I once was lost

Yesterday took me to a town south of here I hadn’t been to in a long time. A pleasant drive. Fine weather. Good roads. I seen very few idiots, which means I have no new stuff to post on ShiteDrivers.com. But that’s a good thing.

I just had to pick up a cheque. Collecting cheques is my second favourite activity, beaten only by lodging them. I had an address: the name of a road.

The snag was this road is actually a new business park. It is not signposted and everyone I asked was new to the town and hadn’t a clue. But I figured I had reached it when I seen a sign for Rosslare. Don’t laugh - this is Ireland. Interpreting our road signs is a black art you develop over time.

Now to find the office in this jungle. Golden rule: Never phone ahead for directions. Never. Doing this causes cheque books to fall into some parallel universe never to be found again. The element of surprise is key. You have to sneak up on them.

I stopped at the first office I came to and got directions and an erection from the (sizzlingly hot) receptionist. As I left, I heard my name: Primal, be the jayzez! If it isn’t the Sneeze himself. What are you doing here? I had a pain in me arse trying to find a place, came in here to ask, and now I’ve a pain in the front of me trousers from yer one at the desk. What are you doing here? Oh yeah, she’s a stunner right enough. She does it for me too. Anyway, this is my office. This what I’m at now. Com’on in and we’ll have a coffee.

It is about 15 years since I met Dan face to face. We were in college together. Mostly in the college bar. He took me to the canteen, pausing to introduce me to his wife - who was filling in for the receptionist. The temporary blood displacement switched to my face.

I’d been keeping tabs on him in the papers over the years and knew a bit about his company. So once the kids? ages? ever hear from so-and-so? questions and the remember the time stories were out of the way we got talking shop.

I read you’re doing well in Canada and Italy. The Post said actively pursuing overseas opportunities. Very snazzy. The last time you pursued an overseas opportunity it was that German girl who shared a house with Noelle Garvey. A strange combination - the countries, not the girls. How the fek did that come about?

Well my ex-boss, Gerry, was in Toronto on holidays and met a guy on a golf course who was bitching about pumping money down the drain trying to solve a problem. Gerry gave him my email and three months later we had the golfer’s business and six other sites in Ontario. You didn’t tell the papers that? Fek, no. That wouldn’t look right on the business pages. We down-played the golf course bit and played up the subsequent ‘wins’, as they call them.

Italy was a different story. A lad flying from Dublin read a piece about us in the in-flight magazine and called us the minute he hit the tarmac in Rome. I flew out the following morning and we had the site up and running a week later. Must have been a bitch of a job finding Italian speakers to support it from here in just five days. How’d you get around that? It was summer time and we offered a few school teachers mega bucks for a couple of weeks to get us up and running. Not for the papers either. Nope. We told them we had a pool of foreign language speakers to draw from. Which was true in a way - one of them is our young lad’s swimming instructor.

I left Dan an hour later with plans for pints made, collected the cheque and headed home thinking about all I’d learned.

· The old adage about the impossibility of getting lost in Ireland with a tongue in your head no longer applies.
· There’s always a catch with hot and chatty receptionists. If something’s too good to be true, then it isn’t.
· Never believe what you read in the papers.
· No matter how big or how small, business is all about contacts, luck and coping with the unexpected.
· Tesco now do a 3l drum of milk. Oh, I forgot to mention that bit didn’t I.