by Paul Howard
‘Let’s not go into the wherefores and the whatnots of the situation, but let’s just say that this all started a couple of weeks ago at Heathrow of all places, where I found a fantastic book in the management section called Are You Being Taken For a Mug? I’ve got it here in front of me. It’s all about caffeine and the detrimental effect it has on the performance of a workforce. Quote unquote.
‘Now, I know what you’re thinking and it did cross my mind, too. Surely caffeine improves productivity, acting as it does to increase alertness, enhance sensory perception, overcome fatigue and improve endurance and motor functions. Nice theory, Kicker. But – and I have to emphasise the but here, Ross – the chap who wrote the book, he points out that caffeine is an addictive drug, which has a sedative effect when it’s taken in excess. You try operating a company and maintaining profit margins when you’ve got 400 people on the payroll doped up to their eyeballs on fresh ground medium roast by mid-morning, oh you’d know all about it then, by God you would.
‘Didn’t need to finish reading, Ross, my mind was made up. Did you know that coffee can cause panic attacks? Panic attacks! I mean we all know about heart disease and peptic ulcers, but panic attacks? And what was the other one, oh yes, insomnia, that was the one that really got to me, because this chap who wrote the book – I’m going to write him a letter, the man has changed my life – he claims that these things account for between eight and twelve percent of all cases of absenteeism. This is America mind you, but I’m sure the figures here are …
‘Oh wait, that was the other thing I was going to mention, he says that the average American worker spends, what was it, ah yes, I’ve got it here in front of me – I marked a lot of the more interesting points with post-its and had Susan type them up for me – here it is, the average American worker spends 114 minutes of every eight-hour day standing around chatting to other employees at the coffee machine or water cooler. And what he’s saying is that this quote-unquote downtime costs American industry approximately $177 billion every year.
‘Now even when you factor in whatever benefits there are from the stimulant effect that caffeine has on the central nervous system of your average worker – we’re talking increased attentiveness, reduction in fatigue, etcetera, etcetera, you’re still talking about $98 billion. Then factor into the equation the health problems caused by caffeine addiction and caffeine-related absenteeism and you’re talking about losses in the region of $121 billion per year. Not my words, Ross. The words of Mark Finnerty, author of Are You Being Taken For a Mug?
‘Now I’m not suggesting that I’ve lost anything like that amount of money, but if Maureen and Deirdre want to sit around for half the day talking about their husbands’ vasectomies and the traffic on the Lucan bypass, then they can bloody well do it at their own expense, not mine, thank you very much indeed.
‘The machine has been gone for the best part of a week now and I hear you, Ross, I hear you, you’re wondering what the net effect of it has been, well I’m coming to that now. Must admit, productivity is down – marginally! – though I’m putting this down to the deliberate go-slow that the staff have organised in a fit of pique and which I’m sure will end when the next round of redundancies and wage reviews are announced just before the summer holidays.
‘This Finnerty chap who wrote the book – I must ask Susan to get an address or telephone number for him – he says that an initial dip in output is normal, due to the ‘cold turkey’ effect that the withdrawal of any drug will have. The symptoms, according to the book, are lethargy, headaches and depression, but all are temporary and normal service will resume within four to six weeks.
‘My next dilemma, of course, is what to do about the heat in the office. The same chap has written another book that I’m trying to get my hands on about how an overly comfortable working environment can induce feelings of contentment and sluggishness in workers, with a resultant fall-off in efficiency. Says in the blurb I read that cold workplaces tend to keep workers focused and more attentive, which is only common sense when you think about it
‘Think I’ll wait until the brouhaha over the coffee machine dies down before I start turning down the thermostat, bit by bit, every day, while carefully monitoring its effects.
‘Anyway, I’m sure you’ve better things to be doing than listening to your old dad whittering on. A phone call would be nice, though. Your mother would love to hear from you. In fact, em, we both would, em … me and your mother. We’ll be in tonight if you want to, em … you know, call us. Don’t worry about the time difference, it’s fine. So, em, talk to you soon.’
The thing is, roysh, I don’t even know how he got the focking number. I certainly didn’t give it to him.
Christian has totally forgotten about this Lauren bird he was in love with before we came away, roysh, and has the hots for this Chinese bird who works at 7-Eleven, we’re talking the one on Ocean Highway here. Pretty much every night he goes in there on his way home from work for, like, M&Ms, or Peppermint Patties, or whatever we’re having for dinner, and storts, like, chatting her up, giving it loads with the old, ‘I feel a disturbance in the Force which I’ve not felt for a long time,’ and even though most birds think he’s a complete and utter weirdo, roysh, this one thinks he’s, like, the funniest goy she’s ever met. Or she did. Until two weekends ago, roysh, when he decides to go into the shop totally shit-faced, with a traffic cone on his head and his schlong in his hand, and ask her to the Film Ball next year. Her old dear went totally ballistic, focked a price-gun at him. It was really, really funny at the time, roysh, but of course we’re all, like, borred from the shop now, and considering it’s the only gaff around here that sells the old Max-Alerts, that’s a problem, a major problem, as in how the fock are we going to porty and work?
Christian’s answer, roysh, when I put this question to him the next morning was, ‘Don’t centre on your anxieties, Obi Wan. Keep your concentration here and now, where it belongs,’ which is obviously a lot of focking help.
In the end, roysh, me, Fionn, Oisinn and Mad Mal from Monaghan, we sit down to discuss it, roysh, and between the four of us we decide the only answer is to, like, break into the shop and steal enough tablets to keep us going for the rest of the summer. We’ll, like, climb up onto the roof, roysh, smash the skylight, and one of us will be winched down into the shop on a rope. At first, roysh, when Oisinn suggests it, we’re all like, Hello? but as the night wears on, and we are drinking seriously fast, it becomes the best idea that any of us has ever heard.
At, like, three o’clock in the morning, roysh, Peasey Pee calls around to hide more shit in our cistern and we ask him if he has any rope, and he just, like, shakes his head, chuckles to himself and goes, ‘You crazy, cattle-rustling Irish,’ and a few minutes later he comes back with a huge length of rope, which is, like, four inches thick.
So there we are, roysh, half-three in the morning and we’re all wearing our black 501s and our All Blacks’ jerseys with the collars turned up, and we’re climbing up on the roof of the shop. We’re tiptoeing around on the slates, and I’m just about to ask how we’re actually going to smash the skylight, roysh – did anyone bring, like, a hammer or anything? – when all of a sudden Oisinn marches straight over and puts one of his size-fourteens straight through the focking thing – CRASH! – and we’re all waiting for the alorm to go off and the Feds to arrive and, like, throw us in the slammer.
But the alorm doesn’t go off and when we’re finished telling Oisinn what a complete focking dickhead he is, we lash the rope around Mad Mal’s waist, make sure it’s secure, and then stort lowering him down through the broken skylight into the shop. The goy’s quite small, roysh, but he weighs a focking tonne and it takes the four of us to hold his weight.
And everything’s going very smoothly, roysh, until the second he hits the floor and then the alorm – which we’d presumed mustn’t have been working – suddenly goes off, though fair play to the goy, roysh, he doesn’t panic, just uses the map that I
drew him to find the roysh shelf, then he storts throwing packets of pills up through the skylight to us and we stort stuffing them into our pockets.
Oisinn reckoned beforehand that, if the alorm went off, we had, like, two hundred seconds to do the job before the cops arrived, though he said this wasn’t based on any actual reconnaissance work he’d done on local police response times, but rather the way it always was in the movies. So Mad Mal’s down there, like, three minutes, roysh, and we’re all, like, telling him to hurry the fock up, but he goes, ‘Wait, I just want to grab a few magazines,’ and we’re there, ‘What the fock do you want magazines for?’ and he looks up through the skylight at us, roysh, his face all blacked up with shoe polish, which he’s obviously taken from one of the shelves, and he goes, ‘For the long, lonely nights.’
Oisinn goes, ‘Good one, Mal, see have they got Hustler,’ but of course we should have known better. When we pull the little focker back up – it takes a good five minutes because we, like, drop him twice – he’s got, like, three WWF magazines, all the same as well.
Anyway, roysh, we manage to get back to the house before the Feds are on the scene, and we empty all the tablets into a big bowl on the kitchen table and, like, burn all the packets in the garden. So that’s grand, roysh. Had a couple more cans, ended up going to bed at five, set the alorm clock for seven to get up for work.
We’ve only been asleep for, like, half-an-hour, roysh, when there’s all this, like, hammering on the door, and I look out the window and there’s, like, a cop cor outside, and I’m there, ‘Fock, it’s a bust, goys!’
I wake up all the others, roysh, and we’re all standing there in the sitting room, totally bricking it, and the banging’s getting more and more, like, impatient, and it’s obvious that someone’s trying to boot the focking door down. We manage to convince Christian to go and answer it, roysh. We’re there, ‘Just play it cool like Huggy Bear,’ so he goes and opens the door, and he’s still totally jarred at this stage, roysh, so what does he say? At the top of his voice, he goes, ‘WE’VE GOT FOCKING RIGHTS! YOU CAN’T SEARCH THIS PLACE WITHOUT A WARRANT!’
We hear this, roysh, and we decide there there’s nothing else we can do except eat the evidence and suddenly we’re all there, like, shovelling the pills into us. We must swallow, like, twenty or thirty each, roysh, when all of a sudden we hear the goy at the door go, ‘How many times do I have to tell you, I’m not a fricking cop. I’m a friend of Peasey.’
Turns out he’s, like, telling the truth. The goy says his name is Starsky, so-called because of his love of, like, cop cors. The one porked outside he stole from the cor pork of a bank in Salisbury, ‘the chicken capital of the world’ he kept calling it. He said he needed shit, roysh, and he asked whether Peasey had left anything for him, and when we said no, he goes, ‘Always the fricking same, that goddamn long-hair,’ and he focks off.
Of course we’re all in the horrors now, having just, like, overdosed on Max-Alerts, and we are talking TOTALLY here. Four nights later, roysh, we’re all still totally hyper, you know that feeling when you’re, like, focking wrecked but you still can’t sleep a wink?
The following weekend, roysh, we still haven’t come down, so the whole lot of us decide to head for the hospital, we’re talking the casualty deportment here, because it’s getting, like, majorly scary by this stage. So we get a Jo down there, roysh, me, Fionn, Oisinn and Mal – fifteen dollars it cost us – and we burst into the place and I grab one of the doctors and I go, ‘We’ve taken about thirty Max-Alerts each and we haven’t slept for days.’
And he looks at me, roysh – this is no bullshit – and he goes, ‘Sorry, we’re not looking for ward staff at the moment.’
CHAPTER EIGHT
‘Ross is, like, SUCH a no-good loser.’
Discuss.
I’ve made a bit of a habit, roysh, of trying to get home from work in the evenings before the rest of the goys, just so I can get to the answering-machine first, make sure Dick-features hasn’t left any more of his stupid messages, because the slaggings are pretty bad at this stage. Here’s the one he left this afternoon:
‘Hey, Kicker, guess what … Oh, by the way, pick up if you’re in … hello? Hello? Pick up if you’re in, Ross … Oh, never mind. Promised I’d keep you abreast of developments vis-à-vis the withdrawal of the coffee machine and any improvements or otherwise in productivity pertaining therefrom. Nothing to report, I’m afraid to say, Ross, or rather, nothing positive. What I can tell you is that in a fit of what I can only describe as pique, with a capital P as well, Maureen – lippy little madam from accounts – went out yesterday and bought a kettle and four large drums of Nescafé Gold Blend. They were sitting there, Ross, on the draining-board in the canteen, brazen as you like, when I passed by there on Tuesday morning. Gold Blend, thank you very much indeed.
‘All the girls from accounts were in there too, sitting around and sipping their coffees without a by-your-leave, wittering away among themselves, house prices in Shankill and Deirdre’s going-away party. I’m paying for all of this, of course. And you know me, Ross, I’m not what you would call a quote-unquote vindictive man, but I don’t mind telling you I headed straight for the petty-cash tin to see if these drums of coffee had been purchased from company funds. Gross misconduct. Instant dismissal. Capital I. But of course, Maureen’s much too clever for that. Don’t mind admitting the resolve was tested, Ross. The resolve was tested.
‘Went home and couldn’t sleep. Had a couple of brandies but they only gave me heartburn. Your mother tried to help, of course. She’s a rock, your mother. Just give them their machine back and be done with it, was her advice. Just trying to be helpful, of course, but that’d be a climbdown I told her. They see one sign of weakness in me and we’ll have that minimum wage nonsense all over again. Wouldn’t be a climbdown, she said. You don’t have to say anything. Just put it back and say it was being repaired.
‘And then she said something that got me thinking. It got me thinking too much if the truth be told. She said, “Charles, I’m sure it takes longer to make a cup of this – what did you call it? – instant coffee, than it does to make a cup of the real thing.” And that was me awake for the night. Couldn’t get this blasted conundrum out of my head. Which takes longer to make: instant or machine coffee? Couldn’t let it go. I had to know.
‘By the way, Ross, if you’re in pick up, it’s unfair to leave me talking into a, em … where was I? Oh yes, which is quicker? Well, I remembered that a few months earlier I had chanced upon a couple of girls from the marketing department lounging around in the canteen, middle of the morning, drinking coffee without a care in the world. So I asked them what they thought they were up to. “Screen-break,” they said. Screen-break, quote-unquote. So I asked Susan to launch a bit of an investigation, you know how she likes all that cloak-and-dagger stuff, to find out how long it actually takes to make a cup of coffee – using the machine, you understand.
‘So, my curiosity having been pricked by your mother’s earlier statement, I remembered that I had a copy of Susan’s report in the study. Sleep was out of the question at that stage, so I went and ferreted the thing out. Made for very interesting reading. Very interesting. She estimated the time it took to brew the coffee first thing in the morning at eight minutes. Each cup made thereafter took approximately thirty-six seconds, adding five seconds for milk and seven seconds for each sachet of sugar used.
‘So, armed with this information, I decided to head straight for the office. My pulse was racing, Ross, I don’t mind admitting that to you. It was racing. I looked at the clock. It was four in the morning. The traffic wouldn’t be bad for another half-an-hour yet. Made town in good time, parking the car on Stephen’s Green, then letting myself in. Headed for the kitchen. Looked around. No one else in. Checked my watch. Waited for the second hand to reach twelve, then filled the kettle. Switched it on. And then as coolly as you like – or as coolly as my shaking hands would permit – I started to make a cup of this insta
nt stuff, just as I’d seen it done once. Tried to remember the process as best I could. One-and-a-half teaspoons of coffee. A drop of milk. Two sachets of sugar. Add the hot water. Stir it until the granules dissolve.
‘Well! Instant coffee, my eye. Took almost twice as long to make as the proper stuff. I went back home then, considering my findings in the car on the way, though in the end I decided to sleep on it and, well, it was such a stressful night I was out as soon as my head hit the pillow anyway.
‘Still didn’t know what to do when I went back in the next morning. Then when I got back into the office, who was there only these two scruffy-looking chaps with long hair, absolutely stinking they were, wearing sandals and God knows whatever else, hanging around the reception area.
‘“Don’t worry,” I told Una, our telephone girl, “I’ll handle this,” and I turned to them and I said, just like this, I said: “There are bloody good support services out there for people like you. You’ll not be getting a penny from me. Now leave before I call the Gardaí.” You’ll never guess what happened next, Ross. “You don’t understand,” one of them said. “We’re from SIPTU. We’re here for a meeting.”
‘Well, you could have knocked me down with a feather. SIPTU, if you don’t mind. Maureen had only dragged one of these wretched trade unions into the whole sorry business. And, well, that’s what’s really bothering me, Ross. Don’t want those people hanging around. Could spell trouble and spell it with a capital T. There’s been a lot of changes in employment legislation in recent years that I haven’t really kept abreast of.
‘Rang up Hennessy, see could he do anything about it, but he’s keeping his head down. The word out at Portmarnock is that he’s gone to the States. Not surprised with the hard time he’s been getting at that tribunal. Happy with yourself now, Mister Cooper?
