Farewell Cuntoc
One year ago I was a fresh-faced 17 year old working in a local computer store. It was one of a chain of five or so stores in Ireland, and it was owned by a man who we reckoned had assets in excess of a million Euro.

Suffice to say, the guy fancied himself the Irish equivalent of Alan Sugar and enjoyed nothing more than strutting around his stores in his Armani suits and ranting about the tiniest things he found wrong with each store. One of his favourite tricks was placing a penny in some inaccessible nook, coming back a week later, finding the penny and screaming about how we hadn't swept/wiped down/stuck our hands down the hole between the printers and the laptops to check for gold.

His visits were thankfully infrequent, so one quiet day I decided to play a joke on my colleagues by sticking masking tape on the bottom of the optical mice we use on the two till computers. As an added feat, I rearranged several keys on the till keyboard too.

About a half-hour later, in strolls Alán óSuicre and heads straight for the tills "to send some important emails". He's not very tech-savvy for the owner of a chain of PC World wannabes, but before I can do anything he's fumbling angrily with a mouse that won't respond, composing an email that reads like the keyboard-hammerings of an angry spastic pigeon and demanding to know who's made him type: "Inpartumt nossugi far ull Cuntoc staff"

I claimed full responsibility and was given the harshest verbal beating of my life, I even got the Irish equivalent of "You're fired!" which in retrospect is quite pleasing. Why did I own up so willingly? Well I'd just accepted a full-time job in London, so getting fired from 'Cuntoc' wasn't so bad. Needless to say, I didn't become The Apprentice.

Still in London now, so that worked out alright.
(scrapsmckenzie, Thu 23 Feb 2006, 22:31, Reply)