Gurriers (95 page)

Receptionists are another kettle of fish altogether; those bitches can track you down! If they’re an account, you’re caught. They will be straight on to the base with their tale of woe, which will always be hugely exaggerated by them. Any courier that doesn’t have his counter exaggeration ready could find himself barred from that account while the bitch is told that he’s been fired. Being barred from an account does have a negative effect on your wages, but not much and the courier has the bonus of never again having to face whatever hag is responsible.

The ironic thing about this scenario is that if the company did fire a courier because of a receptionist she would be much more likely to have to face him again if an account of his new employer did business with the company that she works in.

In other words, they’re better off being lied to.

If an account sends you in to deliver where the bitch works, all she has to do is open the envelope and make a phone call to whoever sent you there. This can be worse for the courier, because by the time the base hears about the incident it will probably have been doubly exaggerated: once by the offended receptionist and then again by the account when ringing to complain.

Everybody exaggerates when complaining. Always! Unless, of course, there happens to be a cool and courier-friendly receptionist in the account who will sympathetically cajole the complainer and then take no further action. Or maybe even a receptionist who has had a brief fling with a courier that has some emphatic insight into their world, possibly one of my exes!

The potential weapon in my hand had been sent by Prescon in Sandyford. The receptionist in Prescon was not an ex of mine and never would be. She was a sour and snotty old fucker of a courier-hating geebag that would relish in reporting an incident to the base controller and would undoubtedly over exaggerate the complaint, thus making the incident sound a lot worse than it actually was. That might have deterred me under normal circumstances, but not today.

I could feel my knuckles whiten with the force of my grip on the package in the second or two that it took me to determine its trajectory. There was no question that there was going to be a trajectory; this envelope was going to be flung somewhere and hard. And there they where, standing on end like a beacon beside the cradle of the phone on the lower level of the reception - a tall packet of cheap ginger nut biscuits, open at the top and eaten about halfway through the 30% extra free marking on the wrapper. This target was so perfect that there was less than a second between me noticing them and the package leaving my hand at speed. It was a perfect shot.

The envelope hit the biscuits in the middle of the packet. Every biscuit above the impact point was propelled upwards through the open end of the packet to rain down upon the reception area. The rest of the biscuits were trapped under the hurtling envelope and slid the entire width of the reception desk with them, knocking every document and piece of stationery out of the way except those that were caught up with them and dragged off the side of the reception to come crashing to the floor.

The crash got the receptionist’s attention first and she spun further away from me. In the split second that she was looking at the mess on the floor prior to focussing on the cause, I toyed with the notion of staying there and asking her to sign for it to piss her off even more. I thought it better not to and by the time she turned around I had also and had taken my first stomp towards the door.

Time for you to look at my back, bitch! I thought.

“Excuse me! You courier, what are you doing? Come back here at once!

I’m going to report you,” She switched back to her conversation on the phone, “I’ll call you later, mom.”

The door was booted open with a high front kick delivered with enough force to take a lot of ordinary doors off their hinges. Thank God RTE didn’t skimp on materials when they were building the radio building!

That’s the last time that fucker‘ll turn her back on a busy courier. I thought.

I was still fuming as I delivered to the sports and social club, but the receptionist there was gorgeous, friendly and also wore a cheerful smile, which is undoubtedly the best diffuser of male nastiness. More importantly, I had her full and undivided attention from the second that I walked into the building until the moment I left.

Because my route brought me so far into the RTE complex, I had decided to use the back entrance before even entering the complex. After the episode with the bitch in the radio building, I probably would have used the gate to exit it anyway, just in case the snivelling cow had been on the phone to the security guards at the main entrance, given that people tend to react a lot more negatively towards couriers who misbehave.

There was no security at the back gate because it needed a four digit code to open it.

This might pose a problem to some people, but not couriers.

Such snippets of time-saving (and indeed trouble–avoiding) information only have to be found out by one courier. Within 24 hours every courier in one company knows the number; within a week every courier in the city knows it. I had never used this gate before, but I had the code written with many other such codes on the inside of the cover of my signature book. It worked and before I knew it I was on Aylesbury Road at the back of Donnybrook Church heading for the nightmare junction with Adelaide Road at the side of the church just before the main junction of the N11 at the start of Donnybrook Village.

Basically, at this junction, one two-lane road (Aylesbury) meets another two- lane road (Adelaide) at a sort of T-junction which transforms, over a very short distance, into one four-lane road just before it meets the main thoroughfare into the city from south. The net result is lots of traffic coming up to a light that is red more than green with vehicles in every lane looking to go every direction. There is always a lot of traffic here and it is usually extremely bad tempered.

I was looking to go through Donnybrook Village, which
meant a trek from the far left lane all the way over to the far right lane. I had to get as much right as forward over a distance of about 20 metres. This is where my next rage episode occurred.

The lights at the N11 junction had just turned red and the cars were slowly shunting forwards to their final positions to wait for green. Effectively, there were four gaps moving backwards in traffic that was going nowhere until the next change of lights. This is one of the better scenarios for a bike to get across some lanes, as long as the cars across the intended path have the patience to let the bike through the gap before moving forwards. The vast majority of them do. One prick didn’t this day.

He was a fat, ignorant business type bastard in some big fancy Nissan. He was in the third lane across and obviously spotted what I was at from my movements across the other two lanes, aiming to cross in front of him when the car in front moved the three or so metres that it could. I could hear his engine revving as my front wheel cleared the car in the second lane across, just as the car in front of him began to move. I knew that there was attitude here, but I had more than enough of my own to counter his. I was going across in front of him whether he fucking liked it or not! I swung the bike to my left and accelerated hard for a split second to get momentum to swing right as close as possible to the back of the car in front of the dickhead. The dickhead had also begun accelerating forward at the earliest moment possible and, because of his own ignorant impatience, had to brake as soon as I swung in front of him. He beeped and when I glared at him, he gave me the slow, disappointed shake of the head.

I snapped.

I lifted my right foot off the footrest, flung the bike to my right and nailed the throttle wide open. Because of my position, the back right footpeg took a chunk out of the left corner of his front bumper. The force of this kicked my back wheel to the left which knocked me almost perpendicular across the front of his car. His look went from smugness to outrage in an instant, but I wasn’t finished.

I sidekicked my right foot into the front of his car three times,
as I drove across the front of it into the gap that had opened up - and been left - in the last lane across. His grill was smashed in two places and his right headlight broken to pieces by the time I had finished with him.

When I stopped at the red light two cars up, I positioned myself in such a way as to make eye contact with him, delivering a slow, deliberate, one finger salute to him as he ranted and raved into his mobile phone. My right foot hurt like hell though.

“Four Sean, four.”

“Yeah, go ahead.”

“Where are you now and what have you got left to do?”

“Just dropped Morehampton Road, heading for Leeson Street, Wilton Place, IDA Pearse and then over to the IFSC and O’Connell Street.”

“Wha’ happened in RTE?”

”Three drops goin’ through and then out the back gate. No problems.”

“Giz a signature for the radio drop from Prescon.”

“I just left it with the receptionist ‘cos she was busy.”

“That’s not what Hannah from Prescon says.” “Ah, ye know what that old cunt is like, man. I dropped the envelope on the desk and a packet of biscuits fell over. I apologised with a wave and left.”

“Come in and see John after ye drop Wilton.”

“Roger.”

“Oh and Four Sean?”

“Go ahead.”

“Youngs’ll give ye one for Symantec in Blanch’.”

“Roger.”

Bastard! He knew how much I hated Blanchardstown. My next run was obviously a punishment thanks to that old fucker in Prescon. I vowed to myself the next time I had to pick up or deliver there I would take a detour through one of the surrounding housing estates, find some dogshit to get all over my boots and walk in a zig-zag pattern across the carpet from the door to her reception desk, being sure to twist my feet with every step I
took to ensure maximum stink factor. That old cow was going to pay for me being sent to Blanch.

Naoise, Joe, Five Alan and Ten Al were in the base when I limped in.

“What happened to you, Shy Boy?”

“I had a crash in Dundrum earlier.”

“No way, what happened?”

“A van had a job for the Office Park which he thought was the Business Park. I was overtaking him on the main street when he realised his mistake and swung right without looking or indicating.”

“Bastard! Did he do much damage to yer bike?”

“Not really. Mirror, clutch lever, bent bars.”

“Are ye badly hurt?”

“No. Shaken, not stirred, Moneypenny.”

“Did ye get the gards?”

“No need.”

“Witnesses?”

“Of course.”

“His details off his disc?”

“Oh yeah.”

“Should be good for a few hundred quid so. Yer bike has loadsa other damage tha’ ye can blame the fucker on, doesn’t i’?”

“Ah, I’m gonna be honest about this one.”

“It’s your duty to make that fucker pay for hittin’ a bike!”

“He will pay- for the damage he’s actually done.”

“Ye can’t let people go unpunished for hittin’ bikes. If ye don’t punish them they don’t cop on and the nex’ time I’ happens the fuckers could kill one of us.”

“I know, I know. He will be punished.”

“Oi, Shy Boy, John is waitin’ in his office to see you. He’s pissed off enough without you keepin’ ‘im fuckin’ wai’in!”

“Leave him alone, ye prick, he’s had a crash.”

“First I’ve heard of it!”

“That was the delay I told ye about in Dundrum.”

“Yeah, so get off his case, Bollicky Balls.”

“An’ tell John to fuckin’ wait his patience.”

“Yeah.”

Since Vinno’s death we had all become even more supportive of each other than before. It made me smile to have every one of my comrades jump to my defence. I made my way to John’s office with a tear in my eye thinking about how happy Vinno would be to be the catalyst to such a spirit of unity among his comrades.

I missed the man so much. A fresh flashback of him dying in front of me choked me just as I knocked on my boss’s door.

Not only had the old bitch in Prescon reported me, the bitch in RTE had made it her business to ask the old cunt where I worked and had phoned the base to convey her shock and horror at my behaviour.

In the course of the bollicking that John gave me, I was told that I would have been fired if Aidan hadn’t just informed him that I had had a crash that morning, coupled with his own appreciation of how hard it must have been for me to be with Vinno when he died.

I snapped again. I shouted and roared about not needing his or anybody else’s fucking sympathy about anything and how dare he assume that just because two thundering cunts phoned and complained about a minor incident - and knocking over of a packet of biscuits is most certainly a minor fucking incident - that the courier involved is buckling under some sort of psychological pressure and not just that his patience was twisted beyond breaking point under extreme and unwarranted fucking ignorance. He was told in an extremely loud voice that if he wanted to side with these bitches over a faithful and hard working employee that he should fucking fire me and it would be his loss to lose me to another company.