Month: November 2018

I saw an advertisement in a newsletter recently for a Traffic/Litter Warden. One of the required competencies for the job was related to Customer Service & Communications Skills.

‘The successful candidate will be a person who actively listens to others and tries to understand their perspectives/requirements/needs. Must be respectful, courteous and professional, remaining composed, even in challenging circumstances.’

You could be forgiven for thinking that they were advertising for a marriage counsellor, but I double-checked and they were definitely looking for a traffic warden and these were the desired characteristics for someone looking for the job.

I’ve come across a few traffic wardens in my time who would seriously struggle with some of those and none of them ever actively listened to me or tried to understand my perspective or needs.

As far as occupations go, being a traffic warden must be one of the most challenging. Not because the work is physically demanding but because they are generally not liked by anyone. In fact, it’s probably fair to say that they are about as popular as a dose of piles.

It’s difficult to see what the attraction is or where the job satisfaction comes from. They must get a lot of grief because there isn’t a driver alive who will admit to any wrongdoing or who will accept that they deserve to get a parking ticket. We are all innocent victims of insensitive traffic wardens.

Anyone who ever got a ticket, got it because the traffic warden was an idiot. It had nothing to do with the fact that the car was parked on a footpath on a double yellow line and was obstructing the entrance to the local fire station on the clearway at peak traffic hour. The warden was just being completely unreasonable.

Apart from being treated like an infectious disease, there are other drawbacks to the job. They spend their time outdoors in bad weather, in constant noise, breathing exhaust fumes and operating in a hostile environment where everybody wants to kill them. Confrontation is par for the course.

Many polls have been taken over the years to try and find the most hated professions. Traffic wardens hit the top ten in most of them along with lawyers, car salesmen, politicians, bouncers and sometimes, dentists. Police officers don’t feature and that surprised me, but estate agents do which I also thought was strange.

But for all the abuse that is aimed at them, there is one other profession that doesn’t get a mention in the list of top ten most hated professions and that is the professional football referee. I’m thinking about the soccer referees in particular.

I have often wondered why anyone would want to stand on a football pitch in front of 80,000 or more supporters as the lone official in black. At various times during a game he will be despised by either set of supporters or maybe by the whole lot of them depending on what decisions he makes.

Even being a referee in the amateur football world can be dangerous as we saw with the recent alleged assault on a match official in Co. Offaly. The man was officiating at an adult soccer game and was apparently chased into a car park after the match and beaten by a group of men. He suffered a broken jaw and other facial injuries as a result and had to be taken to hospital for treatment.

This happened at an amateur game so the pressure on professional referees must be enormous.

In every game of football from the English Premiership to the lower leagues, the referees get a lot of stick from players, management and supporters. They are regularly surrounded by players who disagree with their decisions and they take a lot of abuse.

There is one other job though, that doesn’t appear on any list and I would put it at the top of my mine. I don’t care how much money they make, I just wouldn’t be able for it. The job of looking after feet.

According to Spectrum Foot Clinics, a chiropodist, or podiatrist, is a foot doctor who treats people suffering from lower limb or common foot problems such as bunions and ingrown toenails. Gross.

They can also treat calluses and corns, verrucae, smelly feet, cracked heels and athlete’s foot. I feel like throwing up already. Podiatrists and chiropodists can also help to ease the pain of people who have diabetic foot ulcers and diabetic foot. A verruca, by the way, is a contagious and usually painful wart on the sole of the foot.

I can’t imagine I’m going to eat for the rest of the day after reading that and I very much doubt, that there is a child anywhere in the world who goes to bed at night dreaming about one day being able to treat smelly feet and verrucae.

Their role, is to advise you and your family on how to take care of your feet and the type of shoes that you need to wear. Podiatrists and chiropodists can also treat and alleviate day-to-day foot problems such as fungal or ingrown toenails.

I can’t stand the sight of feet and I don’t like being anywhere near them. My own are six feet away from the top of me and even that’s too close. I can’t imagine any circumstances where I would volunteer to touch a foot that is attached to somebody else. I would probably vomit all over it.

I would lose the will to live if I thought I had to go to work every day and deal with feet. I would starve to death before I could even consider earning a wage that way.

I don’t care what these chiropodists are paid, I’d prefer to be a traffic warden.

I was listening to the Sean O’Rourke programme on the radio recently, and I heard Paddy O’Gorman reporting on a visit he made to the District Court in Portlaoise. He interviewed some people who were due to appear before the judge that day and he asked them what they had done to find themselves in that position.

One guy was charged with handling stolen property after being found with two stolen chain saws in his car. They had been taken earlier from a farm. He thought it was very amusing, and so did his friends, as he told Paddy that he was innocent. He said he was just passing the farm when two guys appeared from nowhere and threw the chain saws into his car.

It was great fun altogether and he suspected that even though he was innocent, he was probably going to get three months or so in jail. He was the father of six children and Paddy asked him if he was worried about going to prison and it was obvious that he didn’t give two hoots. He’d been there before, and he couldn’t care less. Himself and his buddies were enjoying the craic.

His solicitor relayed this ridiculous tale to the judge and asked her to consider a non-custodial sentence. The judge said she would consider it, if the defendant told the truth. When he returned to the witness box, he changed his story and admitted stealing the chain saws. The judge ordered him to pay €500 to the farmer and sentenced him to 250 hours community service.

That’s why the chain-saw thief was having the craic. He knows the system and he wasn’t the least bit afraid of it because he knew he wasn’t going to come out of it too badly, even with his list of previous convictions. That’s why he’s happy to travel the countryside and steal from farmers because the benefits outweigh the risk.

The judge in this case has done nothing to alleviate the fear that rural communities are experiencing because of travelling criminals. The farmer had his privacy violated and his property stolen. He’s probably a hard-working man trying to make ends meet which is tough enough without having to worry about thieves robbing the tools of his trade. The theft of tools from farmers and tradesmen is big business these days.

We don’t know what effect this crime had on the farmer or his family or indeed, the wider community, but it’s the kind of thing that spreads fear amongst the locals. One way to tackle it is for the courts to send out a strong message that there are serious consequences for criminality. That’s not happening though.

The thief in this case had a list of previous convictions and I can’t understand why he was entitled to any leniency. He spun an outrageous story to the judge about two guys throwing the chain saws into his car. He lied through his teeth but then she then gave him the opportunity to tell the truth for a reward and he took it. What did he do to deserve that break?

He said he was sorry and walked out of the courthouse, laughing again and why wouldn’t he? He is an experienced criminal and he has rightly copped on to the notion that the criminal justice system is just as broken as the health system and the housing crisis. There’s money to be made from stealing and he’s operating on a risk and reward basis and the odds are stacked in his favour.

There’s a reduced garda presence in rural communities now, more than ever before, so there is less chance of the criminal getting caught. If the gardai do manage to catch up with him, they must gather evidence and put a case together to get him into court. But even if they do manage to get him before a judge, he still stands a good chance of getting off with a slap on the wrist. A gentle one at that.

This guy has treated the whole legal process as a complete joke and it’s no surprise that he did.

On the same day that I was listening to Paddy, I also heard of a guy who was convicted in the Special Criminal Court for assisting a criminal organisation in the murder of a Dublin bar manager who was shot seven times by a masked gunman.

The hero in this case pleaded guilty to participating in or contributing to activity intending to facilitate the commission, by a criminal organisation or any of its members, of a serious offence, namely the murder of the bar manager. He is the first person to be prosecuted for this offence under the organised crime legislation brought in in 2006.

The gardai did well to locate a phone beside the getaway car that was abandoned after the murder and they identified the defendant buying the phone two days before the shooting.

The judge said that while the provision of any assistance to a criminal organisation is a grave matter, the defendant did not approach this in a covert or disguised manner. “His unsophisticated approach left him open to identification and demonstrated an absence of calculation or guile.” In other words, he wasn’t much of a criminal and didn’t cover his tracks very well and got caught as a result.

The judge was satisfied that it must have been apparent to him that he was assisting in some serious criminal activity. Yet, while the maximum sentence is 15 years in prison, he was sentenced to three years and nine months with one year suspended. He’ll be walking the streets again shortly, but the victim is dead.

These decisions won’t exactly have the criminals in this country shaking in their boots.

There’s something about going to the doctor that makes me a little uneasy and I get nervous whenever I go into a surgery. I’m sure I’m not the only one and I think we’re entitled to be a bit afraid. After all, doctors have the power to turn your life upside down. They can stick needles in your body, send you to hospital and they can even sign your death certificate.

They’re trained to have a reassuring smile and a calm demeanour, so they can convince you that everything is fine, even when you have only about five minutes left to live. I put all that out of my mind this morning when I went to my GP to get the flu jab. I arrived early and took a seat in the waiting room.

I was on my own, so I was just looking around the room, when my eyes fell on the notice board on the wall. I saw a little poster about Parkinson’s disease pinned to the board. Looking down through it, I read the list of symptoms for the early onset of this terrible illness.

Excessive sweating was the first one I noticed, and it made me sit up. I’ve sweated excessively all my life. Back when I was playing tennis, I would always come off the court after a game and my clothes would land on the floor of the dressing room with a plop. Even thinking about it now makes me sweat.

The next sign to look out for, the poster told me, was the loss of smell. A few months ago, I had a very serious illness called man-flu. Women won’t appreciate what it’s like to experience this kind of pain and suffering, but let’s just say that it was horrific. We men don’t talk about it that much, preferring instead to suffer in silence because that’s the way we are. We don’t like making a fuss and we have this bravery gene that helps us to cope.

Anyway, when I recovered from this near-death experience, I noticed that I had lost the sense of smell and taste. They both came back after a bit, but not to the extent they were before.

Another sign was memory loss and I was getting concerned at this stage. I can’t remember what day of the week it is, and I have difficulty with people’s names. When I’m out walking, and I see people coming towards me, I try to identify as early as possible whether I know them or not. Then I race through the alphabet trying to come up with their name in the few seconds before we meet. I regularly fail, so that’s it, there’s no doubt. I have Parkinson’s.

There was more literature on the notice board too about other conditions like anxiety. Some of these symptoms include dizziness, chest pain, neck tension, fear of impending doom, weakness in legs and feeling like you are going crazy. I didn’t have any of these signs before I came in, but now I reckon I’m close to death, depressed and possibly pregnant.

The buzzer brought me back to reality and I got the flu jab without any drama and without being diagnosed with a terminal illness or an unexpected pregnancy, but it reminded me of something.

One of my most embarrassing moments in a doctor’s surgery happened as a result of an incident with my daughter when she was about a year and a half. I put her lying on the floor one day and I was in the process of changing her nappy when something in her mouth caught my eye. When I looked more closely, it seemed to me to be a green fungus growing from the roof of her mouth. It was hideous.

I was on my own and I didn’t have anyone nearby who could offer a second opinion and I was beginning to panic, so I just scooped her up, put her in the car and raced off to the doctor. I was in a hurry to get there before this thing growing in her mouth choked her or invaded her entire body.

I was waved straight into the surgery because this was a major emergency and I only hoped that modern medicine could deal with this horror. I laid her down on the bed and she was looking up at the ceiling, smiling away to herself. She was so brave I thought.

I got out of the way to give the doctor room to carry out a life-saving procedure, but I was taken aback when he asked me where the obstruction was.

I thought the guy was losing his marbles and I practically elbowed him out of the way to show him this potentially fatal growth on the child’s pallet. But I couldn’t see anything. Both of us looked all over her tiny little mouth but there was nothing there.

When I explained to him exactly what I saw, he nodded very sympathetically, because by then he realised that he was obviously dealing with a complete idiot. It was, he decided, a bit of phloem that got lodged in the roof of her mouth while she was lying on her back when she was being changed. Once I lifted her upright, she probably swallowed it and the problem was solved.

I slinked out of the surgery and drove home with the sun visor down, using the back roads, in case anybody recognised me. I figured that by now, it was common knowledge that there was this dopey dad who couldn’t tell the difference between a green baby killing monster and a harmless bit of phloem.

That’s another reason why I don’t like to visit the doctor’s surgery, it just reminds me of my shame.

Things happen from time to time to remind us that times are changing. Like when friends of mine told me recently that they were going to Dublin to see Cliff Richard and their daughter, who is in her twenties, asked them who he was.

I thought that was hilarious and I was telling my son about it, he’s also in his twenties, and he looked at me in a way that made it obvious that he didn’t get the joke. He asked me if Cliff Richard was a black lad with a lot of hair but then he realised that he was confusing him with Lionel Richie.

I thought everyone on the Planet knew who Cliff Richard was, but it turns out that you must be of a certain vintage to be in the know.

Then there was the story about the telephone directory. An Post announced that they are going to discontinue the annual distribution of telephone books to every household in the country. That makes perfect sense given that many homes don’t even have a landline now and most of us rely solely on the mobile phone.

There was a time though, not so long ago either, when directories were essential. When I worked in An Garda Siochana, there were always a few of them knocking around the station and sometimes you would struggle to get your hands on one. They were constantly in use.

They weren’t always in one piece either and there was nothing worse than trying to find a number only to discover that the page you were looking for had been torn out. It baffled me that some people found it easier to rip out the page than write down the number.

Some young people have never even seen a phone book and there are others who wouldn’t know how to find a telephone number in one so now they are being consigned to history along with Cliff.

The mobile phone has completely changed how we communicate with each other but there are some daft aspects of this technology as well. I heard a lady called Jess Kelly on Newstalk recently and she gave five mobile phones a test run over a period of time and then rated the performance of each one.

According to Jess, the most important concerns when buying a mobile phone these days are the battery life and camera quality. The cheapest phone she reviewed was about €800 and the dearest was around €1,300. My bog-standard Samsung cost me around €80 and the battery life is fine. It also takes a good photo, allows me to use the Internet and it lets me make a call and I can’t find any justification for spending any more than that.

Another thing that has changed a lot over the years is our rail service. At least, I thought it had. Back in the early eighties, when I was stationed in Blackrock Garda Station in Dublin, I used the train on a regular basis to get up and down to Cork. Getting a ticket wasn’t complicated. You simply went to the ticket office in the railway station, bought your ticket and hopped on.

If you were lucky you got a seat but if you travelled on a Friday afternoon you’d be lucky to find space to sit on the floor. In those days, the carriages were rough and ready, and it wasn’t unusual to travel without heat or light or both and a dining car was a rare treat.

I hadn’t been on a train for a long time, but I was told that Iarnrod Eireann had gone all posh and sophisticated with new carriages that you can plug your laptop into and everything. I had to go to Dublin for surgery and I figured the journey back down on the train, after the operation, would be more comfortable than sitting in a car for three hours, so I decided to give it a whirl.

I booked online and got my single ticket for €30. I didn’t book a return because I wasn’t sure of the day or time I would be travelling back to Cork. The train was modern and comfortable, and the journey was pleasant.

I was released from hospital a few days later and I headed to Heuston Station. I wasn’t in a position to book my return ticket online, so I looked for the ticket office but of course, that’s gone the way of the phone book and now there’s just a machine.

The machine charged me €62 for a single ticket to Cork. I was feeling a bit sore and sorry for myself and walked gingerly to the carriage to get a seat. I was surprised to find that it resembled something I used back in the 80’s. It looked old and didn’t seem to be the cleanest.

I sat next to a young guy from Canada who was travelling around Ireland on a holiday and once we got going, he was looking out the window admiring the scenery. He told me he was really enjoying the countryside and I had to apologise for the fact that he could see so little of it because the windows were so dirty. They were manky.

There was no dining car either, just a trolley service and it reminded me of the old days. My wife was travelling with me, so we paid €120 for the privilege of suffering this ordeal. In hindsight, the car would have been a more comfortable option but how was I to know.

Iarnrod Eireann are planning to ban alcohol on some of their routes because of the anti-social behaviour by some passengers, but maybe they’re only trying to numb the pain of the prices and the state of the carriages.