Career limiting move

[bellinghman]

A colleague recently had a car accident. It wasn't his fault - a delivery lorry reversed into his car while he was stationary waiting for a gap in traffic before pulling out into a main road. But the lorry driver didn't want to admit fault, and started abusing our Pravin, calling him a Paki and so on.

(Pravin is, technically speaking, Kenyan born of Indian ancestry, and thus our token African, since we already have Chinese and Indian born employees - we are missing a South American, with our closest yet having been a Guatemalan.)

This is possibly a little foolish on the part of the driver, who was driving a lorry for an Indian company, delivering Indian food to an Indian grocer.

Oops!

Comments

[drplokta]

You have an Antarctican?

[bellinghman.livejournal.com]

Not yet - we're trying not to get ahead of ourselves there.

(Just how many native born Antarcticans are there? Is it into single figures yet?)

Our Chinese lass is now getting to grips with the Chinese version of Windows 7. While on a work trip to Shanghai a little while back, she decided to stay over and see her family (which normally involves flying out to Shanghai, and then travelling on from there). And then Eyjafjallajoekull started blowing the wrong way, so she got stuck there. So she ended up buying a new laptop to get on with work from somewhere in central China.

[bellinghman.livejournal.com]

In answer to my question, apparently 11 people have been born there. So it's just scraping two figures.

[silly-swordsman.livejournal.com]

At TAP next door, we had a French mechanical engineer who'd done a couple of 9-month stints at an Antarctic base. That's the closest I've been to an Antarctican.

[bellinghman.livejournal.com]

When I lived in Cambridge with my first wife, lo this quarter century ago, the next door house was co-owned by three guys, two of whom were often away down south with the British Antarctic Survey.

And I did work, once and briefly, for the BAS myself.

[megabitch.livejournal.com]

I did too, many years ago... except it was with the Australian version.

[jon-a-five.livejournal.com]

I take it the police have been informed of this clear case of affray?

[bellinghman.livejournal.com]

Yes. (Though it was verbal, and therefore not technically affray.)

As Pravin says, the problem is that the witnesses were pretty much all Indian, and as he says, there's a cultural tendency among the older generation not to get involved with the authorities, so none of them could be persuaded to provide witness statements. So it's Pravin's word against the driver's.

On the other hand, as far as reports getting back to the owners of the lorry are concerned, that's another matter.

[martyn44.livejournal.com]

And the driver was what, Hungarian?

[bellinghman.livejournal.com]

I think we may assume he was of the BNP's natural constituency: i.e. stupid.

(A native Magyar who'd picked up enough English to unthinkingly use that term in a heated exchange would be admirably accultured, if regrettably prejudiced. I expect George Mikes knew the word, but he would never have used it. Ditto my late godfather.)

[martyn44.livejournal.com]

Ah, I wasn't suggesting that a Hungarian would be any more or less racist than another white van man. Rather I was alluding to the astonishing number of East Europeans driving professionally in the UK, especially in the food industry (and particularly in Scotland and East Anglia). From my company's experience, if he had been Hungarian, his response would have been restricted to 'You were in my blind spot', after which his English would have been exhausted.

My sympathies to your colleague. Again, we see this kind of jackass behaviour far too often.

'Professional' as in get paid for driving rather than drive like Jenson Button (except in their imagination)

[http://users.livejournal.com/_nicolai_/]

Adding racially-motivated assault and threatening behaviour to causing a road traffic accident? No, not so smart...