The tale of how the Oriental Gentleman entered our lives-

One day, one of us found a roll of stickers under a car seat that said ‘Keep Christ in Christmas’- This very quickly escalated into a game of ‘who can place these stickers in the most obscure place’ bottoms of mugs, undersides of spanners etc etc.

Anyway, as silly boys do we got bored of stickers (actually we ran out) and one day after a particularly gruelling shift of making one another laugh, we were walking back to our cars and there on the ground ahead lay a mythical passport picture. 

Enter the OG!

Now I can’t remember which of us picked it up or which of us had the idea to stick it in obscure places but this escalated and quickly! 

From being left under windscreen wipers, to being screen printed onto babygrows, we’ve pretty much found a way to have this picture pop up in the most random of places. I even had him printed onto a balloon saying get well soon and delivered to his house after his diagnosis which you might think would be the winner but this story tops them all…..

Dingle came into work shortly after taking leave once he’d received his diagnosis. He was to have his dad's car serviced. We chatted and laughed as we always did and I didn’t think too much more about it. That was, until I got back to my office (for those that don’t know, I became his boss a few years ago) and found it literally plastered over everything.

When I say everything, I do mean everything, it was on the whiteboard, under my desk even under the handset of my phone. IT WAS EVERYWHERE!

No big deal you might assume except an hour later I had a meeting booked in with a very senior person from within our organisation who it would be fair to say looks very similar to our little friend- You can imagine how panicked I was and spent a very uncomfortable two hours desperately hoping that my visitor wasn’t politely ignoring a copy I might have missed that was staring down at us from the blinds!

I rang Dingle that night to say something along the lines of  ‘mate, that was funny but I need to be professional’ and his response was perfect ‘No you don’t’ then he let out that great big laugh of his that I will miss hearing forever.