“So Herr Pearce, where are we?” asked Herr Rimle, the Swiss HR manager I was phoning so that he could tell me whether I had got a job or not.
“Stockholm?” (Well I was.)
“No.”
“I am in Stockholm.” I wasn’t going to shift on this one. I was definitely in Stockholm.
“No Herr Pearce. Where are we with regard to the position with us?” I was confused. He was supposed to be telling me whether I had a job.
“I was impressed by your company,” I offered.
“Yes, very good. That is good. So where are we?”
For fucks sake. This had the potential to go on all day. I wasn’t about to let that happen as the call was costing me a fortune. Getting a job in Zurich was getting harder (and pricier) by the minute.
“Do I have the job?” Perhaps blunt was best.
“I beg your pardon?” Blunt wasn’t best. Maybe, I thought, if I hypothesise enough and confuse him with the vagaries of the English language, he’ll cut to the chase.
“If you were to offer me a position with you, I would accept.”
“Excellent. In that case I would like to offer you a job with us.” Bingo. God bless the much-underused subjunctive tense of the English language. I was almost tempted to ask if he felt like offering me a reimbursement of call costs.
So there we are. I’m off to live in Switzerland, home of cuckoo clocks, nazi gold and the highest number of firearms per capita in the entire world. I suppose all that nazi gold needs protecting somehow.
Thursday, 14 June 2007
Thursday, 7 June 2007
Mighty Forest
For a League One team Forest have a hell of a lot of fans. The standard of football played most weeks at the city ground is poor; no game can possibly highlight that more than the humiliating 5-2 defeat to Yeovil (population: a few hundred farmers and a handful of barely professional footballers). Yet there are so many fans.
I’ve bumped into Forest fans in the Australian outback (apparently lots of Northern Territory shopkeepers in Tennants Creek on the Stuart Highway have a soft spot for the “Tricky Trees”); in a Cambodian internet café in the form of Chad - a dangerously obese American who was there to take photos of temples; on the streets of Berlin running the marathon in sweltering conditions wearing their Forest shirts with pride, and about 5 years ago I saw a septuagenarian French farmer sporting a Forest shirt with “Shipstones” on the front as sponsors.
And I am now sat on my hotel room bed in Zurich watching England against Estonia on Eurosport having spent a pleasant hour or so in a Swiss restaurant talking about Nottingham Forest to a 40-yr old Singaporean real-estate person who was seated right next to me by some over-keen waiting personnel. He’d never been to England, let alone Nottingham, but was a follower nonetheless. He’d even got a friend “with contacts” in Malaysia to record the aforementioned Forest-Yeovil game and then to courier it down so he could watch it the next day.
I was impressed with his in-depth knowledge of Forest’s monumental ascent to double European champion status and the subsequent monumental downfall to League One also-ran status. A lot of the time he was talking about events that occurred before my fourth birthday so I had to nod and smile and assume he was right, but the rest of the time I felt a sense of shame and as if Mike, 40, from Singapore was telling me off. It was as if he’d been waiting for the last 10 years to speak to someone from Nottingham so he could get to the bottom of why the Forest of yesteryear have become the Forest of today who now can’t even progress past the second round of the Johnstone Paints Trophy (and believe you me, if you meet a Singaporean who is more annoyed with the Johnstone Paints trophy than Mike, then you’re doing well).
He was able to lecture me at length on why Forest should be a better team than they are, on how their performances are inconsistent at best, which apparently in League One is “just a bad joke I don’t laugh at”, on how David Johnson is an overpaid sissy, and more importantly, on how Forest were able to beat Chelsea 7-0 not all that long ago.
I wanted to tell him that it wasn’t actually my fault, but I don’t think he would have listened. He was letting off steam at a rate of knots, which thinking about it was fair enough. A lot of my friends are Forest fans so I get to complain most days if I feel like it. This guy had a decade, if not more, of annoyance to get off his chest. When he got up to leave he commented sadly, “when I was 15, all of my friends decided to support Barcelona and I laughed at them. They’re idiots.” I didn’t have much to say to that.
I’ve bumped into Forest fans in the Australian outback (apparently lots of Northern Territory shopkeepers in Tennants Creek on the Stuart Highway have a soft spot for the “Tricky Trees”); in a Cambodian internet café in the form of Chad - a dangerously obese American who was there to take photos of temples; on the streets of Berlin running the marathon in sweltering conditions wearing their Forest shirts with pride, and about 5 years ago I saw a septuagenarian French farmer sporting a Forest shirt with “Shipstones” on the front as sponsors.
And I am now sat on my hotel room bed in Zurich watching England against Estonia on Eurosport having spent a pleasant hour or so in a Swiss restaurant talking about Nottingham Forest to a 40-yr old Singaporean real-estate person who was seated right next to me by some over-keen waiting personnel. He’d never been to England, let alone Nottingham, but was a follower nonetheless. He’d even got a friend “with contacts” in Malaysia to record the aforementioned Forest-Yeovil game and then to courier it down so he could watch it the next day.
I was impressed with his in-depth knowledge of Forest’s monumental ascent to double European champion status and the subsequent monumental downfall to League One also-ran status. A lot of the time he was talking about events that occurred before my fourth birthday so I had to nod and smile and assume he was right, but the rest of the time I felt a sense of shame and as if Mike, 40, from Singapore was telling me off. It was as if he’d been waiting for the last 10 years to speak to someone from Nottingham so he could get to the bottom of why the Forest of yesteryear have become the Forest of today who now can’t even progress past the second round of the Johnstone Paints Trophy (and believe you me, if you meet a Singaporean who is more annoyed with the Johnstone Paints trophy than Mike, then you’re doing well).
He was able to lecture me at length on why Forest should be a better team than they are, on how their performances are inconsistent at best, which apparently in League One is “just a bad joke I don’t laugh at”, on how David Johnson is an overpaid sissy, and more importantly, on how Forest were able to beat Chelsea 7-0 not all that long ago.
I wanted to tell him that it wasn’t actually my fault, but I don’t think he would have listened. He was letting off steam at a rate of knots, which thinking about it was fair enough. A lot of my friends are Forest fans so I get to complain most days if I feel like it. This guy had a decade, if not more, of annoyance to get off his chest. When he got up to leave he commented sadly, “when I was 15, all of my friends decided to support Barcelona and I laughed at them. They’re idiots.” I didn’t have much to say to that.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
