Originally Posted by
Jimmy Floyd
What a day I had today. In the morning I was getting shelled as has become the norm, just a relentless barrage of enquiries where they give you no information to work on and need an answer immediately.
Then, just before lunch, suddenly my field manager rocks up at the office for the first time since the pandemic, with his white goatee and his 70s Del Boy swagger, and says he'll take me out to lunch as a thank you for all my work. So I say great, get in his Audi coupe and we end up at this tapas place in the nearby posher town. Only ones in there. Asks if I want red or white wine, I say probably white at lunchtime, so he orders rosé. Then he asks me what I want, there's some scallops on the menu for £7.95, seems a nice lunchtime option not taking the piss out of his wallet, so I say that. He proceeds to order that, and a fish/bean stew, and a whole bowl of chorizo, and jamón, and manchego, and albondigas, and TWO bowls of paella ('they're fucking tiny mate'), and a thing of 'potatoes bravos', and something he called 'chiperoni' by which I presume he meant squid. Fortunately, the squid never arrived.
So we're starting to inch our way through this ludicrous amount of food that he has ordered - him chivvying me with insults like: 'You've not had any chorizo, call yourself a fat bastard?' and the like. He's about 5 stone heavier than me and, the way he breathes, perhaps within 10-15 working days from death. All the while he's giving me all the goss, like who's about to be made redundant, and the reason why the MD keeps a particular woman in the office next to his is because he 'secretly loves' her.
Anyway, at the end, he tells me I have to have dessert, and I say you're having a laugh mate and refuse to order one, so he just orders me a panna cotta anyway (we're on about the third glass of rosé by now). Then, out of nowhere, he says: 'Here you are, mate' and thrusts a handful of crisp JMW Turner twenties at me across the table. I say 'You what?' and he says: 'It's a oner, mate, for all your hard work'. Sure enough, he is bunging me £100 cash as some kind of how can I put this, an 'informal bonus'. In my head I think should I be taking this, but there's no Hugh Granting my way out of this one so I accept it with a humble smile. I take the 'oner', and he pays the bill, and on the way out he says: 'Don't tell the boss about the little drink,' and because I'm so attuned to his barrow boy lingo by this point in the lunch, I know immediately that the 'little drink' in question is not the wine we've been guzzling, but the 'oner'. Glorious.
I then basically collapsed at the desk and could hardly do anything for the rest of the day, because that's what happens when you eat and drink and accept bungs at lunchtime.