The Life of an English Postman, Concl. by Richard Wink If anyone has enjoyed these candid accounts of my dabble in the high risk, high stakes life in the postal service then please let me know (email me at aprilmaymarch777@yahoo.co.uk) because it may just convince me to take another job just for the sake of writing about it I handed in my uniform last week, the four red polo tops, one blue shirt (still pressure wrapped in its original packaging), the two pairs of navy trousers, the fleece and the high vis jacket. My initial contract expired this week, it was a temporary deal, after that I rolled on but one more day tipped me over the edge with aching calves, a couple of pints of sweat lost and a little voice in my head that kept repeating the mantra of “Fuck this Shit!” over and over. In all honesty I think they would have kept me on, but deep down I knew that the job had beaten me. Physically I had just about adjusted my pain threshold and this allowed me to cope with the little cuts, bruises, sprains and strains but mentally it was a constant war. I was fighting against shame and a real sense that I was in a job that was somewhat beneath me. I say this not in arrogance but because it is the kind of job that you take when you have just murdered your ambitions. It was the uniform that ultimately governed my decision to quit. Ever since I endured three years of wearing an orange apron when I worked for a well known DIY retailer I have had a problem with wearing a uniform, at least when you are a faceless office rat you are kitted out in just a smart suit that allows you to seamlessly blend into the background. When you wear a company uniform you are identifiable and set apart from the crawling masses. The loose fitting vibrant red polo shirt with the world famous Royal Mail insignia sitting proudly just above your beating heart, *** The time was about half past one in the afternoon. The inner rage was making me boil, I was Klaus Kinski, all bulging eyes and regimented madness. The sun was heavy and my trail led me to the steep descent up and the heady fall down numerous blocks of flats, some wavering a tarty quality of fur doormats and leopard skin curtains others brutish with the smell of tuna trash and the vile flag of St. George sitting at the window like a nationalist cat uttering a bawdy crescendo of “En-ger-land, En-ga-land, En-geeeeeee-land!”. This is England, a country divided. The ground was walking beneath me, the demented treadmill in reverse. Behind each door flap was a vicious dog or a moaning pensioner close to death, after each drop there was more and more mail. The red post bag was never going to empty. Even with a tatty map I had no idea where I was heading, this was unchartered territory. The claustrophobic stairwells were beginning to take my energy. My water bottle was half an inch from emptiness. Each tower was a formidable climb. A man who has lived in a bungalow since he was four years old was never going to take to this urban terrain. So I said to myself that enough is enough. Cycling back to the depot I was surrounded by a silk glow, impervious to hostile traffic, tooting horns and irate pram pushers. Detached from the world and what was going on, I was stuck once again in my own private introspective bubble. Realizing when you are beat, when the game is up and when the game is almost over. It’s quite a hard thing to take, even when you have no love for what you are doing. Contorted by D’Evils. Dear God, I wonder can you save me? I wonder if I am operating in direct opposition to the God that made me. Whether this blatant disregard for security is a sign that I am destined for nothing; is this how life is? One walk to the next until the four horsemen carries you to your designated hole in the ground. You soon realize that the town planners have carefully divided each sector. Rich and poor, council houses and privately owned, corsas and convertibles. Half of the route is a pleasant walk through suburbia, the other is grime central. In the morning your watch your back, in the afternoon you are pleasantly waving back to the woman pruning her roses. Anyway back inside the van where I am sitting on the backseat with Face and Hannibal, Mr T is driving and Murdoch is being a twat. They drop me off at the edge of the road. Then they drive off to some backwards village where they will build some kind of super weapon out of only a wicker basket, a plank of wood, cress, a handful of raisins and a tub of creosote and gallantly fuck some rednecks up without shedding a drop of blood. *** I find myself at a crossroads, looking across the road at the University of East Anglia, an institution where I spent three largely anonymous self destructive years. Ask anyone who attended the University between 2002 and 2005 and almost certainly they would not remember me. That period was a difficult time and the only time in my life where I encountered major panic attacks, depression and even flirted with the idea of suicide. I’d also started to use alcohol as a crutch, not just socially for ‘Dutch courage’ but to get me through the day. Sat on the bus I would sip a down a few gulps of brandy to calm my nerves. I got my degree by sticking it out. Despite avoiding lectures and seminars I was able to BS my way to a mediocre pass. I didn’t bother attending the graduation ceremony, I really couldn’t hack it. Instead I let the postman deliver my degree certificate in the post. So yes the area across from where I stood brought back some painful memories. I did have some good moments during those three years. I started getting seriously interested in poetry, I lost my virginity somehow and the years were mostly soundtracked by ‘Up the Bracket’ and ‘Worship and Tribute’. In many ways you’ve got to wade through the shit before you get the gold. *** Dogs really do hate postmen. I don’t know whether they are prickly about an intruder encroaching their domain or they just don’t like the smell of envelopes. As you prod your fingers slightly in the letter box you feel the dog grab at the letter, sometimes dementedly tearing the post to shreds. The little bastards are the worst, terriers and those mangy dogs that celebs carry in their handbags. They run into the door, snarl, snap, yelp and growl. Bearing their teeth ferociously, I can sometimes see them ready for the kill. Oh great, if it isn’t enough of a risk that you may get run over or mugged you now have crazed animals worked up into a frenzy going hound mental. I only hope they don’t destroy anything valuable, a birthday card, insurance policy documents or a degree certificate. Being a dog owner myself I know how dogs can be a little tetchy around certain things, guarding bones or soft toys but to go mad over a few bits of paper, it just seems ridiculous. My dog is so placid and laid back he probably wouldn’t even bat an eyelid if a burglar was breaking in. *** I’ve observed that almost everybody who walks past me are wearing headphones connected to an iPod, mp3 player, mobile phone or going back further some may even be lugging around a walkman. These people are missing out on so much, all the sounds. The beeping horns, the sirens in the distance, neighbours’ gossiping, infants crying, birds singing and dogs barking when I walk down a driveway. For a writer this kind of shit is gold dust, for a human you are blanking out your environment. Surely all this is better then listening to the latest Coldplay album. One, two—twenty boulders later, Ivan Petrov discovers the twitching hand of his friend, comrade, and his partner for their confidential chore, the construction of D-6, a secret subway system serpentining beneath Moscow’s Metro. It is 1946. The two men had been friends since their school days—simple times when they swindled girls into nudity and snuck pulls of vodka between classes. The men had the privilege to serve together in the 6th Army at Stalingrad, where they often reflected on their happier youthful life, but not too much. Any hope was false under such assignments. Many comrades would never leave the city they defended and after the war they thanked God everyday for the life they were allowed to keep. It was there, in Stalingrad, that they became men, where they learned how to shoot rifles and kill for the homeland, kill for survival. After the war, they would push these lessons aside, place them in the past, but they would never forget. “Anton! Anton!” Ivan screams at the pile of rubble. “Just a moment, Anton!” He turns around, calls down the tunnel to anyone that can hear, “Come help! He is buried in the collapse!” Already exhausted from seven hours of labor, the heavier boulders closer to Anton Alekseev are a feat to remove. Despite his handicap he works arduously to free Anton. He lifts the boulders nearest the exposed hand without any consideration of the particular architecture of the collapse—removing the wrong stone could be like removing a keystone. Soon, Ivan had cleared enough of the collapse to allow Anton’s arm to flex at the elbow. His arm, the muscle, the tendons, lurches about spasmodically. His arm becomes his eyes, his ears, his ability to express himself. By then several men with lights and shovels arrive, take over for Ivan. Ivan takes Anton’s hand, in part to console but largely to control the erratic motions while the men dig him out. His hand calms, yet his grip is one of steel, an unrelenting lock between friends. “You can’t give in Anton! You never submit! Stay with us Anton, just a moment!” October 23rd, 1956 It was my father, Sandor Mikus, who had sculpted the statue that the people massed around with steel cables and trucks. The day was October 23rd, 1956 in Budapest, Hungary. The statue for which my father had won high accolades and acclaim now was subject to ridicule and detest. Joseph Stalin had stood high in Varosliget Park for five years at an impressive twenty-five meters, dominating; his presence in silence did not prohibit his orations of oppression over our people, his stare reminding us of our vassalage and subjection to the Soviet nation. I arrived after the demolition was already underway. From my humble apartment a few kilometers away, I heard the crowd wailing, their uproar of hatred and hope overtook the city. So I closed my texts on physics to see for myself what was happening. Outside my apartment, people were shouting praises to deities, some laughing, some crying. Following the flow of them, I arrived at Blaha Lujza Square, which I often passed through on the tram lines. I saw the massive bronze statue my father had forged lying on the ground; dying, defeated. Strong men with powerful machines were busy severing the head from the body. The people cheered with voluminous passion. The noise from the cutting echoed through the streets. But it was a mere backdrop to the rage of the people. Soon, I could see the head decapitated through a gap in the crowd amassed in front of me. Without thinking I moved forward through the opening, people hugging each other around me as I progressed to the head of Joseph Stalin, our Satan. I stood next to it; my fingers caressed his cheeks, ingesting the subtleties of my father’s greatest achievement. An old woman nearly eighty years old, I imagined, reached from inside her cloak and handed me a stick of white chalk. “Write, my dear! Deface this beast, my hands shake too much, I cannot do it properly!” I took the chalk, examined it briefly, and then without hesitation I finished my father’s masterpiece. On Stalin’s cheek I wrote: W.C. Having a mare’; it is almost a certainty that I will have at least one day during the course of the week where things take a turn for the worse, whether it is because there is a backload of post thanks to a bank holiday or for some other reason that management are keen to cover up. Or a day where you are lifting the equivalent to your body weight in white envelopes, brown envelopes, A3, A4, A5, parcels and shiny plastic leaflets advertising a two for one deal at Fat Pat’s pizza place. Lifting and lugging around a weight so heavy is a feat I had not achieved since a family fishing trip to the Norfolk Broads nearly a decade ago where I carried tackle box, bait box, camping equipment, seat, pole, rods and a large military green umbrella that was not even needed as it never rained that week. Rain is another contributing factor to having a mare’, you are sodden, dripping and squelching. Paper falls apart and so does your brittle sense of hope. The sun too can really take it out of you, dehydrating you to the point that you breathe sand through your throat and when you curse you don’t say shit, you say Sahara. I’m moaning aren’t I? You can’t do anything about the weather, you just have to adapt. What pisses me off no end is when something goes wrong that is less to do with you and more to do with the shoddy equipment you are given. A bike that you lock easily enough and then when you try to unlock it the key jams and snaps in half in the lock forcing you to grab a giant set of bolt cutters to cut off the lock. Or when you are given a week off from the bike and are entrusted with pushing a giant red trolley that is halfway between a Victorian pram and one of those old New York style hot dog trolleys. Worse still when twenty minutes into your walk the back wheel of this trolley comes off and you spend the next four and a half hours pushing a trolley that keeps buckling to the left. But everyone hates work don’t they? http://www.workrant.com Frustration ends when you negotiate your way out of the car park and get past the nearby traffic lights. The bad days are temporary; it’s only your own selfish perspective. The fraught existentialist daydreams that you experience, the doubting voice that chirps in when things are going tits up. It all ends when you sign out and finish your shift. You are soothed by Duran Duran on Radio 2, soothed by the sound of shifting gears and soothed by the first cup of tea you sip when you are chilling out at home in front of the computer after a hard day at work, stuck on wikipedia reading about the alleged conspiracy behind the death of Patrick Tillman, Daniel Vettori’s batting average and the story behind Elliott Smith’s Figure 8 album. I ponder whether I should be using this spare time a little better. I mean we all must unwind after a little bit of grafting. By the time I have unwound I am a little hungry and then a little tired and then I sleep before my alarm wakes me to start again. It is with great pleasure when I somehow muster some energy to prattle on a bit with my own writing projects. For once I avoid distraction. http://www.anxietyculture.com/distract.htm However writing comes with a real sense of guilt. I am a writer still in the closet so to speak. I am not sure whether I qualify as being a writer that’s one thing, the other is that my friends or the vast majority of my friends would be bored stiff if I rambled on about my writing. I think this guilt was enhanced last year when I went through a relatively short spell of unemployment. I drifted in and out of jobs and pleaded to my family that I was taking some time out to do a little writing. A lot of people assume when you claim to be a writer that you are either some deluded bohemian type who quotes Sartre read from scrawls on the toilet walls of Corpus Christi College or if your product is not on the shelves at Borders then you are a liar, a lazy layabout. Kind of like the opinion many have of the unemployed. Working on the rationale that unemployment equals laziness. That Laziness equals eating a bowl of frosties at noon, wanking over pregnant chavs on the Jeremy Kyle show and watching Neighbours twice daily. When you have a job you soon find that your life becomes structured around your contractual obligation to turn up on time and do your shift. You lose time but your reward is money. When you are unemployed ironically you are constantly obsessed with work, acquiring a job is your mission, there is no badge of pride for claiming benefits contrary to popular belief. It is no ODB grinning wildly on the front of Return to the 36 Chambers. You have plenty of time but little money to be able to do anything with it. You cannot write because you are plagued with anxiety and stunted by shame. I think I am pondering my current predicament and the reason why these feelings of dwelling wholly on the negative have come to the fore is because the gloss has worn off. In cricket the new ball does the most damage, it bounces harder against the pitch and will often move freely claiming the most reward. When the lacquer, the shiny red gloss is removed as time goes on the ball becomes unresponsive, struggling to bounce and soon it loses its old zest. When you start a job (note I say a job and not a dream job) you rely on the newness to carry you through, when the shine goes and you get stunted in routine you begin to ask questions. Should I stay or should I go?
The Life of an English Postman #5 by Richard Wink
Being a relatively new guy means that you don’t have a settled route or as I found this month you don’t even have a settled sector. The positive side to this is that you get to see more of the residential sprawls of Norwich, places you never knew existed. The further out your sector, the more likely that you will be ferried out in a van. This to me is bloody exciting and a welcome change to riding a bicycle. If I close my eyes and forget about my colleagues I could almost imagine sitting in the back of the van with Greg Ginn and Chuck Dukowski, enthused about plodding on to our next destination where we are likely to bleed and sweat for a meagre reward.
Stalin Stories by Richard Nesberg
Anton Alekseev & Ivan Petrov
The Life of an English Postman #4 by Richard Wink
The Life of an English Postman #3 by Richard Wink
When it rains it pours. Sodden wet the envelopes dissolved in my hands like Oxo cubes in a boiling pot. There is nothing worse then the combination of paper and water, it drags your spirits down and you feel your morale quickly drain from your pores, running down the hill into the already bulging drains.
“Take this job and shove it
I ain't working here no more”
That’s what you are thinking, quit, leave, run. But somehow come five thirty the next morning you are signing in and surprisingly the clouds have dispersed and the sun shines again. Then when the sun comes out you have the other problem, people. Now I’m not completely misanthropic, oddly enough many consider me to be a pleasant affable guy but boy do I hate small talk. I seem to have this mental block, when you innocently say “Hi” or “Morning” to the old man in his garden or the lady pushing a pram uphill you tend to get caught in a prolonged chat where suddenly you need to think on your feet, improvise.
“Dirty old river, must you keep rolling
Flowing into the night
People so busy, makes me feel dizzy
Taxi light shines so bright
But I don't need no friends
As long as I gaze on Waterloo sunset
I am in paradise”
What can you talk about to a stranger other then the weather; it is my number one go to conversation topic. It usually restricts the conversation to, so you don’t have to stop and natter for five valuable minutes. What’s worse is when they take the weather away from you and prod for more information, having the gall to ask you questions. I am currently covering a route for a guy who is off sick, well technically not sick he had an operation on his hernia.
During the course of a day I am guaranteed to get asked “What happened to our regular guy?”
At first you tell them the truth; it becomes an automated response devoid of any compassion. Then after being asked the same question continuously the devil on your right shoulder begins to talk. My responses become more devious.
“Gone to join the Foreign Legion, apparently he was compelled to after watching that Van Damme film”
“He responded to an email from this wealthy Nigerian Prince and after giving his bank details he was blessed with a million pounds”
“He’s on tour with Motorhead”
“The gas bills and the water rates, and payments on the car
Too scared to think about how insecure you are
Life ain't so happy in your little Shangri-la”
A week ends and you have your pay slip, in your account is a wad of cash. Yet it is never enough despite this job paying more than your last job. Everybody feels like this and you take some solace from that thought but still you wonder what actually happens to the tax you pay. Where does it go? I imagine there is a massive pool of money somewhere that Gordon Brown swims in like Scrooge McDuck used to do in Duck Tales. It’s his way of unwinding after a hard week at work.
I’ve only just noticed that I haven’t acknowledged those irritating snippets of song lyrics that I have pasted thus far in this piece. I wonder if I am getting some form of juvenile Alzheimer’s because I can’t for the life of me think how I was going to use them. I think it was going to revolve around me making a point about some alarming trend that all the greatest songs ever written are about mundane shit, the daily grind. Even the technical ambition and talent of Pink Floyd (and I say that begrudgingly as a Floyd hater) only went stellar because of the everyday themes found within ‘The Wall’ and ‘The Dark Side of the Moon’.
“A working class hero is something to be.
When they've tortured and scared you for twenty odd years,
Then they expect you to pick a career,
When you can't really function you're so full of fear”
Maybe work is making me lose my ability to function. Thoughts go awry when you have an over active mind, a tired body and a mundane repetition. Oddly this cocktail of opposable sensations can lead to some wonderful moments. A charging slobbering St. Bernard, the fumbling of red elastic bands between thumb and forefinger and the cooling wind as you cycle downhill. The weather is setting itself fair and the overwhelming humidity is settling seriously, nailing each morning forecast with little yellow suns dotted all over the island. Sweat clams my skin and though I have never stepped foot inside a sauna room I imagine this is what it’s like. The heat drives a man to hallucinations - the goldfish in the pond become fresh snapping lobsters, in the grass are vicious seething snakes and behind me a shadow lurks dripping sand with each footstep, the pressure of time trickling away. I really wanted to hate MGMT, ‘Time to Pretend’ is everywhere at the moment coming from the jogger blearing music from his headphones, from the car radios that burn past and then through open windows you can hear it on Music Television. I downloaded the album out of curiosity and checked out a review on drowned in sound, the band looked like a bunch of rich hippies from their press photographs, and this look kind of explains what MGMT are all about. The glorious solar-dripped synth melodies, cliché, parody and nostalgia; It’s a mock masterpiece. Sadly, misery is a thriving business, next up the presenter introduces a feature about dating. Oh goody, the one thing I have completely failed at to the point that any thoughts about candlelit dinners, wine and cheese picnics and lovers arm in arm down the promenade leads me to feel the need to flagellate myself and atone for those bad experiences I’ve had to the tune of Bjork’s ‘All is full of love’. My, we have come full circle and I can understand the point of tortured performance art from the likes of Marina Abramovic, point is that it is a necessity to test the limits of the body and the possibilities of the mind and as humans we get off on this punishment, we always have, whether we are the artist performing self abortions or the man who gets up at five AM for six days a week without fail. The Life of an English Postman #1 by Richard Wink Last year after the fiftieth printer jam of the week I jacked in my office job and due to the dearth of vacancies available at that moment I soon ended up in an even worse office job. On the plus side I got to wear a headset and I learned more about ailments that plague the over 60’s then I cared for. Just think one in five pensioners sitting near you on the bus are wearing colostomy bags. Heaven forbid that one might leak. What I wanted was a job that allowed me time to write, time to drink and more importantly something that allowed me to stretch my legs. Sitting on a swivel chair next to Anne and her curried duck gave me a severe bout of nausea. I wanted rain, I wanted sun and I wanted to be away from wires. So I applied to be a postman. This was not some kind of homage to Charles Bukowski. No of course not I wanted to be a postman way before I read ‘Post Office.’ It was a job that I’ve always wanted to try, though I have never fully understood why. Roll on to the present day, or yesterday where I met with a gaggle of folk who were in the same boat as me, we were all going to be ‘posties.’ Induction days are always boring, the rigmarole of signing papers, watching health and safety videos and drinking too much tea. The day dragged and though we were led by a crafty cockney who talked as cockneys do, half in fact and half in glorious anecdotes, these anecdotes are often not true but you want to believe them even if the fiction revolves around ‘this bloke’ or ‘a geezer’; it just wasn’t much fun. We also learnt how to lift properly, remember it is imperative that you are bending your knees, we even learned how to wear a bag and how to push a trolley. As I was told technique is everything. I had a rather nice donut at the induction. I’m partial to the odd donut. This one had a nice coat of white icing with jam in the centre. It went down nicely with a cup of tea. The tea was weak, I should have left the teabag in for longer but when you are in the queue of a cafeteria line you tend to panic. I split a little milk on the counter but didn’t cry about it and used two plastic spoons, one to remove the teabag and one to stir. I have expected to be charged extra when I did this as the cashier gave me a narked look. *** I hadn’t ridden a bike in over eight years, odd considering there are plenty of old bikes out and about on Friday nights. I had forgotten about balance, today my hands shook and the cycle helmet was cutting into my forehead. Christ they have got me riding a fucking bike and I was flowing, man and machine united, pedals pounding downhill I flowed and then shit, I braked suddenly and instinctively put my feet flat down to anchor myself. I wheeled over the kerb and the bike kicked up. I ended up a little saddle sore. The old adage is correct you never forget how to ride a bike. I hate cyclists; they are the bane of a driver in a hurry. They jut out in the road, they stray too far away from the kerb, God knows what they though of me wobbling about. Once you have ridden to the location for your drop the fun begins, you wander to and from each house on the route slipping a few hundred envelopes, magazines and parcels through each letter box. Sounds like a piece of piss doesn’t it? Wrong, unsurprisingly I was constructed by many obstacles. Wrought iron gates, angry dogs, stiff letter boxes and hills that kill a man’s calves. It appears as a newbie that I had gotten one of the hellish routes, physically at least. There are worse in the area, some have tower blocks with endless staircases, others are populated by yobs and bastards. By the end of my route which encompassed the cities highlife and lowlife where plush million pound properties looked down upon shoddy two storey flats, I had truly begun to feel it. My body was fatigued and I had not felt this shot in ages. Perversely it felt good in a way, this was real work. This was the work that I had tasted before when I worked in a paint tin processing factory during the summer after I finished my A Levels back in 2002. A job that causes your body to ache, making you feel real and alive. I was away from the city office bees who buzzed in at nine, toiled lethargically and then buzzed out at five only to spend another hour stuck in traffic before they finally get home.
The Life of An English Postman #2 by Richard Wink
Aliza Shvarts is an artist and I use that in the loosest possible terms, she’s a performance artist apparently and controversially she videoed her own self abortions. It’s the step up from Marina Abramovic's mutilations, her series of ‘rhythms’ laid the blueprint for shock performance art when she began stabbing herself and recording the sounds, then she put on a real show by letting her audience go to town on her fragile frame with various foreign objects, she was the original queen of hardcore. It’s funny how things have gone full circle and the grotesque now leans openly in the world from the blockbuster Saw series where cinemagoers were led through 4x90 minutes of torture porn, then a few years back we had Sebastian Horsley’s crucifixion and now we have Shvarts and her presentation of natural gore. Art is indefinable. Duchamp’s ‘fountain’ is a urinal, Hirst displayed taxidermy and only yesterday I saw a duck lay an egg in the front drive of one of the houses on my route, it was surreal. I wish I had a camera.
Relentless sounds, spoons tingly in coffee cups, miscellaneous smells coming from a few hundred kitchens. Midday approaches and I waltz in a stumbling dehydrated two-step, hopping over cracked paving slabs and stray plant pots containing flowers desperately dwindling in need of a few drops of water. I look in the sky and it’s blue across the board. Somehow I think these flowers will not be saved.
Our great leader is lost at the moment; maybe he has gone on holiday, skipped a few weeks to cool down by the Alps. The presenter on BBC Radio 5 is gobbing on about a strike in Scotland that may lead to a fuel shortage; a crisis is potentially on the horizon. I look at the gauge and I have just under half a tank left, I feel relieved. The next story jumps to some bloke who had the misfortune to be murdered and though he is dead and could not feel what was happening post mortem his corpse somehow ended up bundled in a suitcase and thrown in a ditch, what a way to go. I think they need to have a few ‘nice’ news stories to balance out the ‘bad’ ones.
Memoirs of an I.T. Girl... the things I do for you
By Cat
this girl had a gorgeous tattoo
of a peacock
on her right shoulder blade.
It was new
and she was pontificating
on hygiene
and craftsmanship
when I walked into the cafeteria –
this, of course,
made it hideous
and so i turned away
before her voice got
any more inclusive.
i’m thinking
someone thought
she paid too much…
the bird was pretentious
and empty faced.
its pose was dramatic
victorious even
as if her body were
iwo jima and its ultra violet
green plumage
so erect and inaccessible
were a spray
of american flags.
i’d also like
to pounce on her back
and carve it out with a spork. we must
save the idiots
from themselves
whenever it is within
our power.
I need you to remember as you read this that I am risking my job with every word that I am currently typing. For that reason people and locations will not be revealed, I shall speak plainly and generally.
