Introduction
The first rule of Flanagan’s Running Club is no one talks about Flanagan’s Running Club!
If you are on the mailing list it is because you are trusted not to talk about Flanagan’s Running Club, now that fun at work has been banned in these dystopian times.
I think I’ve sorted out the e-mail issues and this should now come out from my website address without any issues.
On This Day
1886 – Geronimo, Apache warrior, surrenders to the U.S. Army, ending the main phase of the Apache Wars.
1915 – Typhoid Mary, the first healthy carrier of disease ever identified in the United States, is put in quarantine, where she would remain for the rest of her life.
1977 – Tenerife airport disaster: Two Boeing 747 airliners collide on a foggy runway on Tenerife in the Canary Islands, killing 583 (all 248 on KLM and 335 on Pan Am). Sixty-one survived on the Pan Am flight. This is the worst aviation accident in history.
1998 – The Food and Drug Administration approves Viagra for use as a treatment for male impotence, the first pill to be approved for this condition in the United States.
It’s International Whisk(e)y Day
And it’s World Theatre Day
Mapping The London Year
1953 – Notorious Serial Killer John Christie is arrested at his home in Notting Hill
Christie murdered at least eight people, including his wife Ethel, by strangling them in his flat at 10 Rillington Place. Christie moved out of his flat during March 1953, and soon afterwards the bodies of three of his victims were discovered in an alcove in the kitchen. Two further bodies were discovered in the garden, and his wife’s body was found beneath the floorboards of the front room. Christie was arrested and convicted of his wife’s murder, for which he was hanged at Pentonville Prison. BBC Radio London DJ Robert Elms’ parents almost rented a room from Christie but decided against this as Mrs Elms found their potential landlord a bit creepy.
Chuck D Presents This Day In Rap And Hip-Hop History
1984 – Run DMC release their self-titled debut album on Profile records.
Although the album was more a collection of the group’s many twelve-inch singles from the previous year, it nonetheless contained early Run DMC classics that would remain a staple of their live shows for decades to come, including “It’s Like Thar”, “Sucker MC’s (Krush Groove 1)”, “Rock Box”, “Hard Times”, and “Hollis Crew (Krush Groove 2)”.
The Album featured production by Larry Smith, Orange Krush, Rod Hui, and Run’s brother Russell Simmons. It reached #53 on the Billboard 200 and #14 on the R&B Chart.
365 – Great Stories From History For Every Day Of The Year
1204 When she died today she had seen it, done it, lived it all; Eleanor of Aquitaine, the most remarkable woman of her time. She was raised in Poitiers in the traditions of courtly love and the troubadour. In Paris she heard the preaching of Abelard, St Bernard and later St Thomas Becket. A great beauty and sometimes great scandal, Eleanor was a duchess a descendant of Charlemagne and the richest woman in Europe, her domain covering about a quarter of modern France. With its own distinct language, Aquitaine was the land of the langue d’oc, so named because its inhabitants said ‘oc’ rather than ‘oui’.
Eleanor had two husbands, both kings. With her first, Louis VII of France, she went on crusade and enlivened the trip by cuckolding him with her own uncle (not an incestuous betrayal, as her uncle was her blood-aunt’s husband). With her second, Henry II of England, she founded the Plantagenet dynasty that lasted over three centuries. In all she bore ten children, including England’s most storied king, Richard the Lion-Heart, and England’s worst, King John.
One of Eleanor’s granddaughters was Blanche of Castile. When Eleanor was 78 years old she personally brought Blanche from Spain to wed the King of France. At 80 she directed the defence of a town under siege from a marauding army.
Finally Eleanor slipped away at 82, an immense age for her time, carried away according to a contemporary chronicle ‘as a candle in the sconce goeth out when the wind striketh it.’ She lies buried where she died, in the ancient monastery of Fontevrault in the calm of the Valley of the Loire.
Births
1957 – Stephen Dillane
1963 – Quentin Tarantino
1970 – Mariah Carey
1972 – Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink
1988 – Jessie J
Deaths
1878 – George Gilbert Scott
1968 – Yuri Gagarin
2000 – Ian Dury
2002 – Dudley Moore
Number 1’s
Number 1 single in 1969 – Marvin Gaye – I Heard It Through The Grapevine
Number 1 album in 2002 – Nickleback – Silver Side Up
Number 1 compilation album in 2003 – The Very Best Of Cold Feet
Random Results
2010 – Tottenham Hotspur 2 – Portsmouth 0
2004 – Harlequins 20 – Leicester Tigers 23
2017 – New York Knicks 109 – Detroit Pistons 95
1996 – Florida Panthers 0 – New York Rangers 3
Drabble
A drabble is a complete story that is exactly one hundred words long.
Emergency Action
It wasn’t every day that you saw a sight like that as you drove down the road, there in the ditch laid the vehicle at a forty five degree angle facing the way of the oncoming traffic.
How fast must it have been going to lose control and end up on the wrong side of the road? Had there been anyone in the back of it, or was it going somewhere else in an emergency?
Why was it still in the ditch, surely they would have pulled it out by now. Don’t they need all the ambulances they can get?
Joke
A judge is questioning a woman over her pending separation, ‘And the grounds for your divorce, madam?’
‘Ooh,’ she replies, ‘about four acres, with a small stream running by…’
‘No,’ says the judge, ‘I mean what is the foundation of this case?’
‘Oh right,’ the woman continues, ‘well it’s mainly concrete, brick and mortar…’
‘No, no,’ the judge reiterates, ‘what are your relations like?’
‘I have an aunt and uncle living here in town,’ smiles the woman, ‘and my husband’s parents aren’t far from us either.’
‘Dear God’, pleads the judge, ‘let’s try this as simply as we can. Do you have a grudge?’
‘Oh no,’ says the woman ‘we have a huge driveway – we’ve never needed one to be honest.’
‘Is there are infidelity in your marriage?’ asks the judge, now tiring.
‘Both my son and daughter have stereo sets,’ explains the woman, ‘they’re always blaring out music!’
‘Madam,’ asks the judge, sick to the back teeth, ‘does your husband ever beat you up?2
‘Occasionally,’ she replies, ‘about twice a week he gets up about twenty minutes before me.’
‘That’s it!’ screams the judge. ‘why do you want a divorce?’
‘Oh, I don’t want a divorce,’ she replies, still smiling away, ‘my husband does – he says he can’t communicate with me.’
Random Items
Fact
Until 1965, driving was done on the left-hand side on roads in Sweden. The conversion to right-hand was done on a weekday at 5pm. All traffic stopped as people switched sides. This time and day were chosen to prevent accidents where drivers would have gotten up in the morning and been too sleepy to realize that *this* was the day of the changeover.
Firsts
c6400 BC – King Gyges of Lydia (Turkey) issues the first stamped coins
c650 BC – Emperor Yung hue (china) issues first paper money.
1661 – The Riksbank of Stockholm issues the world’s first banknotes.
1772 – Robert Herries issues the first Traveller’s Cheques.
1950 – Frank McNamara launches the Diners Club card, the world’s first charge card.
1958 – The Bank of America in California launches the BankAmericard, the world’s first credit card (Later known as Visa)
1966 – Barclays Bank launches Barclaycard, Britain’s first credit card.
1967 – Barclays Bank installs the first cash dispenser in its Enfield branch.
Thought
Why do banks charge you a “non-sufficient funds fee” on money they already know you don’t have?
Rappers of the Nineties Trumps
Quote
Emily – it’s great having one of those seated heats. It feels good when it warms your bum, it feels like when you wet yourself.
Going Underground
Lewisham
Was recorded as Levesham in the Domesday Book and the name is derived from the personal name of the Saxon Leofsa and the Old English tun ‘a homestead’. The name changed to its present spelling in the course of time.
The station was opened on 20 November 1999.
Top Ten
The ten tallest habitable buildings in London, where building is complete.
| No | Team | Height (in feet) |
| 1 | The Shard | 1016 |
| 2 | One Canada Square | 771 |
| 3 | Heron Tower | 756 |
| 4 | 122 Leadenhall Street (The Cheesgrater) | 737 |
| 5= | 8 Canada Square | 655 |
| 5= | 25 Canada Square | 655 |
| 7 | Tower 42 (Formerly NatWest Tower) | 600 |
| 8 | St. George’s Wharf Tower | 594 |
| 9 | 30 St Mary Axe (The Gherkin) | 590 |
| 10 | BT Tower | 581 |
Cathedral Fact Files
| Cathedral | Chester Cathedral | ||
| Dedicated To | Christ and St Mary (Formerly St Werburgh) | ||
| Type | Medieval | Architecture | Norman |
| Religion | COE | Tower / Spire | 1 Tower |
| Site Founded | 874 | Height (External) | 127ft |
| Church Founded | 1250 | Height (Internal) | 75ft |
| Bishopric Founded | 1075 | Length | 371ft |
| Current Bishopric Founded | 1541 | Width | 206ft |
Thirty-Three And One Third Revolutions Per Minute
Stevie Wonder – Innervisions
Innervisions was Stevie Wonder’s 16th studio album, and was released August 3, 1973, on the Tamla label for Motown Records.
Three days after the commercial release of Innervisions, on August 6, 1973, Wonder played a concert in Greenville, South Carolina. While on the way back, just outside Durham, North Carolina, Wonder was asleep in the front seat of a car being driven by his friend, John Harris, when they were snaking along the road, behind a truck loaded high with logs. Suddenly the trucker jammed on his brakes, and the two vehicles collided. Logs went flying, and one smashed through the wind shield, sailing squarely into Stevie Wonder’s forehead. He was bloody and unconscious when he was pulled from the wrecked car. For four days he lay in a coma caused by severe brain contusion, causing media attention and the preoccupation of relatives, friends and fans.
The nine tracks of Innervisions encompass a wide range of themes and issues: from drug abuse in “Too High“, through inequality and systemic racism in “Living for the City“, to love in the ballads “All in Love Is Fair” and “Golden Lady“. The album’s closer, “He’s Misstra Know-It-All“, is a scathing attack on then-US President Richard Nixon, similar to Wonder’s song a year later, “You Haven’t Done Nothin’“
The lyrics, composition and production are almost entirely his own work, with the ARP synthesizer used prominently throughout the album. Wonder was the first black artist to experiment with this technology on a mass scale, and Innervisions was hugely influential on the subsequent future of commercial black music. He also played all or virtually all instruments on six of the album’s nine tracks, making most of Innervisions a representative one-man band.
Innervisions won Grammy Awards for Album of the Year and Best Engineered Non-Classical Recording in 1974, while “Living for the City” won the Grammy for Best R&B Song.
The album debuted on the Billboard albums chart on August 18, 1973 then reaching its peak position of number four on September 15. In the UK the album also achieved success, and became Stevie Wonder’s first album ever to reach the UK top 10, peaking at number eight.
The tracks on the album have been well sampled and covered with it being sampled 75 times, and tracks covered 101 times.
Named as 31st greatest album of all time by VH1, and 23rd by Rolling Stone.
All songs written, produced, and arranged by Stevie Wonder.
Recordist – Dan Barbiero, Austin Godsey.
Tape operator – Gary Olazabal.
Mastering – George Marino.
Recording coordinators – John Harris, Ira Tucker Jr.
Synthesizer programming – Robert Margouleff, Malcolm Cecil.
Album art – Efram Wolff.
Side one
1 – “Too High” – 4:36. Stevie Wonder – lead vocal, Fender Rhodes, harmonica, drums, Moog bass; Lani Groves – background vocal; Tasha Thomas – background vocal; Jim Gilstrap – background vocal. Snoop Dogg used this for the backing for his track “Too High”, one of eight times it has been sampled, including by Royksopp. It has been covered six times.
2 – “Visions” – 5:23. Stevie Wonder – lead vocal, Fender Rhodes; Malcolm Cecil – upright bass; Dean Parks – acoustic guitar; David T. Walker – electric guitar. Sampled seventeen times, and covered eight times.
3 – “Living for the City” – 7:22. Stevie Wonder – lead vocal, background vocals, Fender Rhodes, drums, Moog bass, T.O.N.T.O. synthesizer, handclaps. Released as the second single from the album, it reached number 8 in the US Billboard Hot 100, number 1 on the Billboard R&B charts and number 15 in the UK charts. Most sampled track on the album at twenty-three times, including by Public Enemy in “Black Steel In The Hour Of Chaos” and by Neneh Cherry in “Inner City Mama”. Covered eighteen times.
4 – “Golden Lady” – 4:40. Stevie Wonder – lead vocal, piano, Fender Rhodes, drums, Moog bass, T.O.N.T.O. synthesizer; Clarence Bell – Hammond organ; Ralph Hammer – acoustic guitar; Larry “Nastyee” Latimer – congas. Sampled five times, and covered six times.
Side two
1 – “Higher Ground” – 3:42. Stevie Wonder – lead vocal, Hohner clavinet, drums, Moog bass, tambourine, handclaps. Was the first single release from the album, being released the month before the album was. It reached number 4 on the US Billboard Hot 100, number 1 on the Billboard R&B charts, and number 29 in the UK charts. Sampled four times, and covered more than any other track on the album at twenty-one times, including giving the Red Hot Chili Peppers their first UK hit single.
2 – “Jesus Children of America” – 4:10. Stevie Wonder – lead vocal, background vocal, Fender Rhodes, Hohner clavinet, handclaps, tambourine, handclapping, drums, Moog bass. Sampled six times and covered five times.
3 – “All in Love Is Fair” – 3:41. Stevie Wonder – lead vocal, piano, Fender Rhodes, drums; Scott Edwards – electric bass. Later a hit for Barbra Streisand in 1974. Sampled eight times, and covered seventeen times.
4 – “Don’t You Worry ’bout a Thing” – 4:44. Stevie Wonder – lead vocal, background vocal, piano, drums, Moog bass; Yusuf Roahman – shaker; Sheila Wilkerson – bongos, Latin gourd. The third single released in the US, reaching number 16 on the Billboard Hot 100, and number 2 on the Billboard R&B chart. It wasn’t released as a single in the UK. Sampled four times, and covered nineteen times including by Incognito, who had their biggest UK hit with it.
5 – “He’s Misstra Know-It-All” – 5:35. Stevie Wonder – lead vocal, background vocal, piano, drums, handclaps, T.O.N.T.O. synthesizer, congas; Willie Weeks – electric bass. The third single released in the UK, reached number 8 in the charts. Not released as a single in the US. Amazingly this hasn’t ever been sampled and has only been covered the once, as an instrumental, by The Simon Park Orchestra, who are more famous for having a UK number one with “Eye Level”, the theme from the TV series Van Der Valk.
Story Time
Retirement Day
I had been working for the same company for more years than anyone should care to admit. I started work at Levitt & Sons on the 1st July 1969, I was sixteen years old, and had just finished school the week before. Levitt & Sons had been established by Henry Levitt earlier in the same year to manufacture specialist photographic paper, plus certain finishing chemicals to use on the paper to produce photographs. In all the years I had worked for the company I had never fully understood exactly what the specialisation was, only that as time went on, the business grew, and then stayed afloat during times when other such businesses were going bankrupt left, right and centre.
Since 2001, that had seemed like it was more by luck than judgement, by that time Henry Levitt had retired as the head of the business, finally relinquishing the day to day running of the business to the “& Sons” part of the company name; James and Michael Levitt. When the business had started back in the sixties, the two of them were both still toddlers, such a pair of cute, angelic little babies you couldn’t have hoped to meet. If I knew then what I was to experience later, there was a good chance that there would have been a terribly tragic drowning accident, the poor cherubs having fallen in to a vat of chemicals as they played in the factory. The pair of them as grown-ups were, without a shadow of a doubt, two of the biggest “shine up your buttons with brasso” I have ever had the misfortune to meet in my life.
From the day they took over, the atmosphere changed, not for the better either. They drove out nearly every member of staff in the country who was older than they were, in fact my only saving grace to being made redundant was the fact that I was considered too expensive to get rid of, having been there since the first year of the company opening, and I’d had the good sense to get in on what was then, their new-fangled pension scheme. I sure as hell wasn’t going to leave voluntarily, but as it stood now I was close enough, I only had two hours left to go before I was going to retire, take my state pension, which added to what the company one was going to give me, meant I was going to have a comfortable retirement when it came to it.
In fact, I was going to be more than comfortable; I owned my own house, a nice large semi-detached house on the outskirts of Leicester, having been mortgage free for the last twenty years. I had carried on using the money I had previously paid towards the mortgage to build up a nice portfolio of investments, having shares, gilts, and ISAs, using the interest and dividends from them to add more back into the portfolio.
When I had started work at Levitt & Sons all those years ago, it was because Henry Levitt had needed someone to help deal with all the administration that was cropping up in the new business. He knew all about the photographic side, having come to form the company out of his own frustrations at not being able to get supplies locally when he needed them for his own photography. He knew where to sell the products to, the very shops that hadn’t been able to supply him were more than willing to sell his products, they were on their doorsteps, and he could produce and sell the items at a comparable price to the imports from the US or Japan.
I found that I was a natural with a typewriter in front of me, there was a cream coloured Royal typewriter that sat in the office, tucked away in the corner of the factory floor, and it became an extension of me. I lost count of the number of letters, invoices and order dispatch sheets that came from my fingers, through the Royal and on to the paper to head off into the wider world outside.
For the first couple of years, that little corner office was all that there was in terms of administration for the company, during that time more orders, from more shops around the country came in. My workload increased as the production outside in the factory took off. During the summer, it was ridiculously hot in there, all the heat from the factory floor came flooding into the office, but it had nowhere to move on to, just collecting there. Air-conditioning was a pipedream for a company like Levitt & Sons back then, and a single wonky fan, that only seemed to have the two speeds of dead slow, and stop, struggled to bring any relief from the heat.
The 1971 trade exhibition caused the already burgeoning business to take off rapidly, with orders suddenly far outstripping the production capabilities that the company had. Henry Levitt was able to buy two adjoining units to his factory; one was a small office suite, with a showroom, previously used by a paint making company who were in the process of being taken over by Crown Paints, and whose administration was moving to another part of the country, the other being a shoe factory, going out of business due to its owner gambling away all its money in the casino every chance that he got.
The two factory units were made into a single production area, with my hot little corner office being removed, as administration was moved into the adjoining offices. The expansion also saw additional administration staff being taken on, some new Royal typewriters arrived, and the administration tasks were split between five staff now. As was common for the time, we were known as the typing pool, a bit of a misnomer, as although they all had typewriters, they didn’t spend all their time typing letters.
In addition to the offices, Henry used the former showroom space to set up a site shop, enabling potential customers to come in and view what they were producing in the way their customers’ shops would be displaying them. The showroom quickly gave Henry ideas for the future, a steady throughput of photographers looking to buy supplies for their own use, hence cutting out the middleman of the shops Levitt & Sons sold to, made him think about opening his own stores.
The first store was opened on Church Gate in Leicester, less than two miles away from their factory, by the time James and Michael took over nearly thirty years later the company had stores in seventy-three towns and cities across the country. Since that high point though, they had closed nearly half of them, the change to digital methods of photography causing a near fatal downturn in sales and orders. The only thing that seemed to keep them in business was that their downfall wasn’t as quick as that faced by the majority of their competitors, and that due to the careful management of the company by Henry Levitt, they weren’t debt laden, with poor cash flow as a lot of companies were. After it had all shaken out there was still a need for their products amongst those using old-school photography methods.
During the company’s expansion, I had stayed working in the same office throughout. The offices themselves had been expanded twice during that time, first by buying three neighbouring houses, extending across into them, and then by building additional stories on to the original ground floor offices, at its peak there were over fifty administration staff employed in the offices. Production had expanded as well, taking over the remaining neighbouring factory units on the same block as they became available; a hosiery factory forced out of business during the three-day week working of the seventies, a toy makers that failed to keep up with the new trends in the eighties, and finally a fax machine manufacturer that never really got going in the early nineties.
In all that time, I had seen staff come and go, to most of them I was Joan from the typing pool, a nomenclature I hated, I did so much more than type, but nothing I said made the slightest bit of difference. Word processors came along and I was finally forced to give up my trusty cream Royal typewriter that I loved and had used for over a decade. Whereas the rest of typewriters were thrown out or given away to local schools, I kept mine in my bottom drawer, it felt like a reminder of a simpler time. My abiding image of it would be looking up from doing a letter, or an invoice on it, glancing at the old ticking clock above my desk, seeing that the time was five to twelve, and knowing I was close enough to being done for the week, the midday Friday finish being something that the entire workforce looked forward to.
Now it was close enough to the end of my working life. Computers had taken over from word processors, and taken all the skill out of doing administration work, a spell checker meant people got sloppy with their typing, pre-made templates meant never having to worry about getting the paper lined up exactly right before starting to hit the keys. The light tapping noises on the computer keyboard were nowhere near as satisfying as the sound of the keys slamming those metal letters through the ribbon, onto the paper wound around the drum. Getting to the end of a line before slamming the carriage back across to the start of the next line, such a satisfying sound, an indication you were actually doing something, and on occasion giving you the ability to work any anger or frustration out. Nowadays there would be a little click on a mouse before a bit of whirring from the printer as it popped out pieces of toner laden paper into a little tray.
Finishing at midday on a Friday was also a thing of the past, nine to five, Monday to Friday was now the standard working week, with weekend working to provide cover for the stores from time to time. With all the changes I had survived, I was glad that I was leaving the administration behind, but as I did so, I had one final ace up my sleeve that was going to play out today.
James and Michael Levitt had done everything they could to make me leave since they had taken over. In their first three years in charge they had systematically removed all vestiges of their father’s people from the company at all levels, in the factory, in the stores and in the offices. Long serving members of staff were made redundant, with it being blamed on falling sales, and changes in the market, even though most of the sackings being done before the real market shift hit the business. In fact, if I had to say, I would blame the two of them for taking their eye off the market at a crucial time, they spent all their time and resources removing those older than themselves from the business, rather than on the business itself.
In 2004, they floated the company on the stock exchange, putting 49.9% of the company for general sale on the market, keeping the remaining 50.1% for themselves. They did it at completely the wrong time for the business, their £2.35 per share offer price being wildly optimistic, with the price tumbling to just 24 pence per share within a week of trading on them opening.
Despite the tyranny of James and Michael, I still felt a certain loyalty to the company and how they did, and therefore I started to buy up some of their shares within my normal investment portfolio. The price stayed around 30 pence per share year after year; I kept buying some shares each month, very gradually increasing my overall share in the company. Early this year I hit a level of 29.9% of all shares, close to the point where I would be required to make a bid for the company, or at least a bid for enough shares to give me a majority share.
I was going to give that up as a lost cause, but working in administration did have some advantages, as I happened across paperwork saying that James had sold off 5% of the shares from his holding over the last two years, apparently without letting his brother or Companies House know. The brothers were no longer majority shareholders, they still had the biggest share, but there was an opportunity there for all the other shareholders to kick them out.
I have spent the last three months of my employment, not doing any productive company business, but instead tracking down all the other minority shareholders, and persuading them to agree to sell to me when the time came to do so. I sold some other parts of my portfolio, cashed in ISA’s, and earmarked my company pension lump sum to use as well, and used it all to buy all the other shares at 40 pence per share. All of the trades went through at 10am this morning, meaning that since then I have been the majority shareholder and de facto owner of Levitt & Sons, and on my last day with the company as well.
As it rolled around to 5pm and the end of the day, James and Michael Levitt slimed their way into the office. It was rare to see them here this late in the day, but they couldn’t help themselves, they had been waiting for this day for a long time, having made it abundantly clear many times they would be glad when I was gone. They were now here to celebrate that fact, full of fake smiles, doing my leaving speech, thanking me for all my hard work and years of service through gritted teeth. Then in as clichéd move as it was possible to pull, a bouquet of flowers was produced, and alongside it a hideously tacky carriage clock. When the polite applause from the other staff had died down, I rose to my feet to give my leaving speech; it was one that no one gathered was expecting
“Thank you, James, thank you Michael, thanks for the kind, if insincere words of your speech, and also for the clichéd gifts that accompanied it.”
“I happen to know that the only reason you are here today with those fake smiles painted on your two faces, is because after sixteen years of trying, you think that you are getting rid of me, someone you think is too old, too old-school, a person from the dark ages of the company, someone older than the pair of you that was here when your father ran the company.”
“It is true, I am the last one left from that era, having started here straight from school, only months after your father started the company. I have seen the company grow and contract, but the way you two halfwits have run the company since your father handed it over to you is a disgrace. You took petty point scoring to a new level, sacking anyone you could afford to pay redundancy to, and those you couldn’t afford to pay, you tried forcing them out of the company on the back of a policy of bullying and intimidation. It worked on everyone else, but not me, I am made of sterner stuff, as you are about to find out, that as it comes to my last day, here in the typing pool as you cavemen still call it, I have news for you. You thought I was close enough to being done to show your smarmy faces here, but you got it the wrong way around, it is you that is not just close enough to being done, but pretty much certainly done.”
“As at 10am this morning, I am the majority shareholder of Levitt & Sons, since James secretly sold 5% of the shares I have managed to track down all the remaining shareholders, and this morning bought an additional 25% share in the company to bring my total share up to 54.9% of the company. Transfer of title with Companies House has been confirmed, as of 4pm today I am the new CEO of Levitt & Sons.”
“My first act as new CEO is to fire James Levitt and Michael Levitt with immediate effect, for gross misconduct, and corporate negligence. The pair of you are to be escorted from the premises forthwith, something that security will be more than happy to help you with. You will return all company property within twenty-four hours, or face prosecution for theft. Your system and building accesses have been rescinded, if you attempt to enter any company property in the future you will be prosecuted for trespass.”
“The exit is that way,” I said pointing towards the door, “and don’t let the door hit your asses on the way out.”
Some of the audience sat in stunned silence, whilst some realising what had happened cheered, it could never be said that James and Michael were well liked. The loudest noise came from the Levitt brothers, with bright purple faces that gave the impression that their heads might blow up at any time, screams of denial and anger flew from their mouths. Death threats were issued, both at me, and at James from Michael, for his part in their downfall by selling his shares. They were heckled out of the room by laughter on the main part, whilst they were manhandled, kicking, and screaming from the premises by security.
Close enough to retiring they had said, not by a long chalk she thought to herself. She needed to prepare for Monday morning and running the company.
The first thing she was going to do was to hang her old Royal typewriter in pride of place in reception.
Dilbert
Epilogue
If you want to catch up on old issues, Drabbles I’ve had published, or the random scribbling from a bored mind on my blog then they are all available at http://www.onetruekev.co.uk/
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