You Must Be From Away

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..or “Fuck, I just tore up the parking ticket”

MMTP, renowned for his razor-sharp intellect (honest, he’s really clued up) and for roasting his sister’s cat and incediarising fondues, has just outdone himself.

We toddled off to the market in Offenbach yesterday and – after a long discussion with Mrs MMTP about where to park (Option 1: drive around for hours looking for street-parking, Option 2: go straight to the parking lot and pay a pittance) – we go for Option 2.

Mostly because I’m driving, MMTP is navigating and the wimmen are in the back.

I give the parking ticket to MMTP who promptly pops in his shirt pocket.

And later takes it discovers it, has no idea what it is, tears it into small pieces and puts it in his trouser pocket, then to utter the classic words at the top of the post.

Gets the usual bollocking from Mrs MMTP, but he says ” Not a problems, I’ll just show it to the cashier and we’ll be away”

There IS no cashier, it’s all automated, no-one responds to the emergency buttons and you can’t just go down to the barrier and press the button to get a new one.

I know this.

I tried it.

I either don’t weigh enough or the Bionic Leg didn’t fool the magnetic loop into thinking I was a BMW.

So we had to call THE NUMBER.

Conversation goes something like this:

“I’m afraid our parking ticket’s damaged and the machine can’t read it”
“Well, it’s in fact quite severely damaged”
“Well, actually, I tore it into small pieces. By mistake”

We send the wimmen off to look at shops to save ourselves from embarrassment when the chappy turns up to release us.

Which he does in no time at all, looks at the remnants of the ticket and works out that we owe him €3.60.

“Just give me €3”, he says. (We should do this more often…)

And then the obvious question

“How on earth can you rip up a parking ticket” he asks.

“Oh” I say ” dead easy. I’ll show you. You tear it once this way, fold it up, tear it again and then once more for good luck”

I think MMTP and I must be related….

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That’s what my mate Gunter once said to me when we were discussing the CIO of one of the sister companies.

A real little twerp (not Gunter – he’s as cool as they come and looks me straight in the eye at 6’4″), who once introduced himself to a group of (English-speaking) airline CIOs with the classically over-formal “Good morning, my name is Mr (roughly translated) Goosefart”

Much rolling of eyes ensued.

Wendelin Wiedeking appears to be in the same boat, vertically-challenged-wise.

Brilliantly effective manager, turns Porsche around to make it the most profitable car maker in the world, but it’s never a good idea to punch TOO much above your weight.

As in: a hostile takeover of Volkswagen.

Always looked a bit of a stretch and what with backroom politics, the recession and an unfortunately timed drying up of liquidity, he’s ended up in the poo, without a job BUT with a €50m golden handshake.

And – get this – 64% of Financial Times Deutschland online readers appear to think that this is either a) about right or b) not enough.

So do I.

He gives half his annual salary to a trust, he’ll give AT LEAST half of his bail-out package away and tears were shed by the workers today.

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Remember Hank Snow’s “I’ve been everywhere“?

Etc.
Etc.
Etc.

Pulitzer Prize winning (it’s really only a matter of time..) journalists John William Flowers and Birgit Gift have been practicing for their incipient old age on a cruise ship, lurking off the coast of Greenland.

And looking at Air Greenland’s route map (yes, there IS such an airline and yes, they DID fly with them…), I couldn’t get Hank Snow’s song out of my head.

Except it went