I have to admit that Arthur, the boss and owner
of Lugga Bus, was like most other small business men in England and hadn’t a
clue what he was doing. The company
survived, but only just, there was no such thing as long term planning just the
blind hope that the company had managed to continue for so long and that it
would continue to do so. He had no employees,
everyone was self-employed, and so he had no real responsibility. If work was in short supply then that was
tough. Many of the guys had secondary
occupations, like myself. One fellow was
a taxi driver in Southport and also fitted under floor safes. So the company was always on the lookout for
new business as I suppose we all were.
Arthur had managed to convince a local business
man to invest in Lugga Bus. The fellow
provided a mini bus, road legal with private hire licence, he established an
account with a garage where the vehicle would be serviced if needed and opened
a petrol account where I could just call in and fill up. Now I had my own bus,
well; sort of, I was the only driver for it and it was kept at my house. There were no advertising signs on the vehicle,
the only give away or tell-tale sign was the taxi licence pate attached to the
rear of the vehicle, a small six inch square of plastic. It was one Friday night, just past midnight
and I had dropped some people off in Southport.
Lord Street is the main, central, road in Southport and contains a
number of blocks of flats occupied by a majority of retired people. I had pulled over to the side of the road and
was checking my paperwork.
There were still lots of people about and they
moved between clubs and pubs and restaurants. I was quite surprised to hear the
side door of my van slide open. I thought
it may have been one of the other drivers, working on the taxis, who had noticed
me and stopped for a chat. But it wasn’t,
instead half a dozen revellers piled in and were telling me that they wanted to
go to the Paradox nightclub in Liverpool.
My first problem was to check and see if there were any Hackney taxi
drivers around. If any of them had seen
a group of people climbing into my vehicle they would report me. I could only carry passengers who had pre
booked and would be included on the lists I carried with me.
“Can I have your name?” I asked, which once
given I wrote on my sheets and drove off.
I wasn’t stupid and had listened to the other drivers, as long as there
was a name, a pick up and drop off point on my sheets I was covered. I couldn’t really work out who would stop and
check me as I doubt if the police would want to get involved in such a serious license
violation. As I began to think about the
situation I realised how stupid the whole thing was for the work sheets I
referred to would be thrown in the bin at the end of the day and there was no
master copy held at the office. These jobs
were known as ‘foreigners,’ and I know a lot of the guys depended on them to survive,
whereas I only took them if they presented themselves at an opportune
moment. I didn’t go out of my way to
look for extra work and I did calculate how much fuel I would have used for the
foreigner and would replace it in the vehicle, for if I hadn’t done that then I
would have been guilty of theft.
Theft is one of my pet hates along with thieves
and unfortunately Arthur came across a routine job that had me transporting a
van load of thieves to and from work each day.
I was initially told that I would be working with a publishing company between
Manchester and Ormskirk. As you may
imagine I was quite excited, you never know what sort of contacts you can make
or what information you can pick up. I would
have eight passengers which would be picked up from their home addresses in and
around Manchester each weekday morning and dropped at one location, in Ormskirk. I would then pick them up at five in the evening
and take them all home. The other drivers
all turned their noses up at this sort of work, mainly because as regular passengers
there was never any tips given, and the fellows who had Lugga Bus as their main
full time occupation depended on the tips.
I have never been sad enough to have done any
form of course on hospitality or customer service standards, so I’m not daft
enough to think that it is acceptable behaviour to tell a customer to, “Watch
your fecking mouth!” However for my
first pick up with this new group of publishers I found myself in
Ormskirk. They came out; one was in a
wheel chair and asked to sit in the front seat.
One of the group seemed to be his friend and lifted him from his wheel
chair into the van. I took the wheelchair to the rear of the van and stored it
away. The remainder of the passengers
climbed in to the rear of the bus and I settled myself into the drivers
eat. “Know where you’re going Paddy?”
said the fellow in the front seat, the one with the working legs. I hope you will agree with me that it was
completely acceptable to tell him to watch his fecking mouth. I waited for his reply and was quite happy to
turf the lot of them out of the van had he not apologised immediately and asked
what they should call me.
We drove off introducing each other and getting
to know one another, well; as best as you would want to. The two fellows in the front seat were ex Royal
Marine, don’t they just get everywhere.
The one in the wheel chair had been trying out a very powerful
motorcycle without wearing a crash helmet and was now well and truly buggered
for the remainder of his life. I was disappointed
as I had hoped people associated with publishing would have been more demure,
or considered, I had hoped for long drawn out conversations about books and
authors but this lot gave me the impression that they were not that interested
in the literary world. They had to listen
to Radio One, the youth radio of the day, absolute rubbish, unless you are ten
years old. And all they could talk about
was football and soap operas.
I know that I often complained that at boarding
school in Ireland we were only allowed to watch one television programme a week
and we would always vote for Top of The Pops, the only other television show we
ever saw was the moon landing. And soccer
too, we were not allowed to watch or play soccer which I am so thankful for
these days for I see people whose whole life is taken up with either daft football
or soap operas. It was also around the
time that reality television was starting to grow. I shouldn’t really complain about the amount
of cretins who glue themselves to the latest so called celebrity fad as I was
actually negotiating with the members of one reality show for a series of
books. Every time I encounter something like
that I wish that I had been able to meet George Orwell who was co correct with
his predictions. But there lays the
problems, he wrote books, how many people these days actually read books?
I listened and talked to this group and
discovered that they were not really publishers, they produced single sheet calendars. You know the sort, one year planner in the
centre, surrounded by adverts.
Publishers my arse, they were telephone sales canvassers. They pretended that they worked for a police
magazine helping charities and in some cases pretended they were police officers.
To make this situation much more disgusting they actually bragged that only one
percent of the money they raised went to a charity, the remainder was split between
them and the boss of the company. The boss
was well known locally as the fellow who had famously been caught snorting cocaine
off the bonnet of his Mercedes sports car.
To not have control of your brain and watch the X Factor or Dancing On
Ice or some other form of mindless drivel can be explained away with social manipulation,
but to be proud of stealing money under false pretences I found was really upsetting,
especially where they crowed that the most generous people were the Irish.
I was so incensed that I actually contacted the
Irish radio show that broadcast my sketches and gave them the story, and the
contacts to check it out, but nothing every came of it. I hated the thought that some decent hard
working business person was sitting in Ireland actually thinking that they were
helping some form of charity or another when in fact they were just getting
ripped off. But are we not back to the
same old situation where this is business and I just don’t understand? Such a shame that those with the, ‘Get up and
go’ required for business so often find themselves filling buckets with money
rather than contributing to society. But
then, hey, what do I know, I was just a bloody foreigner doing foreigners. By the way, just to back up my words, here’s
a link, http://www.qlocal.co.uk/Ormskirk/news_list/%27Scambusters%27_raid_Ormskirk_offices_in_fraud_enquiry-52261594.htm
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