Local Man Would Really Like To Punch HR Guy’s Lights Out

Ramble Inn regular Leonard Hardiman last night grandly offered to let everyone in on ‘a little secret’.

“I’d really like to punch our HR guy’s lights out”.

“Something you say every week, can’t possibly be considered a secret”, ‘early drinker’ Thomas Joseph Guiney said, without looking up from his crossword.

Although apparently closed, the pub was providing a lockdown service to a handful of its most loyal customers, with the aid of blackout curtains. Hardiman, pictured on the left (above), was momentarily taken aback by Guiney’s remark but continued anyway. 

“You know what that pervert spends his time doing?” he asked rhetorically.

“Torturing us with ‘team building exercises’,” he said raising his voice to a near shout.

The noise made owner & proprietor Eamon Halligan, who was leaning on the bar and doing the crossword with Guiney, frown. Hardiman briefly held up a hand by way of apology, before resuming his party piece.

“Last appraisal I got from that dick, said I was ‘rigid, repetitive and unable to innovate’?”

“Produced, as fruit,” Halligan read out, “four letters.”

“He’s saying,” Nugent continued, “that I’m a bloody machine!”

Guiney briefly glanced at him before observing, “But if you think about it, that’s actually a good thing”.

“How so!”  

“It means you can never be replaced by a robot?”

Hardiman’s mouth fell open, as Halligan slowly straightened and smiled.

“Bore!” he said, tapping the paper triumphantly.