Diary of a Grumpy Old Git (11 page)

How do these delivery men manage to leave their cards and disappear so quickly after ringing your bell? Are they somehow bending the laws of time and space? Forget the Large Hadron Collider,
it’s delivery men we should be studying. If we can work out how they operate we might be able to unlock the very secrets of the universe.

I glanced at Jo’s screen as I was walking past her desk today, and saw she was looking at a website called Pitchfork.

I sneaked a look at the site when I got back to my desk. It turns out this is the place she gets all those obscure bands from. I followed a few links, listened to a couple of albums and before I
knew it I was doing something cool again for the first time in about twenty years.

I even managed to casually drop the names of the bands to Jo later on, and she seemed impressed.

It’s so easy to be cool now. In my day, you’d have to read an inky music paper, walk down to a dingy record shop, hand a tenner over to the sneering staff, carry a massive slab of
vinyl home and lift it carefully on to your turntable. Now all you have to do is click your mouse and you’re a hipster.

This is embarrassing. There was a card on my chair when I got into work this morning. I was so surprised I had to go into the toilets to open it. Inside was a Hello Kitty
Valentine’s card which read, ‘Love from ?’

No need for the question mark. It’s obvious who put it there. But was Jo sending it ironically? She must have been, but I couldn’t bring myself to talk about it with her. What if I
told her it was a good joke, and she was actually being serious? I’d be throwing away my first genuine chance of something happening since the separation.

But she can’t have been serious, can she? She must be twenty years younger than me. She probably didn’t even exist on my eighteenth birthday. Not that she missed anything. I should
have waited until the following Saturday for the party. I don’t know why I expected anyone to turn up on a Tuesday.

Whenever Jo looked over at me for the rest of the day, I turned back to my screen. I couldn’t say anything. I wasn’t even good at this stuff when I was the right age for it.

I need to take my mind off all this right now. I think I’ll start my
Sopranos
box set. HBO will make everything all right.

I’ve got my first meeting with TC Waste Solutions on Monday, so I spent all of today reading their website. It was so boring I had to reward myself with a game of Scrabble
every time I finished a paragraph. They do everything from small pedal bins to industrial waste compactors and I had to read about the lot.

I spent quite a lot of time wondering what would make someone set up a business like this in the first place. What sort of life experience would drive you to something so boring?

On the bus home I found that I could name almost every type of bin we drove past. I need to stop filling my head with all this crap. Sooner or later I’m going to force out something
important.

I’m like a pathetic teenager. A girl sends me a Valentine’s Day card as an obvious joke and I spend all evening fretting about whether she was serious. Of course she
wasn’t serious. She’s never serious about anything.

But what if she meant it? It’s clearly up to me to make the next move, but what am I supposed to do? I can’t get my best friend to tell her I fancy her because I’m not at
school any more and I don’t have a best friend. I can’t wait for the DJ to play ‘Careless Whisper’ because we’re not in nightclub and it’s not the eighties. I
can’t even ask for her number because I sit next to her every day.

I think you’re supposed to ask someone on a date these days. But there’s no way I can make myself do that. Surely there’s some sort of Facebook button you can click that does
all that for you now.

I need to stop thinking about it and get some sleep. I’ve arranged the redelivery of my decking for tomorrow and I’ll need to run the race of my life to reach the front door before
the delivery man pisses off.

I was so stressed about missing the doorbell that I woke up at six and waited in the hall. I sat staring at the door like a Russian hitman, knowing that I’d have just
seconds to react when the time came.

I feel asleep at noon, only to be woken up a few minutes later by the sound of the doorbell and a card being shoved through the letterbox. I jumped to my feet, threw open the door and chased the
delivery van down the street. I caught it at the lights and stood in front of it, demanding that they either come back and deliver my decking or run me over and put me out of my misery.

They reversed down the street, plonked the cardboard boxes in front of my door and handed over a touchscreen so battered and insensitive that I gave up on my signature and drew a picture of a
house instead. It doesn’t matter, because they’ll never need proof that I signed for the boxes. Even if they contain nests of wasps I wouldn’t go through the hassle of getting
them to come back and collect them.