The lecturer in the CIÉ management school beamed brightly at his new intake: all qualified engineers. There was barely a thing they didn't know about engines, electricity, metallurgy, induction coils, transformers, energy sources and fuel efficiency. Kevin Myers observed
"Good morning, engineers," he intoned. His pupils, pens eagerly in hand, tongues protruding, promptly scribbled "Good morning, engineers" in their note-pads. "Excellent," he said. "An attentive class." "Excellent," his students wrote. "An attentive class." The lecturer smiled to himself. With this sort of imaginative flair, these young people would be sure to rocket through the management of CIÉ.
"We have a simple teaching system in CIÉ management school, in which we drum home the essentials by a form of mnemonic. This is a system for remembering things. The CIÉ mnemonic is simply based on the alphabet.
"So we start with the letter A. A stands for assets. Assets are our natural rights. We inherited them from our forefathers and foremothers, and we do not have to think any further about them. We possess hundreds of thousands of acres of assets, and the most important thing is we should never have to answer for them, to anyone.
"B is for bus. We run buses all over Ireland. Some countries have bus services which are dictated by the clock. At bus-stops in Stockholm, electric signs actually tell you how many seconds you'll have to wait for the next bus. We think that's a little fussy, and not very Irish. Which doesn't mean we can't learn. So we're introducing our own bus timetable. It'll be less minutes/seconds and more January/February.
"C is for clocks. This is largely covered under B. Still, do try not to create an atmosphere of tension among the workforce by having clocks which are too accurate. Excessive devotion to punctuality destroys a working environment. Station clocks should always be a few minutes slow. Which brings us to D, for Delays. These are inevitable in our line of work. Try not to worry about them. Dentists do teeth. We do Delays. That's it.
"E is for engineers, obviously. Our primary purpose is to give Employment to Engineers, so E is a doubly important letter. Revere it. F is for fraught. This is what you'll certainly be if you try to reduce D. G is for Government, God bless it! Government protects us from every little mishap in life. Government is that affable undemanding body that allowed the Luas works to operate during office hours only. No night work. No weekend work, just like the civil service. Civil service culture is our culture! WE ADORE GOVERNMENT!
"H is for hernia. Which is what you'll certainly get after you've got too F from tackling D. I is for imagination. Forgive me. This is the most taboo word in our organisation. I - not the same thing! - will not use it again in your hearing.
Imagination would enable us to do shocking, terrible things, like working 24-hour shifts when we're renovating the DART line, which would have dire consequences, such as seriously reducing the D word.
"J is for joke, also known as the timetable. K is for keen. Another taboo word. L is for Late: oh joy! M is for monopoly, our everything, our alpha and omega. N is for natterjack toad, whose speed of action and applied intelligence make it our role-model. O is for Offaly, where you'll find the missing Limerick-Cork express from December 1968, the passengers still aboard, and somewhat famished. (But that's our secret, OK?)
"Q is for queries. Bad things. No organisation can cope with queries. Ignore them if possible. R is for Rumour, another word for timetable. S is for Slovenly. This is the opposite of the I word. Slovenly is good. Slovenly is worthy. Slovenly is what we aim for. It is, in fact, Us.
"T is for trains. We have one in Sligo. We think. And there's one somewhere near Limerick Junction. Possibly. T is also for Timetable. See B, C, D and J. U is for Utopia, which is another term for CIÉ as it is today. V is for Victorian, as in much of our rolling stock. W is for Westport, where a fully-loaded passenger train has been standing for three years now, waiting for a driver. X is for Xmas, the day when we run no services at all, and the day we'd like to imitate throughout the year. Y is for yesterday, when the average bus was supposed to arrive but still hasn't. And Z is for Zodiac, whose signs we use as the scientific basis for our long-term planning.
"There you have it. The alphabet of everything that's important for management of CIÉ."
A little voice spoke up from the back of the lecture room. "Please sir, you didn't mention 'P' in your alphabet."
The lecturer allowed a sardonic smile come to his lips. "Correction. You said 'P'. The letter is 'p'. Lower case. It is too contemptible a letter to merit the capital form. No word beginning with 'p' has any meaning or significance whatever to CIÉ.
"That student aside, you have been a most unimaginative class. You will be immediately put in charge of the DART renovation scheme. Indeed, some of you show all the signs of the pathological mismanagement which could well qualify you for Luas."
He sobbed. "I am so very, very proud of you. Remember: work office hours only. And most of all, never, ever do road-works at a time when there's no traffic to disrupt."