So, I flew into JFK from Heathrow....

...never been outside of Sho Ling in my life. Took the bus from JFK to Princeton, New Jersey, where the magnolia trees were in full blossom. I got off the bus and felt the warm breeze and looked over at Princeton University. Red-bricked, it was the closest to Oxbridge I had ever got in my life. Jeez, I am not in Sho Ling any more, I thought.

The Nassau Inn, on Nassau Street, with the famous Yankee Doodle Dandy painting, was where I would first meet the guy that was going to cost me £20M....

Let me know if you want to hear any more....

Took the bus from JFK to Princeton, New Jersey

Meh, you should have flown into Newark, then taken the Northeast Corridor. Would have been there in under an hour.

Flying into JFK on Friday and out of Newark onto Mexico on Monday ...... but would love to know who cost you 20 millon

Meh, you should have flown into Newark, then taken the Northeast Corridor. Would have been there in under an hour.

True, but back in '79, you couldn't fly into Newark Airport from Heathrow. I had to wait for People's Express...

(Google it, sonny.....)

....from Gatwick...

Off topic within two posts into a ruck about airport transfers. Only on TSW.

This is looking dangerously like a story that is gonna make regulars long for me to tell another Golf Story.

So, on that basis, I'm out.

This is looking dangerously like a story that is gonna make regulars long for me to tell another Golf Story.

 

So, on that basis, I'm out.

It's amazing how you can turn any thread that isn't about you and golf, into a thread about you and golf.

...never been outside of Sho Ling in my life.

Well that wasn't true was it. Lost interest after that.

Let me know if you want to hear any more....

i could stand to hear some more! Don't let the snipers put you off GM i reckon you've got an interesting yarn to spin + i for one want to see where it goes.

Don't like that bar. Looks like it would take ages to get served.

Does it involve a dusty broad and Jonny Two Fingers?

That's an amazing modern looking Dell desktop serving the till for 1979...

Don't like that bar. Looks like it would take ages to get served.

Looks to me to be ideally set up for quick self service

you sold your apple shares as a result of a conversation you had with somebody in that bar?

Looks to me to be ideally set up for quick self service

especially if your tipple is red wine.

Are we going to get the next instalment soon? My refresh button is nearly broken!

An Indian strolled into the bar, walked over and held out his hand, smiling as I shook it. If I had known what was going to happen, 15 years later, I would have shaken him by the neck, until he was dead, the son of a b!t ch. Ignorant of future events, we settled down at the bar, a draft Michelob for me, a white wine for him. PM was his name, a PhD who completed his studies at Ohio State and married a mid-west girl and had a couple of kids with her. An affable guy and despite going native, still had an affection for India and in particular, the British Raj. An anglophile and I was an anglo! We would get on fine, I thought, us against the Italian Americans running the corporation I worked for. We had desks next to each other for over 4 years, swapping stories, discussing physical chemistry and laughing at the "wise-guys" who worked in our labs, most totally clueless and always trying to steal a little idea from here, a suggestion from there and claim it for there own. After a couple of patents, one failed marriage and a pregnant new wife, I got the hell out of Dodge. A new Pakistani boss, whose command of German impressed the clueless Italian American running the division precipitated the move. A more deceitful guy you couldn't meet and he was only to last a year, after one lie too many. The fact that he had replaced my previous manager, who had been convicted of child abuse while I was working there, only convinced me that I wasn't best suited for the management opportunities at this place. This guy wasn't even sacked, but transferred to a non-managerial role in the next building!

I bade a fond farewell to PM, an even fonder one to a few of the secretaries and returned to a research position in the UK. Little did I know that the smiling little punkah wallah, slapping me on the back as we stumbled out of the bar, would cost me millions a few years later, him and a couple of American colleagues who would blindly lie, under oath to a clueless British judge.

this is good stuff GM, but i would like to hear more bout the secretaries

this is good stuff GM, but i would like to hear more bout the secretaries

I went out to lunch with a few of them and one in particular, always had a thing for me. I paid the bill and as I looked at the amount, I said that for that money, I should be getting a blow job from the waitress. This secretary leaned over the table and whispered to me that she would give me a blow job for nothing.

Never did make it back to work that afternoon...

I went out to lunch with a few of them and one in particular, always had a thing for me. I paid the bill and as I looked at the amount, I said that for that money, I should be getting a blow job from the waitress. This secretary leaned over the table and whispered to me that she would give me a blow job for nothing.

 

Never did make it back to work that afternoon...

Was that before or after they cleared the table?

stop it, you are making the Bear all frisky and we don't want him offering us somewhere to hang our teatowels.

This secretary leaned over the table and whispered to me that she would give me a blow job for nothing

Thats not so unusual. Bearsy would do that for a cheeseburger and some fries.

Thats not so unusual. Bearsy would do that for a cheeseburger and some fries.

Yeah, but remember to pay him after the job 'cause wiping all that grease and melted cheese off can take forever.

Come on GM..Come on!

Ah the being old being shafted by slimy Corporate Types + Brit discovering that some Foreign types may not hold the same scruples that they do story.

OK I'm in.

...never been outside of Sho Ling in my life. Took the bus from JFK to Princeton, New Jersey, where the magnolia trees were in full blossom. I got off the bus and felt the warm breeze and looked over at Princeton University. Red-bricked, it was the closest to Oxbridge I had ever got in my life. Jeez, I am not in Sho Ling any more, I thought.

 

The Nassau Inn, on Nassau Street, with the famous Yankee Doodle Dandy painting, was where I would first meet the guy that was going to cost me £20M....

 

 

Let me know if you want to hear any more....

Just stay off the golf....or I will think you're DP in disguise!

Back to the UK to work for a chemical major in Norfolk, which was and is probably the biggest sh !thole known to man. Mainly down to the locals, who, due to centuries of foreign raids, trust no-one. Anyone with an accent gets stared at. It was 18 months until our neighbours acknowledged us. Actually, they just talked about us, in the local, from the other side of the bar.

A lab overlooking the Ouse, a view which didn't really provide the stimulation required and despite a couple more patents there were no sign of opportunities. Mind you, the benefits for middle management were limited to sh@gging whatever secretary you wanted, without getting caught by your wife/her husband. Grubby, grubby people and not really my style.

My main memory of the place is the local myth as follows:

The Tuesday Marketplace in King’s Lynn (the town’s central market – now a rather large cobblestone car park bordered by the Corn Exchange and a variety of pubs and hotels) was, for many years, the scene of the public execution of ‘witches’. Having been accused (and found guilty) of witchcraft, Margaret Read was burned alive in Lynn’s Tuesday Marketplace in 1590. The legend (of which there are several versions) states that, whilst she was being consumed by the flames, Margaret’s heart spontaneously burst from her body and hit the wall of a house opposite – searing a permanent sign into the brickwork that can still be seen to this day. The heart is then said to have quite consciously “bounced” all the way out of town and into the River Ouse where it disappeared beneath the surface of the water in angry, sulphurous waves that recalled the bubbling of a cauldron!

 

 

If you visit Kings Lynn now, you may recognise the three blokes in the bottom right. I think they are local policemen now...

Two more patents, two years and I was back to the US, Pennsylvania this time, for a bizarre two years with my last multinational before I started my own company and made my first million...and got ripped off for a bit more than that, by my long lost punkah wallah.

Jesus christ a thread with GM and DP.....

Ooh, a good weekly serial. It's just like reading Charles Dickens, I can't wait for the next instalment. There's a book in there somewhere, GM, it worked for Geoffrey Archer.

Jesus christ a thread with GM and DP.....

Nope I am all ears.

I have never heard a tale of someone being screwed by an American Corporate or finding an untrustworthy S.W Asian.

Looking forward to the next installment. This is GM's gig. I respect that.

Oops sorry I meant "It's not like I have never heard..."

but still looking forward to the next episode

The frightening thing is, I've zipped through half of my life in a few posts, so now is the time to slow down, describe things with the utmost accuracy and paint a picture resembling the reality, as I saw it at the time. My last job in the corporate world was on a large research park, just outside Philadelphia. It was there that I would meet the last person involved in the crime against me, a PhD from Yale, RP, who owned a horse ranch in the rolling hills of Ambler and was a research chemist in his spare time. As wacky, a swively eyed loon, as you would want to meet, his ivy-league credentials had advanced him up the feeding chain, to a position in which he was given a technician to do his bidding, a young(ish) blonde with a nose like an anteater, known as JF.

What happened, on reflection, was the start of the intense jealousy the RP had for me, which would eventually manifest itself into that crime perpetrated by him and the punkah wallah, all those years later. You see, I was good at my job, because I had to be, given my background and I also worked hard to make up for the disadvantages of not being ivy league. For those that don't know, ivy league refers to the top Universities in the US, where you need to be both clever and rich to be able to attend. The 4 universities that founded this elite were Harvard, Princeton, Yale and Columbia, so RP and I were, in UK parlance, Cambridge and Solent University, in comparison.

I had a few other things going for me at the time, however, in addition to native cunning and hard work. I had an English accent and didn't look like Elephant Man, which meant that the female technicians were attracted to me, like flies to sh !t. "I just love your accent, John", they's say. "That's a coincidence, because I just love your t!ts", I'd say, trying to sound like Hugh fu%%ing Grant, and they'd laugh said t!ts off.

It also helped that my boss at the time, IA, a jewish scientist with a wicked sense of humour, was an anglophile. Unfortunately for RP, his sense of humour was wearing a bit thin with the wacky ideas that RP was coming up with, and even thinner with regard to his frankly dangerous experiments and lack of personal hygiene.

After a stellar start to my research career at this establishment, IA transferred the lovely JF to my lab and RP was left on his own, to be totally humiliated by the guy from Sholing. He had a hard-on for JF and I played to the gallery, even though I wasn't attracted to her in the slightest, even when drunk. First it was the nose, but during the first few weeks she worked for me, this little Italian American used to regale me with what she got up to at the weekend, with a certain married Afro-American, in the woods around Philly. "Once you go black, you never go back", she said, while complaining about the poison ivy rashes on her knees and I thought to myself, thank God for that, as it looked like the Anglo-Saxons had dodged a bullet.

Anyhoo, RP would look at me with barely disguised hatred for the rest of the time I could stand working in this zoo. To put it in perspective, there was mass panic among 90% of the employees, when random drug testing was introduced. This is in a lab where we were "handling some dangerous sh !t, dawg," to quote one of the technicians from the 'hood.

So desperate was I to return to a semblance of normality, that I started up my own consultancy and, given the choice of anywhere in the world, it wasn't hard to chose a Science Park, just outside Southampton, where I took two years to make my fortune.

...back to God's Country....