Dung Beetle

A nice easy job picking up from the local hospital and ten miles up the road to Ulverston, or so I thought!

My fare was waiting in the foyer shoehorned into what must have been a specially strengthened jumbo size wheeled chair. I would guess that she would have been maybe between 28st (390lb) and 30st (402lbs) and had her right arm in plaster and stuck out at an extreme right angle.

She was with her mother who at maybe 4ft 10in and 6st (84lbs) was the complete opposite to her in every way.

I can’t wheel her declared the mother and looked at me expectantly, so I took a deep breath and started to shove as hard as I could on the back of the wheeled chair. At first, it would not budge and so I closed my eyes and gave it all I had and was rewarded with some movement. I opened my eyes when the victim began shouting at me and found that all I had managed to achieve was turning her on the spot three times. Mother pointed out that one of the wheels still had its brake on so I released that and prepared to set off again.

By this time, the ladies of the WRVS had evacuated the rest of the patients from the foyer and were comforting them with tea and biscuits.

 Off I set with the huge load squealing and shouting directions looking like a dung beetle pushing an elephant turd up an anthill.

When I finally reached the taxi with my Convoi Exceptionnel and I was pondering just how I would load her without any mechanical assistance, she popped up out of the chair like a whale breaching the ocean and shrieked “I can walk you know it’s my bloody arm that’s broken”

With that, she climbed into the front seat of the now lopsided groaning taxi.

I set of staggering back with the chair wondering why she waited for me to push her in the chair when she could walk and why I was daft enough to do it!  

Mother was sat very quiet in the back and daughter sat waiting to be belted up. This was never going to happen even if I could reach round her the belt would never have stretched the vast distance.

Next was the problem of releasing the handbrake which was hidden beneath some unknown part of the daughter’s anatomy, this was achieved with much embarrassed and apologetic fumbling and straining.

“I was ran over by a truck,” the daughter announced when we had set off, now being a sensitive sort of guy I didn’t follow my first instinct and ask her if the truck driver survived, but I couldn’t help but wonder.

Daughter had a loud shrill sort of voice that just didn’t seem to want to stop talking at me. After a mile or two mother quietly tried to interrupt her to tell me directions to the place they were going. This seemed to be a big mistake as daughter shrieked “can’t I bloody talk now you old cow” and this started a full scale argument between them for the next nine miles of pure hell.

Every time daughter shouted at mother, she turned round to face her in the back and in doing so punched me with the heavily plastered arm.

I was mentally exhausted and black and blue by I finally gratefully dropped them both off.

Some days I would rather be a dung beetle!