The 2084 Precept (68 page)

He paused and looked up from his file. I
looked back at him. I knew what he was thinking and I didn't blame
him. I was thinking the same.

However, he continued, viable proof on these
and other matters had not been forthcoming, at least nothing which
would have held up in a court of law. The claim file had therefore
eventually been closed in favor of Naviera Pujol S.A. Three months
ago in fact. So why wasn't the Naviera informed, I asked, and why
hasn't the claim been settled? Ah…he replied, finalization for
settlement purposes is also a process which requires a certain
amount of time…but you will be pleased to hear that there is de
facto no longer anything standing in the way of an immediate and
full payment of this claim.

I did not show any elation at this
unexpected piece of great news. I didn't show any emotions at all.
I knew exactly what it was all about. These insurance companies
delay settlement of all and any insurance claims for as long as
they reasonably and legally can. At any given point in time they
probably have hundreds of millions, maybe more, sitting in
interest-earning or dividend-paying assets instead of sitting where
they should be sitting, namely in the accounts of their clients.
These dividend and interest amounts are simply additional revenues,
with no additional cost involved. 100% profit. Of course it doesn't
work with clients who stay on the ball and continuously monitor
their claim situation and regularly demand written updates of the
status. But these are a minority and Naviera Pujol was not among
them. And from what I had seen of the Naviera so far, nor would I
have expected it to be.

So when do you expect to make the transfer,
I asked. Oh, it will be sometime this week already, he said.

And that was the end of the meeting. I
thanked him for his time, he thanked me for coming, and I was
smoking a celebration cigarette within seconds of hitting the
street. A painless meeting, no work involved, hardly any time
wasted, and €3.4 million coming our way!
Now
, this week!

A fantastic piece of luck at last and one I
was sorely in need of. I was already working out what would happen
to that money. First of all, both the crane and the
Mahon
Star
's top deck would be fixed. Both of these items would
create immediate additional revenue potential and the payback would
be an unbeatable one, months, not years. I might spend a bit more
of the money on some sales and marketing activity to speed up the
recuperation of some of the 40-ton container business. And then the
remainder would be stashed away in bonds or other income-generating
investments.

However, I would not be spending any money
fixing our idle ships' engine and dry dock problems before I had
worked out how to have them generating revenues. But I
would
prepare for the eventuality by obtaining two or three quotes for
the engine repair in the meantime. And I would not tell Sr. Pujol
that we would ourselves be able to cover the next few months' cash
flow requirements; let the group continue paying for that until the
company, hopefully, became profitable. Yes, this was similar to the
insurance company's trick. But business is business; and as in most
everything else on this planet, it is the survival of the
fittest.

I took a taxi to our dock offices. The
Mahon Star
, having enjoyed its Sunday day of leisure in
port, was being unloaded. The ship's captain, Agustín, was in the
office chatting with Fernando about which containers should be
loaded onto the lower deck this afternoon. So I said good morning
and let them continue and sat down on a chair in the corner to flip
through my emails until they had finished. And then my company
mobile rang. It was Pedro. María del Carmen had called in early
this morning with her resignation, he said. She wouldn't be
returning to the office.

More good news! Not a huge item, but all
gifts are welcome and will not be returned to sender. “Thank you
for letting me know, Pedro,” I said. “We will probably outsource
her bookkeeping function and halve the cost at the same time. No
panic. Please have Conchita do what she can in the meantime; I
expect to be back on either Thursday or Friday and will have a chat
with her then. And by the way, Pedro, I said, I urgently need some
quotes for a full repair of our crane. As soon as possible. And
while we're about it, a couple of quotes for fixing the
Mahon
Star
's top deck. And if you can manage to persuade them at
short notice to come and take a look at the work to be done while
the ship is in Palma tomorrow, that would be fantastic.”

Another of my mottos: never delay anything
unless there is good reason to do so. Cash is still pouring out of
the window here every day.

“I'll do my best,” said Pedro.

As Agustín stood up to leave, I asked him if
it would be possible for me to travel back on his ship on Wednesday
night if I needed to. Of course it would be possible for the boss
to travel on his ship, he said. I was welcome to travel with him
and his crew anywhere and at any time.

Good. I would try to make it on Wednesday.
That way both ships' crews would have seen their new boss in jeans
and without a tie, and they would also have seen that, in spite of
being the boss, he was also a fairly normal guy. Important they
think that, irrespective of its veracity.

I drank some coffee with Fernando and
discussed which methods might be best to try and recuperate some of
our 40-ton business.

And then it was time for the dockworkers'
midday break and their much vaunted leader sauntered into our
office. The sauntering was accompanied by an aura of surliness
typical in uneducated humans of his ilk who, unable to be of much
practical use to anyone anywhere, decide to spend their few short
decades on the planet reviling and obstructing anything and anybody
connected to what they refer to as 'the representatives of
capital'. I tend to feel sorry for these poor, unfortunate
specimens, half of their brains are missing or, as my father would
have put it, 'thee'r all bone from t'neck oop', and so I addressed
him as if he were a normal human being.

What is your opinion, I commenced, on the
need for seventeen dockers to handle these small-capacity ships of
ours. He didn't hesitate. Our opinion is the opposite to yours, he
replied. And after making a few unsuccessful attempts to achieve a
conversation of any kind, I thanked him for his time and terminated
the meeting. It was either that or smash him in the face. But the
latter does not form part of my character, and even if it did, I
am, as I have previously mentioned, of a cowardly nature and
wouldn't attempt it even with somebody less muscular than he
was.

Zero success on the dockworkers' front both
in Palma and Barcelona. More than a disappointment, those costs
were one of our major problems. We would have to listen to some
professional advice as to whether we could force the issue legally
in any way, and I asked Fernando to find a decent lawyer over the
course of the next few days.

I also asked him to urgently contact as many
shipping agents as he could and try to fix me up as far as possible
with some appointments for tomorrow and Wednesday. I wanted to see
if yesterday's brainwave had any chance of becoming reality, or
whether it was simply a dream solution born out of ignorance. We
have a whole ship, I told Fernando, available for regular container
cargo transport. I assume he thought I was referring to one of the
ships already lying idle, no need to enlighten him just yet.

In an hour's time I had a not very easy
meeting to get through with this pallet rental company. I had some
quick tapas and a glass of white wine in a café to which I will
never return. No air conditioning, two ineffectual fans in the
ceiling futilely stirring the air around and about, and the floor
strewn with even more garbage than you usually find in this kind of
place in Spain. But worst of all, it was full of modern youth, some
whisking away on their mobile screens, others concentrating on
typing meaningless text messages, still more of them actually
telephoning, shouting as usual in complete disregard for other
guests of the establishment and - needless to say - completely
ignoring each other at the same time. The Y generation is what it
is called, except that I call it the visual display zombie
generation, the predecessor to the Z generation. The latter will
have chips implanted into their brains at birth, thus voiding the
annoying need for today’s pesky hardware requirements: mobile
phones, charging cables, T.Vs, desktops, laptops, tablets,
google-glasses, video games, the cinema, computer wristwatches, and
any other screen activities of which I may be unaware. They will be
able to program their own dreams as well, including erotic ones if
they wish, thus facilitating their fairly meaningless journeys from
birth to death in a way that is not yet possible today.

* * * * *

I took a taxi to the pallet company which
was in the Granvía industrial estate in Sabadell, a grotty
satellite town about 20 kilometers northwest of Barcelona.

Life certainly can be weird. Preternatural
as well. Here we have a mentally sick person who has somehow
managed to trigger meetings of the U.K. government and also a
global summit meeting to deal with the subject of how the human
race might convert itself into a more intelligent and
non-aggressive one. And here we also have a person like me, sitting
in a taxi, earning money for communicating with said madman,
knowing that it is all a load of cobblers, pure fantasy, and
therefore continuing to spend my time and energy on the task of
returning a loss-making shipping company to profitability. In
exchange for money of course.

The taxi dropped me off exactly where it was
supposed to, no problem these days with satellites beaming the
necessary info non-stop earthwards.
Worldwide Logistics
was
the unoriginal and probably misleading name of the company, and I
had plenty of time to smoke a cigarette before going inside.

It was basically a big warehouse with an
office area accessible through a small side door. There was no
reception area and no receptionist, blonde or otherwise. There were
some people sitting at their desks staring at their computer
screens and they paid no attention to me, absolutely zero. I stood
there for a minute and I watched them. Nobody stirred. If I were a
possible big new customer, it didn't interest them. If I were a
possible existing customer with a query, it didn't bother them. If
I were a person wishing to place a huge order for goods or
services, that would be my problem. And if I were to be seen
placing a massive bomb with a short fuse on the floor and walking
toward the exit door, they wouldn't have moved much either. You get
human beings like these; they would provide a useful theme for a
doctorate dissertation on the relationship between neurological
inertia and social decay. Finally, a guy came marching through from
a partitioned office at the back of the building, shook my hand and
led me back to his lair.

"Sr. O'Donoghue, Naviera Pujol, the
pallets," he said without further ado.

"Yes," I replied. "Thank you for finding the
time to receive me at such short notice."

"My pleasure, my pleasure," he said, "and
what can we do for you?"

As if he didn't know. "I wish to discuss the
termination of our contract," I said.

"No problem. Can be done at year-end. You
return the pallets in good condition. End of story."

"Or we buy them," I said.

"Yes, that is contractually possible
also."

"What do the pallets cost?"

"Oh…whatever the new pallet price is at
year-end."

O.K., so he was one of those. An asinine
piece of nastiness. One of those rotting turds which the ocean
waves occasionally wash into your face as you float peaceably by on
the currents of your life. Fair enough, no sweat, a turd is a turd
and no-one had taken the trouble to swill this one down into the
sewers. So the task now fell to me.

"We are not going to pay new prices for
second-hand pallets. They are an average of eight years old and
cost a fraction of what new pallets are worth today."

"Then you will have to return them. In good
condition," he said.

"And we are not going to return them
either," I said.

"Then you will have to continue paying the
rental charges."

"And we are not going to do that
either."

He remained composed, he wasn't worried. He
was in possession of a watertight contract signed by that imbecile,
Alfonso. He picked up a pencil and started tapping it on his desk.
"That would create a bad situation," he said.

"Yes, it would," I replied. "However, to
avoid that bad situation, I am prepared to offer you the equivalent
of nine months' rental charges to terminate the contract. That
amount coincides with my estimate of the value of the pallets eight
years ago and is a lot more, considering the depreciation, than
their worth today."

"We cannot accept that," he said. "Nor is
there anything in the contract which obliges us to do so."

"Then we have nothing further to discuss," I
said and I stood up to leave.

"This will mean a court case," he said.

"Indeed it will. Expensive lawyers for you
and expensive lawyers for me and you will be paying for both. In my
opinion, that is. I look forward to meeting you there." And I
turned and opened the door to the warehousing area.

"Wait…" He was a fast thinker and he knew
when his bread was buttered and when it was not. "One year's rental
charges," he said.

I paused for a moment as if I was thinking.
"O.K.," I said, "I will go as far as that. You will need to send us
a signed legal agreement to that effect, one which our lawyers can
approve, and then we will make the payment which automatically
voids the contract."