More good news! Not a huge item, but all gifts are welcome and will not be returned to sender. “Thank you for letting me know, Pedro,” I said. “We will probably outsource her bookkeeping function and halve the cost at the same time. No panic. Please have Conchita do what she can in the meantime; I expect to be back on either Thursday or Friday and will have a chat with her then. And by the way, Pedro, I said, I urgently need some quotes for a full repair of our crane. As soon as possible. And while we're about it, a couple of quotes for fixing the Mahon Star's top deck. And if you can manage to persuade them at short notice to come and take a look at the work to be done while the ship is in Palma tomorrow, that would be fantastic.”
Another of my mottos: never delay anything unless there is good reason to do so. Cash is still pouring out of the window here every day.
“I'll do my best,” said Pedro.
As Agustín stood up to leave, I asked him if it would be possible for me to travel back on his ship on Wednesday night if I needed to. Of course it would be possible for the boss to travel on his ship, he said. I was welcome to travel with him and his crew anywhere and at any time.
Good. I would try to make it on Wednesday. That way both ships' crews would have seen their new boss in jeans and without a tie, and they would also have seen that, in spite of being the boss, he was also a fairly normal guy. Important they think that, irrespective of its veracity.
I drank some coffee with Fernando and discussed which methods might be best to try and recuperate some of our 40-ton business.
And then it was time for the dockworkers' midday break and their much vaunted leader sauntered into our office. The sauntering was accompanied by an aura of surliness typical in uneducated humans of his ilk who, unable to be of much practical use to anyone anywhere, decide to spend their few short decades on the planet reviling and obstructing anything and anybody connected to what they refer to as 'the representatives of capital'. I tend to feel sorry for these poor, unfortunate specimens, half of their brains are missing or, as my father would have put it, 'thee'r all bone from t'neck oop', and so I addressed him as if he were a normal human being.
What is your opinion, I commenced, on the need for seventeen dockers to handle these small-capacity ships of ours. He didn't hesitate. Our opinion is the opposite to yours, he replied. And after making a few unsuccessful attempts to achieve a conversation of any kind, I thanked him for his time and terminated the meeting. It was either that or smash him in the face. But the latter does not form part of my character, and even if it did, I am, as I have previously mentioned, of a cowardly nature and wouldn't attempt it even with somebody less muscular than he was.
Zero success on the dockworkers' front both in Palma and Barcelona. More than a disappointment, those costs were one of our major problems. We would have to listen to some professional advice as to whether we could force the issue legally in any way, and I asked Fernando to find a decent lawyer over the course of the next few days.
I also asked him to urgently contact as many shipping agents as he could and try to fix me up as far as possible with some appointments for tomorrow and Wednesday. I wanted to see if yesterday's brainwave had any chance of becoming reality, or whether it was simply a dream solution born out of ignorance. We have a whole ship, I told Fernando, available for regular container cargo transport. I assume he thought I was referring to one of the ships already lying idle, no need to enlighten him just yet.
In an hour's time I had a not very easy meeting to get through with this pallet rental company. I had some quick tapas and a glass of white wine in a café to which I will never return. No air conditioning, two ineffectual fans in the ceiling futilely stirring the air around and about, and the floor strewn with even more garbage than you usually find in this kind of place in Spain. But worst of all, it was full of modern youth, some whisking away on their mobile screens, others concentrating on typing meaningless text messages, still more of them actually telephoning, shouting as usual in complete disregard for other guests of the establishment and - needless to say - completely ignoring each other at the same time. The Y generation is what it is called, except that I call it the visual display zombie generation, the predecessor to the Z generation. The latter will have chips implanted into their brains at birth, thus voiding the annoying need for today’s pesky hardware requirements: mobile phones, charging cables, T.Vs, desktops, laptops, tablets, google-glasses, video games, the cinema, computer wristwatches, and any other screen activities of which I may be unaware. They will be able to program their own dreams as well, including erotic ones if they wish, thus facilitating their fairly meaningless journeys from birth to death in a way that is not yet possible today.
* * * * *
I took a taxi to the pallet company which was in the Granvía industrial estate in Sabadell, a grotty satellite town about 20 kilometers northwest of Barcelona.
Life certainly can be weird. Preternatural as well. Here we have a mentally sick person who has somehow managed to trigger meetings of the U.K. government and also a global summit meeting to deal with the subject of how the human race might convert itself into a more intelligent and non-aggressive one. And here we also have a person like me, sitting in a taxi, earning money for communicating with said madman, knowing that it is all a load of cobblers, pure fantasy, and therefore continuing to spend my time and energy on the task of returning a loss-making shipping company to profitability. In exchange for money of course.
The taxi dropped me off exactly where it was supposed to, no problem these days with satellites beaming the necessary info non-stop earthwards. Worldwide Logistics was the unoriginal and probably misleading name of the company, and I had plenty of time to smoke a cigarette before going inside.
It was basically a big warehouse with an office area accessible through a small side door. There was no reception area and no receptionist, blonde or otherwise. There were some people sitting at their desks staring at their computer screens and they paid no attention to me, absolutely zero. I stood there for a minute and I watched them. Nobody stirred. If I were a possible big new customer, it didn't interest them. If I were a possible existing customer with a query, it didn't bother them. If I were a person wishing to place a huge order for goods or services, that would be my problem. And if I were to be seen placing a massive bomb with a short fuse on the floor and walking toward the exit door, they wouldn't have moved much either. You get human beings like these; they would provide a useful theme for a doctorate dissertation on the relationship between neurological inertia and social decay. Finally, a guy came marching through from a partitioned office at the back of the building, shook my hand and led me back to his lair.
"Sr. O'Donoghue, Naviera Pujol, the pallets," he said without further ado.
"Yes," I replied. "Thank you for finding the time to receive me at such short notice."
"My pleasure, my pleasure," he said, "and what can we do for you?"
As if he didn't know. "I wish to discuss the termination of our contract," I said.
"No problem. Can be done at year-end. You return the pallets in good condition. End of story."
"Or we buy them," I said.
"Yes, that is contractually possible also."
"What do the pallets cost?"
"Oh…whatever the new pallet price is at year-end."
O.K., so he was one of those. An asinine piece of nastiness. One of those rotting turds which the ocean waves occasionally wash into your face as you float peaceably by on the currents of your life. Fair enough, no sweat, a turd is a turd and no-one had taken the trouble to swill this one down into the sewers. So the task now fell to me.
"We are not going to pay new prices for second-hand pallets. They are an average of eight years old and cost a fraction of what new pallets are worth today."
"Then you will have to return them. In good condition," he said.
"And we are not going to return them either," I said.
"Then you will have to continue paying
the rental charges."
"And we are not going to do that either."
He remained composed, he wasn't worried. He was in possession of a watertight contract signed by that imbecile, Alfonso. He picked up a pencil and started tapping it on his desk. "That would create a bad situation," he said.
"Yes, it would," I replied. "However, to avoid that bad situation, I am prepared to offer you the equivalent of nine months' rental charges to terminate the contract. That amount coincides with my estimate of the value of the pallets eight years ago and is a lot more, considering the depreciation, than their worth today."
"We cannot accept that," he said. "Nor is there anything in the contract which obliges us to do so."
"Then we have nothing further to discuss," I said and I stood up to leave.
"This will mean a court case," he said.
"Indeed it will. Expensive lawyers for you and expensive lawyers for me and you will be paying for both. In my opinion, that is. I look forward to meeting you there." And I turned and opened the door to the warehousing area.
"Wait…" He was a fast thinker and he knew when his bread was buttered and when it was not. "One year's rental charges," he said.
I paused for a moment as if I was thinking. "O.K.," I said, "I will go as far as that. You will need to send us a signed legal agreement to that effect, one which our lawyers can approve, and then we will make the payment which automatically voids the contract."
He nodded slowly, and I merely walked away and back out into the heat of the afternoon. There was no point in my wasting my time with pleasantries. Not that I had anything against the turd. A turd, as I have said, is a turd and you find them floating around here and there. But it’s not their fault, you can’t hold them responsible; the responsibility lies with whoever excreted them.
And to be fair, and we do try to be, he had had a brainless customer permanently tied into a remunerative contract and had exacted what he knew was the best he could obtain for losing it. A year, of course, was what I was prepared to pay in the first place. Otherwise we would have had to contractually pay rent until the year-end anyway, plus court-mandated compensation for not returning the pallets. But for less money than that, we were now free of the contract and there would be no more wasted expenditure in the future. I didn't think it was much of a bluff on my part about seeing him in court. Neither he nor I would have wanted to incur serious attorney costs. Nor did the Naviera have any lawyers to review the termination document he was going to send, nor did we want or need any. I would review that document myself and if it was satisfactory, I would merely have it notarized.
I walked along in the glaring sunshine to the neighboring building which was a bathroom equipment showroom, and asked the sales lady if she would mind calling a taxi for me. I gave her my sexiest smile and it was no problem.
It was just after five o'clock when I got back to the docks. Fernando was on the phone and I heard him trying to arrange a meeting for me with someone on the other end. I called Sr. Pujol to give him an update on my activities—not necessary, but always good to give the right impression—and he said let's meet at seven o'clock at your hotel and we can talk it over while enjoying some aperitifs on their terrace bar.
A great idea. This is a great country to be in from May through October. You can't talk business in the warm sunny evenings on terrace bars in Germany or in the U.K. or, if one wishes to be pedantic about it, very seldom. I waved goodbye to Fernando. He stopped in the middle of a phone call to someone else and said he would contact me later in the evening. That will be fine, I said.
Back at the hotel I showered, changed, and went down to the outdoor bar area. Sr. Pujol was already there. It had given me pleasure to inform him of the hotel I was staying in, he could see for himself how his expensive consultant was prepared to suffer while fixing the shit he couldn't fix himself. Chapter One in your book of 'The Cumulative Effects of Minor Psychological Finesses in Consultancy'.
He was seated at a table and looking through a menu. We shook hands, I sat down, a waiter appeared—quite a piece of luck in this place—and I ordered a very cold sherry. I had learned from the big bosses of a major sherry company in Jerez de la Frontera, where I had been invited one evening while on a project in that region a few years ago, that you should not drink sherry cold. When I protested that that was how it was always served to me, they smiled and said, yes, and that was the way they wanted to keep it, it increased consumption volumes. But, as a discerning person, they said, I should never drink it cold.
But I liked it cold, or at least decently chilled. So I am clearly not a discerning person. Too early for dinner, said Sr. Pujol, looking up from his menu, but how about some calamari to pick at and a nice bottle of white wine to go with it? I told him that that was a grand idea, except for the fact that I didn't like calamari, or squid, or octopus—I can't tell the difference—on account of my not particularly enjoying the taste of hot India rubber. My preference would be for some boquerones, if he didn't mind. And at least he laughed, albeit in his reptilian way, and ordered both.
"Close escape about an hour ago, don't you think?" he said.
"Close escape?"
"Yes, that meteorite that smashed into the Atlantic Ocean. A very big one, and it didn't completely burn up on its way in through the atmosphere. A bit bigger, and half of us wouldn't have been here in a few days' time. Makes you think."
A statement I could not agree with as my neurons were refusing to think. There was no point. They had decided that aliens were impossible, therefore Mr. Parker was an unheard of astronomy scholar, among other things, and ahead of his time by a long way. As were the Galileos, the da Vincis and the Einsteins in their time.
"Or if it had landed somewhere in Europe," continued Sr. Pujol, "half of us wouldn't be here already. Just imagine, no more Naviera problems. And no more boquerones and white wine." And he chuckled his reptilian chuckle. "Check it out later on, Sr. O’Donoghue, the television channels are full of it."
"I certainly will," I said. "And good to hear you say that the Naviera's problems and the white wine are preferable to the alternative."
"Too right," he said, "and anyway you are going to solve those problems, correct?" Another of those gruesome smiles of his. He probably eats grilled lizards for breakfast. Iguana, maybe.
"I don't know yet. I am working very fast, as I always do, but I won't have arrived at a conclusion until the end of next week."
"Well, hopefully it will be a positive one. Otherwise you will miss out on your company car."
"Company car?"
"Yes, it's a fairly decent BMW 5 Series station wagon. I gave Alfonso two weeks to return it. It should be back in about ten days' time."
Not bad. Perks are nice. More money for spending or investing.
"But you were going to give me an update, I believe," he continued.
"Yes," I said. "Some cost savings are under way and there are a couple of ways in which we can increase revenues. But those things will not get rid of the losses. I am looking at some really major initiatives but I have no idea whether they will turn out to be feasible. Certainly, it seems as if there is nothing we can do about the dockworkers' costs. But one thing I wanted to ask you about. If I can manage to free up one ship from the Mallorca run, is there any reason from your end as to why I shouldn't put it to work on another route?"
"You can do whatever you want," Sr. Pujol replied. "That is why I have hired you. I honestly don't care what you do, as long as you make the company viable again."
"O.K., well…thank you. Then we'll see how things work out. I will be letting you know by the end of next week whether I can fix things or not. But even if I can't, I would be happy to run the company for you until you resolve the situation by selling it or whatever."
That was already agreed, he said, and we finished off the food and the wine and we shook hands and he disappeared back into his own private world, inhabited no doubt by other members of the cold-blooded, lung-breathing vertebr
ates of the species Reptilia.
I smoked a cigarette, ordered a steak, and was finishing my coffee and another cigarette when my phone rang. It was Fernando. I have managed to fix four meetings for you tomorrow, he said, and one for Wednesday. He was trying for more on Wednesday, and he would text me the names, addresses and phone numbers and the times fixed for the meetings within the next few minutes. I thanked him for the good work and told him I wanted a maximum of three meetings for Wednesday, as I planned to travel back that evening on the Mahon Star. I'll fly back the week after if necessary, I said, to continue the search.
I went up to my room and switched on the television. It was full of the meteorite. There were also explanations of just about everything, including the differences between meteorites, asteroids and comets. They spoke about the Earth having been hit an estimated 350 times in the last 10,000 years by asteroids as large as the one which wasted 2,000 km2 of Siberia in the year 1908. And they cited the very high odds of millions of us being killed by asteroids during the next 10,000 years. And they talked about asteroids whose orbits we could track and forecast, and about why there was no guarantee it would stay that way because their trajectories were sometimes affected by gravitational aberrations in space about which we as yet had little knowledge.
And they talked about asteroid 2011 AG5, discovered in 2011 by Mount Lemmon astronomers in Arizona, USA, a high risk object which apparently could directly impact the Earth the next time around, which would be in February 2040. And while they were explaining that this particular matter had been on the agenda of the 49th. Session of the Scientific and Technical Subcommittee of the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space, something I judge to be a complete, utter and entire waste of everybody's time, I fell asleep.
DAY 40
The 2084 Precept Page 50