to us as part of the gift of free will, or so they say, except of course that we are now instructed to be very careful about what opinions we decide to adopt and which of them we decide to broadcast. I personally have nothing against free will. Each and every human judges and thinks differently anyway. Look at the number of hung juries.

  The fact that free will also serves as the perfect excuse for blaming the created for everything, rather than the creator, is merely a happy coincidence for those in the know, those peculiarly robed persons who preach this amazing knowledge to the rest of us.

  But this was not a day of rest for me. Certainly I had some breakfast, such as it was—no poached eggs, no bacon, and no Chivers in this place—certainly I had a swim in the sea, but not in the pool, the hotel didn't have one—and certainly in the evening I went to a bar, nightclub is possibly a better word for it in view of the ratio of women to men, the prices of their drinks, and the quasi-naked females gyrating around on a miniature stage.

  But all of this time I was working. That is to say, I my neurons were working. They were searching and searching and searching for possible solutions to the Naviera situation. And it wasn't until about 10 p.m.—and curiously enough at precisely the moment a female hand removed itself from my inner thigh and began some sensual caressing of that part of me whose reflexive reaction to her ministrations had become unavoidably apparent—that my neurons' bells began to ring. And they rang and they rang and they rang. Joyful, victorious chimes. Which provoked me into ordering yet another of this bar’s single malts—I was drinking one of the Islay malts, a 16 year-old Lagavulin, not bad at all—and the lady got another expensive glass of champagne, or maybe it was a mixture of fizzy water and a cordial, who cares, and, euphoric as I was, I permitted her to continue doing what she was doing until the danger of it becoming a messy business became too great.

  She gave me a kiss—on the cheek; never, ever on the client's mouth, they are not stupid—and was already eyeing the room for another frustrated member—no pun intended or required—of the male sex as I paid the bill and pushed my way through the heavy curtains and back out into the street. I took a taxi back to the hotel and went up to my room.

  My neurons had come up with the following: I had to take one of the two ships completely off the Barcelona-Palma route and find full-time work for it somewhere else. Easier said than done of course. But nobody, so far as I am aware, has ever maintained that the easy solutions are always the best ones. The other ship would then only do the Balearic run three times per week, but it would be running at full capacity instead of half, so no loss in revenues. And…we would only be paying for three days' dockers' work instead of six. And…the entire costs of the newly non-operational ship and its respective dockworkers' loading operations would disappear until we found profitable work for it again. The savings on fuel, maintenance, crew wages and loading costs alone would go a long way toward solving the company's financial situation in one fell swoop.

  I would have to do some exact calculations next week, not that they would affect what now appeared to be an unalterable decision. The aim of course had to be to find regular work again for the newly-idled ship. This would result in a doubling of the company's revenues, or close to it; instead of merely resolving a loss situation, it would catapult the organization into being a highly profitable one. And if we were successful over the next few months in stealing some of the 40-ton business away from our Barcelona-Palma competitors—I would have to investigate how we might go about trying to do that—I could fix up one of the long-term idle ships and put it back into operation. And longer-term, there must be ways for the remaining idle ship to generate full revenues as well. But that would be something for the future, not an item to worry about now.

  I thanked my neurons, I thanked them very much indeed. But they didn’t reply, they are not very educated, and I fell into that pleasant world of malt whiskey-induced dreams.

  DAY 39

  This kind of latitude has a lot to say for it. The sun was shining again, I had no hangover and I took a taxi directly to the insurance company's offices. I had a coffee nearby, there is always somewhere nearby to have a coffee in Spain, I smoked a pre-meeting cigarette, and I entered the company's reception area at approximately two minutes before the appointed hour.

  The girl at reception was one of those blonde Catalan women you see quite a few of—I speculated that at some point in history a fair share of the local females were duly raped by invaders or by the foreign powers who happened to be ruling this area at the time, maybe by the Visigoths, maybe by the Habsburgs, maybe by both or maybe by more. Or maybe nobody had raped them, I had no idea. It was mere idle speculation on my part. It filled in the time as she walked me along to the insurance executive's office.

  The executive was not as tall as me, but he was tall, and he was a very business-like executive. He had a thick file in front of him on his desk, 'our' file obviously, and he got straight to the point. The insurance claim investigation had necessarily been a prolonged one, he said, due among many things to a question of possible inebriation on the part of the ship's captain and, totally irrespective of that, a question of possible gross negligence in the matter of how and why the ship was driven onto Cabrera's rocks in the absence of any kind of weather conditions which might have been considered a contributory factor.

  He paused and looked up from his file. I looked back at him. I knew what he was thinking and I didn't blame him. I was thinking the same.

  However, he continued, viable proof on these and other matters had not been forthcoming, at least nothing which would have held up in a court of law. The claim file had therefore eventually been closed in favor of Naviera Pujol S.A. Three months ago in fact. So why wasn't the Naviera informed, I asked, and why hasn't the claim been settled? Ah…he replied, finalization for settlement purposes is also a process which requires a certain amount of time…but you will be pleased to hear that there is de facto no longer anything standing in the way of an immediate and full payment of this claim.

  I did not show any elation at this unexpected piece of great news. I didn't show any emotions at all. I knew exactly what it was all about. These insurance companies delay settlement of all and any insurance claims for as long as they reasonably and legally can. At any given point in time they probably have hundreds of millions, maybe more, sitting in interest-earning or dividend-paying assets instead of sitting where they should be sitting, namely in the accounts of their clients. These dividend and interest amounts are simply additional revenues, with no additional cost involved. 100% profit. Of course it doesn't work with clients who stay on the ball and continuously monitor their claim situation and regularly demand written updates of the status. But these are a minority and Naviera Pujol was not among them. And from what I had seen of the Naviera so far, nor would I have expected it to be.

  So when do you expect to make the transfer, I asked. Oh, it will be sometime this week already, he said.

  And that was the end of the meeting. I thanked him for his time, he thanked me for coming, and I was smoking a celebration cig
arette within seconds of hitting the street. A painless meeting, no work involved, hardly any time wasted, and €3.4 million coming our way! Now, this week!

  A fantastic piece of luck at last and one I was sorely in need of. I was already working out what would happen to that money. First of all, both the crane and the Mahon Star's top deck would be fixed. Both of these items would create immediate additional revenue potential and the payback would be an unbeatable one, months, not years. I might spend a bit more of the money on some sales and marketing activity to speed up the recuperation of some of the 40-ton container business. And then the remainder would be stashed away in bonds or other income-generating investments.

  However, I would not be spending any money fixing our idle ships' engine and dry dock problems before I had worked out how to have them generating revenues. But I would prepare for the eventuality by obtaining two or three quotes for the engine repair in the meantime. And I would not tell Sr. Pujol that we would ourselves be able to cover the next few months' cash flow requirements; let the group continue paying for that until the company, hopefully, became profitable. Yes, this was similar to the insurance company's trick. But business is business; and as in most everything else on this planet, it is the survival of the fittest.

  I took a taxi to our dock offices. The Mahon Star, having enjoyed its Sunday day of leisure in port, was being unloaded. The ship's captain, Agustín, was in the office chatting with Fernando about which containers should be loaded onto the lower deck this afternoon. So I said good morning and let them continue and sat down on a chair in the corner to flip through my emails until they had finished. And then my company mobile rang. It was Pedro. María del Carmen had called in early this morning with her resignation, he said. She wouldn't be returning to the office.