8. The-Italian-Connection
It was soon after 9/11, an event everyone remembers where they were when it happened, and for me, I was at work in a picturesque hill-town in the Apennine mountains of central-Italy, east of Rome. I was working alongside one of the big-five consultancies (PwC, Accenture, Deloitte, EY and KPMG), helping them master the supply-chain software they were implementing at the H.Q. of a pan-European home-appliances company.
I always enjoyed implementations with the big-five; their consultants are clever, dedicated professionals, and easy to work with. Their minimum working hours are strange though. They tend to fly-in on Monday-morning and work to 9.00 pm before checking-in to their hotel. Then they work from 9.00 am to 9.00 pm during the week, until Friday, when they leave at lunch-time to fly-back to where they live, for a well-deserved weekend-break. That’s towards fifty hours per week, even before travel-time is included!
Being a 3rd party, I refused to follow that regime, and would often walk-out at 7.00 pm or earlier as I’m a great believer in the thirty-five-hour week, even in consulting. I did not need to impress or prove anything, and unlike the “cub-consultants” deployed by the big-five fresh-faced from college, could not be “culled” for failing to “make-the-grade” at year-two. Being of a “certain-age” (i.e. an “old-bugger” in my 40’s), I liked my free-time more than money and career. I also disliked the rush to get back home to Amsterdam for the weekend, and the ungodly-early starts on Monday morning to get to Schipol. Often, I would stay-over at the client’s location and enjoy the weekend there to avoid this mayhem.
The only issue with this policy was that I missed the distractions of home; your favourite bars and restaurants, and particularly, the coffee-shops. There were two possible solutions to the coffee-shop problem; either secure local recreational-supplies, or take them with me. I wasn’t very good at the first option, unlike Marvella, my life-partner. Once when we were relaxing in a bar at a business conference in Geneva, she popped-out to the toilet and scored more plant-based-material than you’d get from a garden-centre! This made me choose the second option; bring your own.
Because of 9/11 things were already getting more difficult, even in Schengen countries like Italy and the Netherlands. Immediately after 9/11 when we were going on holiday to the Italian lakes, I popped-out to the toilet at Milan’s Malpensa airport while Marvella stood-guard at baggage-reclaim. Returning I witnessed in slow-motion as a German-shepherd sniffer dog, followed by two policemen, zig-zagged towards her like the shark in Jaws, before rising-up on its back legs and tapped her on the shoulder. She turned around, bent over and said to the dog “what a lovely animal you are, what’s your name, and where’s your owner?” before standing-up right in front of the two officers. One of the officers filled-in for the dog: “he’s called Caesar, and you’re coming with us!”.
We were detained, thoroughly searched, and questioned for two hours, but they couldn’t find anything; no cigarette-papers, no loose-tobacco, no drug-paraphernalia, no-nothing; it was just Marvella’s base-load seeping-out into Caesar’s ultra-sensitive nose. Eventually the chief-officer relented and lectured us, in a fractured English with a wonderfully strong Italian accent, “we are not looking for people like you”. This always makes me think “then why keep stopping old hippies like us?”, but best to keep quiet, grovel a lot, and move-on. He then gestured for us to leave, which we began-to, before Caesar re-appeared from nowhere and triumphantly repeated his two-leg tapping trick on Marvella while furiously wagging his tail. The chief-officer then let-us-go for the second time. I hate bloody dogs; hate them.
As I set-off for Schipol on a Sunday afternoon for the next two-weeker at the client, Marvella handed me my box of sandwiches for the trip, and I took a small amount of hash with me for the middle-weekend, wrapped in thin-tissue-paper. This keeps the smell down, and you can quickly put it in your mouth where it, and you, are pretty safe. No one expects police to go fishing around in people’s mouths, and in extremis, you can always swallow it. What could possibly go wrong?
Everything started well. Taxi from home to Amsterdam’s Schipol airport; fine. Plane from Schipol to Romes’ Fiumicino airport; fine. Train from Fiumicino to Rome’s Termini station; fine. Walk through underground passage to change tracks; fine. Then things started to disintegrate. The train to the client was nearly full, but I found a seat with quite a few free spaces around me. I sat down, but just before the train was due to leave, a company-of-Carabinieri entered the carriage and took every free seat. I was surrounded by the Italian fuzz, all in their not-so-comic uniforms, with that red-stripe running down the legs. I vowed never to by anything from Armani ever again, as if I ever did!
What the hell were they doing here? Didn’t they have those police cars you saw on the Italian-job to ferry them to wherever they want to go? Why use public transport? Why persecute me? Just to be on the safe-side I discreetly transferred the hash from my pocket into my mouth and wedged it between my teeth and lip, and decided to just relax and go-with-the-flow. The train pulled out on time, and we started our three-hour ramble through the heart of Italy.
After about an hour I started to get a little hungry (guess why), so inspected Marvella’s sandwiches in the Tupperware box. There were egg-and-tomato, cheese-and-onion, and bread-and-butter ones to go with a hard-boiled egg, and salt in twisted silver-foil. The egg-and-tomato were beginning to go soft, so I started on them. I think you know where I’m going with this, but it was only after peeling the egg and starting on the bread-and-butter sandwiches I had the inevitable “little difficulty”. It was the very last sandwich that “did-for-me”. I had to chew harder-and-longer than expected, but I persevered, and as I swallowed was hit by the awful realization; I’d just eaten three days-worth of hash in one go! Shit!
By the time we pulled in to that little hill-town I was fully paranoid, and just grateful to leave the train at the right stop and escape the malevolent presence of the Carabinieri. I walked up the hill to my hotel, checked-in, and decided to go out and enjoy the evening in the strong, autumn sun. I settled on one of the open, sandy areas which had a large bar and tables to one side. I sat down, started on my lime-flavoured alco-pop (I was in my alco-pop phase), and started thinking about the great-mysteries of the universe, as you do when you’re extremely stoned.
Four great-mysteries floated into my mind. Why was there no apple-flavoured alco-pops whereas you could find orange, strawberry and even passion-fruit? Why do sniffer dogs like Caesar wag-their-tails when making an “arrest”, are they just happy in doing their dirty-work? What is the collective-noun for consultants, each with their own view on a subject, a confusion-of, a consternation-of, …? No, not quite right. Finally, why did all the young-ladies around me at other tables, sitting with their boyfriends, all wear plastic see-through bras? In fetish clubs I’d seen leather-bras, rubber-bras, even vinyl-bras, all with-or-without holes for the nipples, but never a see-through plastic one.
Then as the sun went down, I “knocked-these-problems-off”, one-by-one, Sherlock-Holmes style, ably-assisted by his trusty side-kick, the good doctor Hash-Watson. I was still “in-my-prime”, after-all!