Free Riotous Retirement by Brian Robertson, Ron Smallwood Page B

answered.
    “Hello,” said a very feeble voice and Terry was immediately relieved and terrified at the same time. He slammed the phone down. What the hell did he think he was going to say to this lady at 5.00 o’clock in the morning: hello Mrs. Brown, you don’t know me but I was just wondering how you were? or it’s a beautiful morning, I’m the new manager and I just thought that all residents should be up and about, appreciating this beautiful new day!
    Mid-morning Terry was in the office even if it was a Saturday. He was determined to get on top of this job. A lady resident came in and Terry immediately introduced himself.
    “I’m Terry. I’m the manager filling in for Helga while she is on leave,” he explained.
    “I am Mrs. Brown and I live at number 48.”
    Terry’s heart skipped a beat but he managed to remain cool.
    “And how can I help you, Mrs. Brown?”
    “Well it’s the telephone. I had a call in the middle of the night and when I got out of bed to answer it there was no one there. Most annoying, and I just thought I ought to report it, just in case anyone else had reported such calls. This sort of thing can be very annoying you know.”
    “No, no, nobody else has reported any calls like that, but I can assure you I will look into it. Let us hope that it was just a one-off call, someone made by mistake,” Terry suggested.
    The following week the rain and wind returned to Burnside retirement village. The beautiful trees swayed and branches were under increasing strain due to the unusually violent movement and increased weight of water. Some snapped and fell. Terry, Alex and the gardener were again busy clearing village roads and keeping an eye on the trees they thought might collapse altogether. It was a worrying time for a new trainee manager on his first posting.
    Terry was kept busy by villagers phoning and advising him of what had to be done to specific trees close to their particular property. They were not requests. They were generally demands or orders he suddenly realised! Bloody marvellous, he thought to himself, how a bit of wind and rain suddenly drew everyone’s attention to the trees that they paid little heed to in normal times when all they did was appreciate their shade. 
    The problem was, how did you respond to an impossible demand regarding one tree about to fall on one resident’s house, an emergency in their eyes, which it  might very well be, but at the same time attend to similar requests coming in from every second resident?
    All the time Terry was trying to hold to the RPI maxim ‘never argue with the clients, just move on, always move on’. He was making promises to come out in the wind and rain and inspect particular trees from one end of the village to the next. It was the only way he could get off the phone.
    He had tried valiantly to make notes and work on an order of who he was to see first, second and so on, but the phone calls kept coming, he couldn’t take notes on one call because Alex had come into the office to tell him something which he had already forgotten, and then there was another call!
    He gave up. He stopped taking notes and just fobbed the complainants off with anything—he wasn’t arguing, he was just moving on. And then he was getting calls from people who had called him half an hour beforehand. That’s when he told his secretary to just tell all the callers that he was out. He’d had enough.
    He was standing there in the main office reception area when the outer door opened and a huge gust of wind literally blew this lady complete with her wheelie walker right into the office. There was no introduction, no handshake, no greeting took place whatsoever.
    “There is a huge tree branch right across my drive and I would like it removed right now.” The lady made this statement standing in a large puddle of water that had entered with her and dripped from her person as she stood there.
    “Look, come through to my office, let me take your coat