Bolshoi Dyengi

“It’s problem” announced Uri sauntering towards me and thumbing back towards the fork truck. I eyed him suspiciously, you never can tell.
‘Many money’ he suggested, rubbing his oily thumb and forefingers together and flashing me an equally greasy gold toothed smile.
Shite, I thought.
I looked from Uri to the sad yellow monster. In a past life it was probably worshipped as a god or at the very least revered as a revolution in Soviet pallet lifting technology. It did the work of ten men, apparently, and it was now taking about the same number to fix it.
I hated it. I had spent two months trying to get it repaired, which is about the average time it takes to get anything done around these parts.
I shook my head, how much this time? ‘Skolka estoyet?’ I asked in my best Russian.
Engineers, mechanics and general repair men or persons, should I say, at this point please take note; you are the same the world over!
Uri shook his head and not for the first time that day and made that sound, you know the one, that inhaled whistling sound. See? No different.
‘Maybe two hand red dollar’ he offered with a shrug.
I coughed but made out it was because of the vulgar cigarettes they had brought me back from the local kiosk.
Christ! I could feel the blood simmering already.
‘’Two hundred fecking dollars? I could buy a second hand bloody car for that!’ I shot a look towards Sergei my translator. ‘Tell him if it’s not repaired after that I’m going to tie him to it and push it in the river!’
Sergei looked suitably alarmed; Uri was much bigger than him. There are some advantages in being linguistically challenged.
He was a good sort really, Sergei that is, most of the other employees were scoundrels.
‘Err…Mr. Conner Sir; Uri says that the pallet loader will be repaired and fully operational by this time tomorrow and at the latest by next Friday. He very much expects the repair costs to fall within the estimated two hundred dollar budget.’
He was a good translator but he had a tendency to overdo it.
‘Furthermore’, he continued, ‘Uri very much regrets the time it has taken to repair it and that the contractors are not very reliable in this respect….’
I put my hand up to stem the flow and handed over two hundred dollars. ‘I give up’ I said; besides I was bloody freezing. The factory heating system (large carbon spewing wood burner) was at the other end of the plant and I was starting to turn blue.
I pointed at Uri, which although considered rude in these parts I wasn’t really in the mood for cultural harmonics. ‘Chot da? Receipts, Panamayesh?’ I made the international gesture for requesting the bill at a restaurant. He seemed to understand this although I knew I had more chance of seeing the fork truck working than seeing a receipt.
I decided to cut my losses.
‘Serge, tell Uri that if he gets it working by tomorrow I’ll give him a two hundred dollar bonus’ With that I spun on my heels and headed home, there was only so much head shaking I could take.
The next morning, as the car bounced into the factory car park, my face dropped. You couldn’t fail to notice the panic. There was a large hole in the side of the building, the fork truck was on its side and an ambulance.
Sergei raced towards me beaming as I stepped out of the car.
‘Good morning Mr. Conner sir, Uri is very pleased to announce that he has repaired the pallet loader’
I shook my head.