Top 10 Things to Do When the Cards Are Stacked Against You
10 Make sure you get enough sleep
9 Eat well
8 Exercise (these three are vital and often the opposite of what you want to do)
7 Don’t panic or beat yourself up
6 Take note of the new lessons you’ve learnt—there’s always value in every experience
5 Get away—to anywhere, be it the other side of the world or the woods round the corner
4 Remember yourself as a kid and how brilliant you knew life could be
3 Think calmly, collectively and positively
2 Hatch a plan
1 Go again
I left Piccadilly with my tail between my legs, my dream in tatters, but radio was now in my blood and I vowed that one day I would make it back.
In the meantime I resolved to throw myself into the entertainment world closer to home, but I had no money and no resources with which to do so other than my precious Mini that my lovely mum had bought me. It was time to rejoin the real world.
I took a job as a forklift truck driver while I thought about things further. It was a job I both loved and hated. I loved it because I could listen to the radio all day; I hated it because the bloke in charge of me—the warehouse manager—was a complete bastard. I really wished him ill and hoped he would get killed on the way to work, I pitied his wife and children he was so horrible—unlike the big boss of the company who was one of the nicest guys you could ever wish to meet.
The business involved importing deep-fat fryers and ice-making machines from Canada. They weighed anything from a few pounds to two and a half tons and they were so tightly packed in the forty-foot freight containers they were shipped in, it was barely possible to get them out. The task of doing so involved sliding the forks of the forklift underneath the wooden packing case and then tilting the whole thing back and forth to somehow waggle it out, like you might do to loosen a brick in a wall, except this was two and a half tons of fat fryer and it was balancing precariously twenty feet above you—well, actually me in this case.
Once I got the waggle on, I had to wait for the fryer to sway away from me and then reverse quickly while the angle of the forks enabled the case to come clean out, missing the top lip of the container; as the fryer then swayed back towards you, a full backwards tilt was required to bring the waggle to a halt and allow the fryer to slide gently back fully onto the forks.
The momentum of the whole operation would often cause the back wheels of the forklift to come off the ground every time the fryer swayed away from me—over waggle and the forklift, along with the bespectacled ginger-haired driver, would be up in the air off the ground and it would be goodnight Vienna.
This never happened to me but I did get a sideways waggle on once when one of the big fryers caught the top lip as I reversed out too late. The fryer began to rock slowly from left to right but instead of beginning to settle, the rocking became more and more exaggerated; with each rock it became ever more obvious what was going to happen. The fryer had taken on a momentum of its own. I was sat in the cab of the truck, helpless and openmouthed. I realised the fryer was going to tip at any moment and probably to the left which is precisely where the big boss’s brand new beige/brown Rover Vitesse happened to be parked. I looked on in disbelief—they say things like this occur in slow motion and that’s exactly how it felt.
The fryer came crashing down right on top of the boss’s pride and joy which was flattened like a pancake. It looked like a joke car: all four of its wheels had splayed out like a baby deer losing its footing on the ice.
As the deafening noise subsided and the dust settled I could not believe what I was looking at. There were splintered planks everywhere from the crate; the fryer was in bits and somewhere underneath were the remnants of a now unrecognisable prestige executive motor car.
‘Shit the bed,’ I thought to myself, ‘what do I do now?’ and then I remembered that line from The Godfather where Robert Duvall’s character informs the film producer that Senor Corleone always insists on hearing bad news as soon as possible.
I walked straight through the office pool and into Bill, the big boss’s office.
He could see I was distressed.
‘Well, hello young Chris, what can I do for you?’ he enquired warmly in his thick treacly Scottish accent.
I had already decided the best way to break the news to him.
‘Bill, imagine the worst thing I could tell you.’
He thought for a second. ‘…Alright,’ he said smiling as if it were a game.
‘OK, well, whatever that was, this is much much worse.’
He laughed nervously. ‘What on earth is it? What’s going on?’
There was no other way to say it so I just told him straight. ‘I have just dropped a two and a half ton fat fryer on your car.’
He took a beat to take in what I had just said and then without saying a word he walked straight past me and outside to the loading bay. When he saw the car, or what was left of it, he stopped dead in his tracks, looking on at the carnage in total disbelief.
‘How the fuck did you do that?’ he finally said.
‘It just happened,’ I replied pathetically.
‘Well, for fuck’s sake don’t let it “just happen” ever again.’
And with that he turned on his heels and went back to work. Later that day his secretary called the insurance and the next morning they delivered a replacement vehicle—the same model of car but this time in silver. Bill’s reaction amazed me and taught me several invaluable lessons:
Never keep bad news from the person that needs to know it. Tell them as soon as possible.
Never dwell on bad news—it serves no purpose save to make things worse.
Never let something that is totally sortable get the better of you. As I said, Bill’s reaction amazed me, but looking back, it was entirely pragmatic: a car is just a combination of tin and rubber and it was insured—so no problem.
What I also discovered later was that Bill had vehemently disliked the beige/brown colour of his car when it had been delivered and was secretly thrilled at being able to replace it in silver.
It wasn’t long after this unfortunate episode that due to a combination of bastard warehouse bloke and more recently an over-amorous female member of the office pool (who happened to be married to a professional rugby player), I decided that it was time to hang up my warehouse coat once and for all. It was back to the job section of the local paper.
Top 10 Business Names I Have Been Involved in
10 Big and Good Productions (my first production company)
9 Gambon and Defreites (the private detective agency I set up with my friend Michael)
8 The Great Car Company (my first foray into the classic car market)
7 Umtv
6 Ginger Television
5 Ginger Radio
4 Ginger Productions
3 The Ginger Media Group*
2