This is a hilarious story that I just had to share! A few weeks ago my friend hired a gardener from a commended local firm, as you do when you have a very busy schedule and the funds to be able to do so. You also expect that when you are forking out a fair whack for the chap, that he will leave his personal woes at the front gate and not proceed to have a full on breakdown, dramatically experiencing almost every emotion known to man, right there in full display of your upper middle class elderly neighbours and their family…… I bet you can never guess what happened???
All was well at first until we heard a loud noise coming from outside, like something crashing and a lot of shouting… I went out and was confronted with our gardener waving his arms around and screaming into his phone at the top of his lungs! He was arguing with someone (We think maybe it was his boss) although it didn’t sound like a very productive discussion as they just appeared to be yelling an assortment of profanities at each other. We gave him a cup of tea, and after staring at the kitchen wall for several minutes, he returned to work. An hour or so later and he was screaming into his phone again, about some bloke “not coming through” for something- Probably drugs by the bizarre way he was behaving! Again I tried to talk to him and he calmed down, but it pretty much went this way for the whole afternoon…. At one point he was laughing hysterically as he cut the hedges, which I guess I couldn’t say anything about as at least he appeared to be happier!
The last we saw of the guy was around 6pm when he was sat on the wall swearing his head off again into his phone- He had done a really good job on the garden, and his outbursts were disturbingly entertaining, but what was annoying was the fact that the house is on a really posh, quiet, upper class street in North London, where the locals are probably not often subjected to such publicly emotional outbursts! Next door are a pleasant older couple who we see now and again- I knew they were at home that day, so fuck knows what they thought, as they would inevitably have witnessed the chaos!
The next day we found a pile of around 15 empty beer cans behind the wall in the back garden, along with three empty ripped up packets of B&H cigarettes that certainly were not there before. We could have complained to the company who sent him about the fact he was drunk on the job, but quite frankly we don’t really want any further communication with either the gardener OR his boss, as it would probably result in some kind of weird alcohol fueled riot as they now know where we live (Or LIVED as this happened a few months back).
Moral of the story: Do your research before hiring a splodger to trim ya bushes (Ohhhhhhh cRuDe) as you may end up with this maniac ,or worse, on your hands!