nasa, I’m slipping out of verse to reply, because what I have to say is too damned important to fit into my hopelessly poor attempts at iambic pentameter. I know I can’t speak for all 89-ers, but the vast majority of us feel no joy at AN’s current demise. We admit to feeling some satisfaction at the discomfort the unspeakables are currently going through, (I’m sure ‘heroically’), but we sympathise with the rest of you, for we all too accurately understand what you are going through at the moment. Because, not to make too fine a point of it, we’ve ALL been there and done that. Remember? And we, unlike you, had ZERO public sympathy at the time and a blanket refusal on the part of damn near everyone to understand..
What I and others have tried to say here is that in 89 /90 we tried to warn you ALL where the Fat Man was leading the company and almost without exception, we were met, sometimes with hostility, but universally with a selective blindness that staggered me at the time. Early in the dispute, I was roundly abused picking my children up from school by a woman whose husband was missing out on his overtime ‘because of you’. And she didn’t want to hear anything that might cloud her ‘clear understanding’ of the situation.
This was coming – none of us could predict how, but it was coming – from the day the dirty duo took over in 79 and began stripping the very guts out of a once proud company. You only had to look at the low-lifes who moved into (and UP into) management – people who would do the Fat Man’s bidding however stupid we (and they) could see it was. You got quite a few of those among your pilot group post 89, but it wasn’t just the pilot group who suffered fools at the helm. Who could forget the biggest sh*t kicker of them all, now (mis?) managing a certain football club?
Good luck to you all - well, almost all. May you be back in gainful employment with minimum delay. I just hope the damned government doesn’t end up giving the carcass, without debt, to those manipulative bastards from SQ. If they take AN over, those ‘lucky’ enough to get their jobs back will understand the term ‘blood on the streets’.
Maybe it’s time you all took a class action suit out on the survivor to the dirty duo – the real culprit in AN’s current demise.