Stall The Ball

I witnessed today the most amazing display of co-ordination and teamwork I have seen outside of the movies.

It was a nice sunny afternoon when out of the blue two Dublin clamper vans rolled up on either end of the street as silently and stealthily as cats. No over revving of engines or screeching of tyres for these boyos, quietly quietly catchee monkee was the watch word here.

Even as the vans rolled to a stop doors were flung open and all the occupants bailed out, crouched, notepads at the ready. They immediately split up one half to one side of the road, the other half to the other side.

Crouched, looking around for possible alarmists (office workers with a mobile phone) they half ran half leopard crawled along the footpath using the covers of shadows from nearby trees and cars, quickly checking tickets for expiry times.

Follow up:

On spotting an expired ticket a clamper immediately signalled the others using a combination of gestures that varied from pointing, poking himself in the eyes with two fingers and something that looked like he was masturbating his ear.

The others, having completed their allotted patrol area smoothly segued into clamping mode. One took up a covering position near the ticket meter temporarily blocking it from use.

A second raced back to a van to recover the heavy ordnance. A large blunt looking implement of torture pained a garish yellow.

The remaining clamper, the original spotter, proceeded to graffiti the car with stickers.

The heavy ordnance bod made his way to the car and began to subject it all sorts of indignities including some sort of bondage fetish where he manacled the car to the ground! To add insult to injury he promptly photographed his handiwork. But no flash of course. Probably some sort of high definition thermal imaging spotting scope that's still classified.

Operation complete, as a silently as they had come, they faded back to their vans and disappeared without a trace. The entire operation took less than 2 minutes and was executed in complete silence.

Irish Rangers, SAS, Delta Force ? Forget it; give me the Dublin clampers anytime.