cooking in a 5 star suite, the reason and the recipe
The Americans called everybody into Sydney, the Brisbane, Melbourne, Auckland and Perth offices – all their top floors. This was two days after a meeting in New York with the analysts, the heathen witchdoctors. The business model is broken they were told, the analysts, the leaking assets now totally submerged by anxious debt. There was a smell of bad governance.
Two meetings were scheduled, one on wednesday and one on thursday with the lawyers. First the bad news, and then everybody gets fired.
Getting fired is a public business these days. It happens a lot.
George got fired on the thursday, George the Financial Controller. George from Bondi fired by a Minnesota yank with a lisp and a fake hair problem and a nose that could only have been a casualty of somebody else’s cocaine. Go back to the hotel and pack he said, then fly home and clean out your office, leave the car in the corporate lot, but before you go sign the new contract for moneys borrowed at the now forever vanished favourable rates. Six months ok for full payback George?
And fuck off, George ..
This was at 10 am, the Sheraton on the Park late checkout was 5 pm, an earlier arrangement because George was no fool when the company card was paying, but that’s a seven course lunch and a quick healing massage in Chinatown out the window.
So he sat in the suite with its terraces overlooking the cathedral and park, his small bag packed, his future riddled with weaknesses. His CV a tragic witness to this latest corporate clusterfuck, of which he had played no part but transfer profits from here to there and from country to country as instructed. George kept the emails.
Hungry. Corporate card sliced. Six hours until the flight. Room Service don’t answer the phone and all the booze drunk last night. Some things you know are coming.
Time enough for Alexander the Great to plan the battle of the Punjab.
Later.
In the suite, after a little shopping in the David Jones food hall.
George unpacked the fresh salmon slices and a roll of greaseproof paper, he wraps each slice in the greaseproof and goes to the cupboard and takes out both the iron and the ironing table. Switches on the iron – medium hot – places a wrapped salmon on the ironing board and sits the iron on it – ten minutes per side – done.
Then he unpacked the green prawns and cleaned them of shitline, head and shell. There were eight of them, and into the bubbling kettle they go. Two minutes should do it, and watch they don’t get caught in the kettle neck. Messy extraction that, and never mind the smell and the prawn heads, George won’t be back and he’s not paying to clean up the mess.
Two kilos of kipfler potatoes wrapped and tied into one of those white bathroom robes he used to wear when times were happier, they go on the floor in the shower. Then turn on the hot water, full, five hours should see them done.
Steamed Salmon with fresh caught prawns and kipfler potatoes.
Fuck you back.
prawn courtesy of Ballina
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