It Took Five Hours To Ruin His Whole Business

This happened twenty years ago. I was a truck driver driving a fixed route of deliveries to several factories in the country. Mobile phones weren’t as common as they are now, so when I was on the road there was no way for my boss to contact me. It was normal for me to leave my boss’s place at 0700 and not return before 1900. Sometimes it would happen that my boss would phone one of the addresses on my route to leave me a message: pick up a load at that address, don’t deliver the load at that address but at that address, etc.

One day I came back, parked the van, and went into the office to hand in the car keys as usual.

My boss told me that my wife had called and that it sounded serious. Of course, I called my wife, and she told me that her father had died five hours ago and she needed me to come home. I asked her when she called my boss. She told me she had called five hours ago and told the boss.

I hung up and asked the boss why he didn’t relay the message five hours ago. He told me that he’d considered that, but he knew that I would return home immediately and that would be very inconvenient for him. And as my father-in-law was dead already it wouldn’t make any difference if I finished my route.

He didn’t see me leave because he was KO’d on the floor. I never returned to the place. I started work with another company one week later. I told them when I applied why I was looking for a new job, and they didn’t have any problems with me hitting a jerk in the face. I did have to go to court, but that was to get my outstanding pay, which I did.

I also made a call to the Dutch Bureau for Taxes about tax fraud, about having five different vans on the road on one license plate, about double sets of books, and about shipments of “medicinal herbs” to certain warehouses.