Cunt of the Week: Riddle Me This...

>It is often said that if you remember the early days of the Marketeer, then you never really knew where the sales department stashed their coke. This is a tale from those days.

An interesting counterpoint to the public humiliation that Alistair Sim has had to endure over the last 18 months is the vast number of people in the industry who Got Away With It, individuals who did similar or worse things to Mr Sim, but simply escaped vilification solely by virtue of not getting caught. One such individual is Robin Riddle, one time Northern Sales Rep for the Economist, a role he presumably fulfilled through either osmosis or telepathy as, despite sharing an office with him for some six months, I never actually saw him do anything at all.

One of the typically far-sighted and innovative moves made by the Carnyx Group during the brief period they genuinely had a presence in England was to arrange to reduce the overheads of its Manchester office by sharing a space with the Economist, which consisted entirely of the “Riddler”.

When I say reduce the overheads, what the ever-duplicitous Carnyx Group actually did was inflate the claimed rent and allocate a supposed portion of it to the Economist, a portion which actually pretty much covered the whole of the real rent.
Robin was bought into our one room office (on the third floor of a building on the corner of York Street and Fountain Street), on the condition that whatever happened in “Marketeer Mansions” stayed in “Marketeer Mansions”, However, the keen Carnyx-costcutters overlooked three vital facts about Robin:

a) He was a compulsive gossip, with very little to do
b) He organized the MPA lunches so a had a ready made audience of people to compulsively gossip to
c) He was a complete cunt

Far from keeping schtum about the goings-on in Marketeer Mansions – which at that point was a marginally less happy ships than one ferrying a dead Viking to his eternal reward - Robin used confidential information – sales data, internal squabbles etc–to persuade the many that that usually bodyswerved to avoid him to break the habit of a lifetime and spend more than 50 seconds listen to him pontificate. He was an Olympic class pontificator.

He then compounded this by getting involved with one of the Marketeer sales girls, whose main interest in Robin was promising sexual favours in return for him paying off her burgeoning credit card bills. Unfortunately, whilst her visa final demands were the exclusive province of the Riddler, her heart and sundry other organs were, largely, the exclusive province of another (married) man.

When, despite howls of protest from me and James O’Donnell, the Marketeer’s deputy editor and token grown-up, said sales girl and Romeo Riddler decided to move into together (said sales girl now having rent arrears as well as threats to her pets from Visa hitmen), it was obvious things were going to get worse. Much worse.

When the World’s Least Trustworthy Woman moves in with the World’s Most Paranoid Man, Dark Satanic Forces can take the day off, and put their feet up, secure in the knowledge that they are well surplus to requirements.

And so it came to pass that WLTW and WMPM were sharing an apartment, a bed, her bad debts and, most critically, a PC.

Said sales girl made the mistake of using the shared PC to arrange a hotel tryst with her One True Love of the Month, fatally neglecting to clear her in-box and sent box. The Riddler, of course, having found his previous fiancée in bed with another on at least one occasion, scrupulously checked WLTW’s email accounts on a daily basis. Hourly, if she was out.

On this occasion, the Riddler found details of hotel bookings, times, dates etc. Unsatisfied with merely being able to confront the visa-indebted vixen with his discovery, he stalked her all the way to Leeds on the day of the tryst.

Entering the hotel, he then knocked on the illicit couple’s door and pretended, in squeaky tones, to be housekeeping. Upon looking through the peephole, the coitus interuptees swiftly realized it was not an amusingly-voiced Malmaison manservant but rather a revenge-bent Riddler. Quite sensibly, they decided to remain on the reverse side of the door, until the Riddler began reeling off details of the married man’s home address, phone number, wife’s employment and, most chillingly, the name of the school where his kids went.

Understandably freaked out by the Riddler’s OCD stalkery, said married man did the dishonourable thing and promptly fled, leaving our tiny slip of a sales girl to tackle the disapproving-of-their-nobbin’ Robin alone. Hardly his finest hour – and you know who you are and I know you’ll read this.

Now the Riddler is hardly an impressive specimen of masculinity, but he was twice as tall as his petite ex-paramour to be. Such inequality, however, did not stop him from smashing her head into a wall and then spitting in her face. Nor was this the only time. After this he took to hanging around outside her apartment at night and repeating the process on more than one occasion. A nice guy. I wonder what his new colleagues at the Economist in North America would think should they ever find out…

An amusing aside on the whole Riddler affair and one which sums up the Walter Mitty-like nature of his existence… Early on in my acquaintance with him he started using an alias – “Robin James”. He explained to the bemused Marketeer crew that was this because his father had been a counter-terrorism operative working against the IRA and that he had been officially warned by the Secret Service that his distinctive surname made him a target for revenge attacks by disgruntled Irishmen.

The truth, like most things about the Riddler, was far more prosaic. His former fiancée, Jenny, had baulked at taking on his surname should they marry, feeling that “Jenny Riddle” sounded far too similar to a well-known urination euphemism – hence the name change. Upon finding this out we quizzed him as to why he hadn’t opted for “Taylor” rather than James. Although, we found this hilarious it rather predictably, like so many other things, went clear over Robin’s notoriously vacuous head.
If you would like to nominate a Cunt of the Week, please email me on tonymurray37@hotmail.com. Anyone, of course, who nominates me may well find themselves in this hallowed spot.