Be Ware of Corporate Hitmen With Unholstered 9mm Vendettas

Ian Hutson

I feel that it might happen at any moment.

A quiet stretch of canal, an empty Starbucks coffee cup thrown over-arm from the deep shrubbery, landing a savage blow to the Hutson temple…

A burly Watery Wellness Trust Ltd rozzer with a loaded iPad, secreted behind the door of an Elsan room at a lonely Service Area, a scuffle and an ugly sluice blockage…

The heavy Company Book, held aloft in both hands by a shadowy figure with the brim of their forehead pulled down low; thrown at me from some ancient canal bridge…

…with the section on “putting one foot wrong from now on” underlined in green crayon.

Chapter 2733, Subsection 498a, Paragraph 1621, Line 877 and Footnote 13d of the new Licence Terms & Conditions.

Still, some things must be said and not forgotten, especially in the matter of faceless, bullying corporations (you know the one). As Mother often said to me while lacing up her Doc Martins before heading out to work undercover for the Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti; ‘Never forget, never forgive, never surrender.’ As Gary Numan said (to lots of people, not just to me), in Track 7 of the seminal album Savage (Songs from a Broken World); mercy is over-rated.

The National Bargee Travellers Association have been kind enough to publish my account of the Cardinal’s recent hair-pulling, ankle-kicking, latte-spilling silliness with The Weyland-Yutani Corporation The Watery Wellness Trust Ltd.

If either of my readers would like to cast a beady occular orb over it then please click on the link below:

Going The Distance With CRT.

🙂

Thank’ee. I hope that it is useful.

Illuminated transcripts will be available in the fullness of time.

But meanwhile…

…life continues, at a wild, metropolitan pace.

On a domestique note there are some new links in the menus at the top of each page hereabouts, some leading to Pinterest in case that’s your thing, others to the august bodies of NBTA and NABO.

I’ve added another dozen and a half images to the Cardinal’s FineArt America pages/shop, the better to cater for those with boring walls in need of tartery-uppery, a need for personalised greetings cards upon which to send their village hate-mail, and/or even such as a hankering for jigaws to while away the long, lonely decades before death.

Watch this space and, should I be found one morning stabbed through with a hideous blue plastic sign bearing the half-sunken tyre logo – avenge me.

Chin-chin, chaps.

Ian H.

14 Comments

    1. Thank’ee most kindly. It does strike me that an organisation that reneges on written agreements and then merely – for the most part – balls its fists and sticks its chin out defiantly is hardly what even metropolitan croissant-munchers would term “customer facing”!

      The saddest thing of all about their behaviour, and the mark of a true Corporate Bully, is that they don’t actually face up to any of the real – very few in number – problem boaters, a list of which any of the rest of us could supply on lined paper produced from a back pocket. The few, the very few, who absolutely extract the micturition fluid, do damage, moor wherever for year upon year, remain untouched by C&RT hand. C&RT instead make a loud noise and go for – attempt to go for in this case – the “lower-hanging fruit”, the civilised people that they imagine will be more easily cowed. To their many institutional faults one must add corporate cowardice!

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  2. “…their own high standards of customer service in their communication with me.” The irony of this statement by the CRT is staggering. Or do I mean irony? Perhaps I mean bald faced lie. Hmmmm. Yeah, that guy absolutely knew it was just BS typed to fill up white space in the email.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. I did rather get the impression that the gentleman who ended it all, so to speak, in one single email was of an opinion not dissimilar. The first person twisted (oh boy, did he twist!) and turned and seemed desperate to be anything but upright, the second chap – in my brief contact – didn’t actually use the words ‘codswallop’ and ‘nonsense’ but left traces of them between his lines.

      Commercial aspects of the WWT Ltd may be unfusticated (as yet) by the boat & boater-loathing ethos passed down in the more public aspects of the monolith. Long may they remain thus.

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  3. Instead of you having to prove your movements by pictorial evidence they should be proving by their ‘evidence’ every documented siting of Cardinal Wolsey – if nothing else it will show their lax administrative system. This kind of incompetence makes me get so angry I have to have a lie down. Grrrrr!

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    1. Some numpty writing the 1995 Waterways Act poorly-phrased two items. They specified that somehow the burden of proof was on the boater, and they coined the term ‘boaters without a home mooring’ when the distinction and terminology ought to have been ‘boaters’ and ‘boaters WITH a home mooring’ – thus getting setting the standard against creating some sub-class.

      It would help if there were ANY oversight of these people, but there’s nought but an airy-fairy meets-once-a-year “committee” of Membrum Parliamentary Virilis. They turn up, eat the biscuits, put in their expense claims and rush to catch the 4.55 to Brackhampton. Even the so-called “ombudsman” is – get this – paid for by C&RT!

      Tis incroyable.

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  4. Remember the mouse’s tale in ALice’s Adventures in Wonderland?
    “Fury said to a mouse, that he met in the house, ‘Let us both go to law: I will prosecute you – Come, I’ll take no denial; We must have a trial: For really this morning I’ve nothing to do.’ Said the mouse to the cur, ‘Such a trial, dear Sir, with no jury or judge, would be wasting our breath.’ ‘I’ll be judge, I’ll be jury,’ Said cunning old Fury: ‘I’ll try the whole cause, and condemn you to death.'”
    Do you think this is prescribed reading for the tyre drowners?

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    1. With the proviso that it’s probably read -to- them (just before afternoon nap in the office) you’re almost certainly correct!

      What really gets my goat is that assumption of total authority over me (and over all other boaters), when in fact we boaters – the public in general – are the dog, and C&RT are merely the dog’s sit-upon. It’s not really entirely their fault. H.M. Government recruited folk who would be seriously challenged running an already-established city-centre sandwich shop, when what is really needed is folk with more of the Victorian engineer about them – engineer in the proper sense of the word, not its recent wishy-washy watered down use. We’re in the hands of (mediocre) administrators, when what we need is people who build dams and bridges and hydro-electric pot-plants – overseen by one or perhaps two people who can speak politicalese. 🙂

      Liked by 1 person

    1. Thank’ee!

      The re-wilding might well be for just that, I wouldn’t put it past Corporate! Others have postulated a cash-flow problem, that all is not well in the land of High Finance, and that perhaps lack of money is the real reason. Sounds equally plausible to me – perhaps Bank of Geneva have stopped honouring WWT Ltd cheques?

      Looking at it now there’s no way that any contractor could just turn up and mow-as-usual, it will take a lot of clearing up before it’s ready again for motor-mowing. Chaps with machetes and flame-throwers will be needed!

      Liked by 1 person

  7. Ooh! Having just watched re-run (covid is, it seems, a dam’ good excuse for TV companies to KEEP ON showing us repeats) of “The Hollow Crown” and dug out my Complete Shakespeare….I sense a touch of the chap who called for a horse, several times, and was found a few hundred years later in a “stable for several hundred horses” in the County of Leicestershire.
    I hope you don’t become a foundation stone for a car-park….

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    1. My Watery Wellness Trust Ltd file has doubtless now been removed from General Filing, and placed in the red filing cabinet, the one marked ‘Trubble maykahs’.

      There is a pattern to my life that simply cannot be denied. 🙂

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