I am the antithesis of cool, calm and collected.
Despite being a pensioner by adland standards, I can sometimes appear to be very immature. Not by a 41 year olds standards, but by a 14 year olds.
One example was last week when I was skyping with my best friend Paul.
As many of you know, this man is like a brother to me.
We’ve known eachother since we were born, we have gone on all sorts of stupid adventures together and I’ve written lots of posts about how much I love him – of which a positive example is here and a slightly [read: very] dodgy example is here.
Anyway last week we were catching up on Skype.
It had been a while since we spoke so we had a lot to catch up on – however within 12 seconds, I knew he was the one with all the news and I was the person who was going to listen, and do my absolute level-best not to piss myself.
His first bit of ‘news’ was he was bitten.
Not by a dog.
Or a cat.
Or any animal for that matter … but by a human, if that’s what you can call an Iron Maiden fan.
On top of being a printer, Paul – all 6ft 5″ of him – is a bouncer.
Despite his imposing size, he’s softer than a labrador puppy … so I can just imagine his surprise when throwing out some old Iron Maiden fan from one of their gigs for being a nuisance, the guy turned around and bit deeply on Paul’s hand.
As he was telling me he has had to get tetanus jabs and AIDS tests, I am ashamed to say I was laughing aloud … but that was nothing compared to the next story he told me.
To cut a long story short, he was dropping off some garden waste at his local refuge centre.
To cut a short story even shorter, he somehow managed to lose his step while chucking his rubbish in and fell 16 feet into an empty skip … breaking 3 ribs and writhing in agony.
I know … I know … when a 6ft 5″ big bastard falls into a skip and breaks his ribs, I should be deeply concerned – and I was – but that didn’t stop me howling as I imagined him doing the most ungraceful flop [into a skip] in history!
But it gets better … or worse, depending on how you look at it.
You see the skip was so deep – and so empty – that Paul couldn’t pull himself out of it and to make matters worse, the refuge centre didn’t have a ladder to get him out.
So what did they do?
They called the fire brigade.
THE FIRE BRIGADE.
The best bit is that the man that called the emergency service was told that if all the engines were out on jobs, they’d have to call a Seaking air & sea rescue helicopter [like the one in the photo above] to winch him out.
Hahahahahahahahaha.
I would literally have given anything to have some mammoth flying machine – usually used to pull people out from capsized boats in treacherous and freezing seas – fly over a rubbish dump and winch some tall bloke out of a skip, but alas, the fire brigade were available and with sirens blazing, they “rescued” the extremely embarrassed hard man bouncer from the skip dustbin.
Yes he was injured … yes he could have been seriously hurt … but that doesn’t stop the fact that I basically was 2 seconds away from becoming a baby again and wetting myself with laughter.
Don’t feel too sorry for him, he is a bit accident prone … don’t forget this is the man who chopped the end of his finger off with his lawn mower, broke his ankle TWICE trying to hurdle over some street railings, went on an Olympic toboggan run and almost fell off and recently stubbed his toe and fell so awkwardly on his sofa, he smashed his ribs in.
So to my beloved Paul, thank you for doing the stuff that makes me laugh like I’m a kid again, because given the age of the people I work with, most of the time I feel I should in an old folks home.