Day 12 - Mardyck

Today’s blog will be overshadowed by my beef of the day, or should I say horse.  That is such an old joke I suppose now.

I had to go to Mardyck and meet a techie guy and as it was arranged last week I got all the details including the address and so feeling confident this morning I set off.  The address he gave me, when input into the satnav took me straight to a retail park.  So I parked up and called the guy and his response was, “yeh that is where it takes me when I use the satnav”.

I didn’t respond in the way I wanted and the most obvious one but asked him where I went from there, bearing in mind he knew exactly where I was.  He said he didn’t know and said he would ask a local, so he did and he gave me directions.  They seemed pretty easy to follow and they lead me to a nature reserve with a huge sign of a frog on it.  Quite appropriate I thought and I rang the guy back.  The local guy said he had never heard of the place despite the fact he had lived in Dunkirk for years.  I asked for the road the office was on and he said he didn’t know, where the nearest major road was and again he didn’t know.  So I had to check that this guy had lived many years in Dunkirk and had travelled to the same place for years but did not know any of the surrounding area.  Eventually I asked him to talk me through his journey to work and tell me what he saw and his directions were, under the highway through two tunnels and it is on your right.  The only thing he could say when I asked for any landmarks was, there were no buildings near the office.  So basically his idea of a landmark was to tell me what was not there.  At that point I managed to see a lorry with the company I am working for on the side and followed it, hoping the guy was not going to Bulgaria or somewhere as far.  But no he was going to the site and I was lucky.  However to get to the site I did go under a highway but he failed to remember that he goes around three roundabouts before the two tunnels which turned out to be bridges and then there was open ground before another roundabout and then the site.

I was surprisingly calm when I met him but didn’t hold out much hope of getting any work done and you know what, I was right.

As I was leaving he said, do you think you will find your way back to your hotel  and it is at that moment you think of many responses, but he is the customer so I smiled and said see you tomorrow.

Just one other thing when I was at work, I stood at the window and showed the local guy in the distance a bloody great big sign with a Frog on it and said he might like to visit that place as it looked interesting.