Month: June 2021

I guess I was tired, but I was feeling a bit jealous on that Monday morning about eight. The weather was cool but not cold and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. It was the kind of day that makes you really not want to go to work. The train was stopping in Manheim on its way to Munich. I cannot say with 100% certainty it was American solders but it was a fairly large group of guys probably about 25 – 35 in age with short hair who all looked pretty fit and spoke English.

They were obviously up for a big day, it appeared that each of them were drinking a one liter can of beer. They were not really drunk, yet, but it appeared that they had started before getting on the train. In its own way it was all fairly funny. They were all having a good time and from what I could gather most of the train was living vicariously through them.

I was a bit of disappointed when I had to get out in Stuttgart and the party train kept going.

It was a fairly embarrassing incident. I didn’t see that the recruiting agency was not a stable partner but a liability waiting to happen. Eventually it did happen and the company went into insolvency proceedings. My attorney was setting my expectations to receive very little if anything at all. Not only did this make me quite angry, it was money that I needed to pay the rent.

I was speaking griping about this issue to my friend who came up with a rather unique solution. There are firms in every country that will try and recover money that is owed, and in this case it was a company that was in Moscow that also had offices in Germany.

I had already started with legal proceedings, but I was intrigued by their web site. Below is a translation of some of the sentences from their web page.

Specializing in money collection in the traditional Russian style. Our close work with government agencies has proved very effective in all eastern European countries

Through our corporate network it is possible to obtain a variety of information that allows us to track the debtor anywhere. Various methods such as letters and surveillance are effective no matter where they are located. We offer a particularly unique and close working relationship in Russia. There we work almost hand in hand with the state authorities (FSB and Russian militia) to process your claim.

I was very very close on a couple of occasions to have this highly regarded collection firm take my case.

It isn’t the typical bachelor story where you take a peek into the bathroom and it appears that all sorts of fungi and molds have taken over most of the flat porcelain surfaces. Nor is it a story about there being only three piles of clothes in the closet, one definitely dirty, one somewhat used and the rest unfolded but clean clothes. It doesn’t even have an anecdote that ends up with the only thing in the refrigerator being a couple of bottles of beer and a some olives.

Nah, this is a short story about a couple of Minnesota bachelors and their struggle against the elements. It isn’t any real secret that Minnesota gets snow and cold every year between October and March. To be honest, it was a surprise even to the residents when it started snowing on Thursday and really didn’t stop until about Saturday.

The result was actually a lot of snow. The official numbers put it about 22 inches for this one snow storm. To complicate things this was the first snow storm of the winter. Neither the city nor the state were really ready for this. Initially I thought that my apartment complex was just a duff organization that was not able to organize the shoveling of snow. Yet after a while it became apparent that this was no ordinary snow storm and our cars were not going anywhere, perhaps not even to work on Monday.

We didn’t have any food and we didn’t live in the big city. We lived about a mile from the town near us and as a couple of bachelors we didn’t really have much in the way of food in the fridge. So without much planning we walked to town and the hardware store was closed, as was the restaurant, actually everything was closed except for a small convenience store and Little Caesars pizza.

So we did the only thing we could, we had pizza and bought some frozen pizzas and a case of coca cola. We only got enough to last the weekend as we felt certain that we would be dug out by then.