***
I left the office on the dot again. I shouldn't do that, particularly on a Friday, it sets the wrong tone, but there have to be exceptions to everything. First of all my neurons wanted nothing more to do with deranged alien students. Secondly, today had been a long day but also a successful one and certain things require celebrating; starting off with an hour or so swimming in the sea and a nice cool beer on the terrace afterwards.
And I prolonged the celebration by taking the taxi back to Palma to a café which hosted a weekly blitz-chess tournament on Friday evenings. I didn't win it. I lost on time to the winner in the last round and finished second. Deservedly so, there is never any luck in chess. But the small cash prize was good enough to finance a fish dinner. And the few Courvoisiers which followed I financed myself.
DAY 44
Today was Saturday and I woke up late and it was getting hot already. I had a swim in the pool and I breakfasted on the terrace, yes, poached eggs again, and then I settled down to my second cup of Illy coffee and a cigarette and contentedly reviewed the agreeable state of affairs in which I found myself as of today's date.
On the personal side, I had gained one million Euros in just over six weeks for doing very little. Neither Delsey nor more powerful people were bothering me and it seemed to me that I had no further responsibilities toward Jeremy and his imaginary world, nor toward whatever screaming and arguing was going on among the planet's current holders of might and power.
At the same time, on the business side, the Naviera was about to show a miraculous turnaround. And I was about to become Mr. Superman for Sr. Pujol himself. He would think I was perfect, which I am not of course, which is a good thing, because perfect people tend not to have any friends. I was merely someone fortunate enough to have landed in a situation containing its own built-in solutions and who had also been lucky enough to stumble across them without wasting too much time.
With the Africa business we would be near enough doubling our revenues and the majority of that would be pure profit, given that most of the costs would remain the same, including the Gerona Sol crew's wages. In fact, as far as I could see at the moment, the only increase in costs would be for fuel. But against that, we had another immense saving: the dockworker's costs. We would be saving the full weekly Palma costs and most of the Barcelona ones, as the ship would only be appearing there once per week.
And we would only be incurring dockworkers' costs once per week in Morocco, and we would only need about six dockworkers there, say, and they would be at vastly cheaper rates than the ones in Spain. Next week, Pedro, Conchita and I could work out the exact numbers but unless my thinking was wrong, the labor costs savings would be for an estimated 3,500 man-days per year. And we could enjoy the uproar this would cause among the dockworkers in both Barcelona and Palma, but there was nothing at all they could do about it.
What is more, it would seem to them as if I had previously been trying to give them a chance by asking about the possibility of a headcount reduction, a proposal which they had undeniably rejected out of hand, in fact they had refused to even discuss it. So my shirt was as white as snow for the purpose of any future excursions into the pig-headed wonderland of communist-style labor.
We would also soon be earning more money by recuperating some of the 40-ton container cargo once the crane was repaired and by losing fewer journeys during the year following the Mahon Star deck upgrade. And on top of that, we were reducing miscellaneous costs on items such as fuel burned by tuna fishing, bookkeeping expenses, pallet rental costs, and plenty of other minor items such as Alfonso's so-called travel and entertainment expenses.