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

[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)