THERE is a machine in this building which gives me more apoplexy than
any other. Every Sunday I stroll in to commit art on the sports front.
While you are lolling over your roast beef or even the liqueurs, I am in
the House of Horrors attempting to make sense of my notes on whatever
drivel I am purporting to report. I am hungry and no frustration can be
as blood-pressure-enhancing as The Herald sandwich vendor. Let me tell
you about this evil apparatus.
I have complained to the colleagues about it: indeed the boys and
girls come up from the Press Bar every Sunday afternoon to witness,
cheer on, applaud my uncontrollable rages over this thing. Strong men
wince and the Ladies' desk would blanch horribly if it ever thought of
turning up on a Sunday and overheard my calumnies against this object.
Many years ago I worked in a milk-bottle-washing plant. Run it was by
the socialist-minded SCWS. The machine was 60 years old and clearly
Charlie Chaplin had once worked on it and used it as a model for Modern
Times. Youse stood there waiting for the cases of empty milk bottles to
come on to the conveyor belt.
Another bit of machinery with 12 big hand-like pincers stretched out
and took the bottles on to another conveyor belt and the bottles went
through and round and about and ended up getting big steel bits putting
them into holes for the bottles and then they went through the wash and
emerged at the other end clean and healthy and then got filled up with
milk and then put into crates and then got silver foil capped upon them.
Have you got me so far?
Now the above is very boring. The below is not. For what actually
happened was that none of the operations worked. The hand-like pincers
never picked up any of the bloody bottles and if the bottles went
through to the other end the full bottles dropped on top of them, burst
like an adolescent's plook, sprayed the girls at the other end with milk
and glass fragments, and then the dairymaids came up and hit you
severely with their foreheads.
The bottles fell over on the conveyor belt and didn't go into the
considered holes and didn't get washed but slipped into the air and
added to your discomfort by exploding around you.
You felt like Old Bill in the Bairnsfather cartoons: ''If you know of
a better 'ole, go to it!'' Jacques Tati had invented the script. Hector
Nicol had done the words. The machine was designed to bring out the sort
of humanity of which we are all capable: Goebbels, Himmler, Stalin,
Souness, John B. Sommerville.
Empty space
The machine which is supposed to vend sandwiches -- corned beef,
cheese and tuna salad, various, especially various, which lies by the
door outside the newsroom has an advantage over the milk-bottle-washing
contraption: it charges money. You put in your 40 pence, press the
button, open the door, and put your hand into an empty space. This
machine cheats. This machine doesn't even do what O. Henry's Gentle
Grifters did: it leaves you with nothing at all. If it ever does the
bread has been leavened by Herod's wife around about the time of the
parting of the waters and the corned beef was corned at the start of the
American Civil War. I have been paying 90 pence a day into this behemoth
every day for months.
I have complained to the management. Devil the bit Herald supremo Liam
Kane cares: he is too busy practising his mouth organ upstairs. The
editors eat their cheese chits in The Buttery of a lunchtime. The Father
of the Chapel told me he would bring this up at the next chapel meeting.
I heard the insane laughter from his office three miles away. Health and
safety officers were no good either. They told me they didn't cover
mental health. But I am right. Correct. And truth will out. This machine
is making money for George Outram. In fact, if Outram wants to make a
real go of the business it should close this blatt and install sandwich
vendors throughout the entire country. That would suit Liam Kane with
his moothie-playing. Then there are telephones.
Public phones come in various guises but they are all designed to
steal money from you. I know not what variations there are upon the
public telephone, especially the ones in public houses, but I will tell
you this: there is no such thing as a follow-on call. I would like a wee
breakdown upon the profits made by Beattie simply on the theft of your
tenpence or more every time you embark upon a communication on their
dastardly instrument.
The boss of BT, a Mr Iain Vallance (I once had a primary teacher with
that surname: he trained at the Camp on Blood Island), has tried to make
his product entertaining by employing Maureen Lipman on telly ads. Ms
Lipman should think again. Such blatant robbery has been ascribed to her
(and mine a bit) community ever since Christians got envious of the
Chosen People. Doesn't do us any good at all.
I have now decided to take this issue to the very highest in the land.
John Smith would be proud of me. The individual comes first and
community action is required on this matter. Frustrated by the sandwich
machine and the telephone is but the tip of the iceberg. There are more
machines to topple. Some of all this is serious at that.
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