Living for Disco

The man has an incipient mullet, and is wearing disgraceful grey polyester trousers with a trailing hem; they are too short, and display a pair of limp grey socks inside brown plastic loafers.  He is also sporting a foul dark beige shirt that hasn’t seen the hot side of an iron since 1976.  I take this as a bad sign.

He gets my back up immediately by snidely berating us all for being late.  The programme on the wall states that we should all have been there at 8.20, but we all have emails to prove that we were asked to be present at 9.  When I point this out he smiles nastily at me, scratches his polyester crotch through his pocket, and says “Yes, but it’s now nearly half past.”  He is lying.  It’s 9.15, and we’ve all been sitting patiently for him to begin for over five minutes.

He then gives us a long and very dull talk about rules, while excavating his breakfast from his back teeth with his finger, and having another go at it.  From the looks of it, it was quite a meal.  There’s a lot of chewing left to be done, for sure.

“And one last thing” he says.  “If we can all agree that this course is not like an omnibus.  We all get on here, and we get off together on Wednesday afternoon.  I don’t want to see anyone just showing up for lunch, or tea, or late.  We are here for your benefit – let’s see this thing through together”.  He makes a three-day monitoring and evaluation course sound like intensive group therapy.

We break at 1pm.  I see him tucking enthusiastically into hearty meal (and no doubt saving it in his cavities for later), but when we trail back into the room at 2, he is nowhere to be seen.  Clearly, his omnibus ticket is a flexible fare, as he remains invisible for the rest of the day.

Thankfully, so does his lunch.