Coffee.
Up until about 6 months ago I worked in the property department of a well known chain of Coffee shops (I wont name them but anyone who has ready Moby Dick or seen Battlestar Galactica will have a good idea). I worked out of the London office finding new locations for stores either on the high street or in shopping centres and it was amazing how many landlords would do a good deal just for a couple of free coffees every week.

Given the company's expansion plans I was driving around the country every day looking at sites and visiting existing stores to sort out any of their issues. As I was constantly in and out of the shops and driving miles I was always drinking our coffee to keep me going. This meant that when I got home each night I was having trouble sleeping due to the sheer amount of caffeine consumed.

At the time I was living in a small 1 bedroom flat in Ealing and found a local gym that was open all night to work off my energy. It was fairly quiet and helped me sleep. One night I got chatting to one of the other regulars a chap from the Philippines who appropriately was nicknamed Phil (an English version of his name). He had come over to the UK on a container ship (as crew not stowed away) and was currently working at a hand car wash near the Chiswick Flyover to earn some additional money before heading back there. We chatted a number of times and became good friends.

About 6 months ago the recession meant that the department was looking to reduce the number of staff and were asking for voluntary redundancies. I did consider it but didn’t know what I was going to do with myself and mentioned this to Phil. At the time he was about to go back on the ships and invited me to go with him. Using this as an opportunity to go travelling I took the redundancy with the plans of touring the Far East for 12 months until the economy improved.

The boat we signed up on was the Yasa Neslihan on route from Canada to China carrying iron ore. Other than Phil and me the rest were Turks but most spoke English in some form and soon my Turkish was not bad. By the time we headed through the Suez Canal I was getting bored. However this changed as we headed through the Gulf of Aden. One night at the end of October I was asleep on my bunk but awoken by the sound of gunfire. We had been boarded and captured by the infamous Somalian pirates. We were all rounded up and kept on the bridge. They all seemed rather friendly and once we realised that there was no Bruce Willis type hiding in the ducting of the boat it became easier to co-operate than resist. We were relatively well feed and could even see some ships following us but they did nothing. Once the Somalians had radioed to shore it became a waiting game until the owners paid the ransom.

Given that none of our captors spoke Turkish I ended up having to do a translating job as we were navigated back to Somalian waters. I got friendly with the Pirate captain, who disappointingly didn’t have a parrot eyepatch or similar. And we ended up discussing business, he had previously been a small time business man in Mogadishu ironically running a café so we had a common topic to discuss. Then one drunken evening as people do we discussed what we would do in the future, definitely a case of Stockholm syndrome setting in. And we even came up with a plan to combine my skills in selling coffee and his in Piracy. We planned to board ships and force them to buy drinks from us at exorbitant mark ups. We just needed a name for the company.

“Starbucaneers” I suggested.
(lordofallhesurveys How appropriate you fight like a cow, Fri 6 Mar 2009, 12:56, Reply)