The waitress forgets to bring my order. I am furious: she's wasted my time. I've been sitting in this dump of a café staring at the wall for 20 minutes. How dare she use up my day like this?
The train is late. I cannot meet my client at the restaurant at the appointed time. They will think I am insincere and do not want the deal. How can I be expected to do business in his country if the damned trains don't run on time?
There are imperfections in the batch. It turns out the filter was contaminated: someone didn't clean it properly last time. This sample took three weeks to prepare – isolating, purifying, desiccating, analysing... How in God's name am I supposed to get the work done if incompetent buffoons work here?
It turns out the match was fixed! Twenty thousand people turned up to watch the final, but the truth of it is that the score was settled weeks ago. That's the problem with sport these days; there's no fair play anymore. How can you have faith in the teams and players when there's always someone pulling the strings in the background?
The political ambitions of his deputy head were notorious. He just wouldn't do anything without an eye on advancement, on reciprocal actions, on curating a selection of favours to later call on. Some of the parents and governors saw it, but chose to live with it: how could they let children through the gates with such a Machiavellian beast daily working his machinations?
The behaviour of the corporation towards the environment was beginning to bother some of the shareholders. They had been with the company for more than twenty years and believed in it, but recent reports from the River Authority made for alarming reading. They feared a whistleblower, negative press and a drop in share price. But how could they change things in the current economic climate?
The tanks were still on the street, but they needed bread. Before she could do anything about it, Abdul had grabbed the money from the pot beside the door and run out of the gate towards the little bakery on the corner. She called out, but he was long out of earshot. How could she hold together a family in a situation like this?
The landing craft sloughed to a standstill in three feet of choppy seawater: the first out received the bullets –ripping through their clothes, webbing, helmets, to sink deep into their flesh– and they fell backwards and forwards and into the waves. Instinctively he followed, ignoring the gantry he jumped into the bloody water to take perilous cover from the strafing of the machine gun post high on top of the sand. But there was a clear 100 yards of empty beach to run before any possible fighting could take place. The bastards sat up there with pure murderous intent, showing not one little ounce of mercy: if he left the water and the protective flotation of corpses there would be no hiding from it. How could any human survive this? He would never again complain about late buses, the boss's last-minute demands, the weather, or anything, for he now faced death here on Juno Beach.
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