When I was younger, I’d always insist on a small present anytime I had to visit anywhere remotely uncomfortable, places like the dentist, barbers or even some of my relatives. It was classic stamping your feet behaviour and generally I won out. I once had a lower tooth removed but emerged satisfied from the Dentist with a wind up space shuttle. Haircuts always resulted in dinky cars, and I once got Buck-a-roo for permitting myself to be admitted to hospital with serious blood poisoning. But as the years pass, you begin to realise that you don’t always get what you want. You occasionally have to put in as much as you get and sometimes, you have to cut your losses, pick up your underpants and leave before her husband reaches the landing. The gang in Thomas Cook are brats of the highest order. Like the Electricians before them, they believe that the recession is OK for other people but not for them. They were handed their pink slips, a more than satisfactory wedge of cash and told to leave. Instead of doing the honourable thing (such as heading for the nearest pub or having their babies), they decided to illegally hole themselves up in the now closed store and most likely rob as much stationary as their non ‘woe is me’ placard hand could carry.
The Gardai quite rightly, and under court orders, moved in to remove them. The protesters however acted like they were auditioning for a Jim Sheridan movie. The Birmingham Six should be looking for royalties. SIPTU then announced that is was “absurd” that staff who were losing their jobs were facing a court. In a Libel avoiding act of animal cruelty, I dressed up my dog as the SIPTU spokesman and conducted an interview with him. I put it to him that the Gardai are not arresting them because they lost their jobs, but because they illegally occupied someone else's property. The SIPTU spokesman, as cute as can be, simply hung his tongue out of the left side of his mouth and wee’d gently into the slacks that I’d ruined trying to get him into. The interview ended, as it does with many trade union officials, with my face being licked and a little rub behind the ear.
You see, I too recently was the proud recipient of redundancy, and yes, whilst I did fill up my man-bag with anything that wasn’t nailed to the floor, I didn’t fluff up my pillows on the managers desk, drink some cocoa and dye my hair for the cameras. I simply took the money, and left with grace (via a quick buttock printing session on the photocopier). That’s life folks.
However, something tells me that this gangs relationship with Thomas Cook isn’t over. I mean, there’s obviously the hundreds of package holidays to the Costa Del Sol that they probably booked before they were removed to look forward to.
