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Wednesday 29 February 2012

The right place at the right time.

   Many years ago I used to work at Harrods in Knightsbridge. I started in the Food Hall and then transferred to the Gift Shop. The buyer took a bit of a shine to me and if anything interesting was happening she'd get me involved. One summer the store had a French promotion and built a French Village in the middle of the ground floor. There was a Patisserie a Chocolatier a Perfumery and in the middle of all of this was a post box.
   I was due to go on holiday the week the promotion was wrapped up and a day or two before I was due to leave I was summoned to her office.
"So a little birdy tells me you're off to France for your holidays."
"Yes, that's right."
"Are you flying or the boat train?"
"Boat train."
"Oh right, we've got a little job for you"
   And the job? it was to post all the postcards the customers had put in the postbox, in a real French post box. That night I left work with three large carryabags full of cards. My then girlfriend and I spent the whole journey down to Biarritz on the train, reading these cards. Once we'ed arrived and got ourselves sorted it took us about three days to post all these cards. The village only had a small box and we crammed as many in as we could each day. I would of loved to have been there to see the look on the postman's face each afternoon. Wondering where all these cards had come from. Was his little village now on the route of some huge passing holiday coach and what happened on Thursday ? did it breakdown or loose it's way. Never to return. And what of all those Harrods customers who had brought the postcards and stamps, had written messages on them and posted them. Did they really believe these would somehow arrive on a friends or loved ones door mats with a French postmark? and what would my Boss have done if I hadn't been going on holiday? Luckily for all these folk I was in the right place at the right time.

Onwards and upwards in the pursuit of happyness and fulfillment :-)  
 

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