One day, there were but few colleagues in. The day was passing quietly when The Bully stalked down to The Wizard's office, seemingly to seek an audience with him. The Wizard was generally responsive to the dialogue as was basic practice when in dealings with The Bully, although in reality not amenable at all by this stage.

It soon transpired that The Bully wished to secure The Wizard's assistance. There had arisen the matter of some toys that he had procured for his offspring that were not working as he had expected them to and was not in possession of the skill nor disposition to make them work himself. Feeling this to be something of an awkward situation, relating as it did not to matters of work, The Wizard nonetheless felt in some way obliged to help The Bully. Thus it was decided that they would travel across country to The Bully's rural retreat where The Wizard would then be put to work on the mysterious and new-fangled toys that had evaded The Bully so.

The journey itself was something of an ordeal for The Wizard in that The Bully had clearly resolved that this was a private and untraceable opportunity to petition against The Wizard's peer and friend, that other rebel, The Guru. Building on his earlier insistences that The Wizard was unmistakably more content when not in the company of The Guru, The Bully talked at length in a singular, relentless discourse about how The Guru had in fact achieved nothing to date and that all of his hailed and much-lauded successes had in fact been cattle dung. Public praise was deemed to have been manufactured, and the significance of various works to be grossly inflated. The Wizard fixed quietly upon the skyline and watched as fields rushed by. And all at once they were there. They had reached the rural retreat of Pom Pommery.

The retreat resembled something of the Pastor's tea house. In any case, one could not have anticipated the interior to have been quite so dishevelled and smelly given the rustic if dilapidated charm professed from outside. Indeed the first thing to strike The Wizard was the fetid smell. Clearly The Bully's hounds had been allowed to dominate in all rooms and subsequently the odour was one of damp, dirt and a general grime of perspiration.

The Bully indicated towards a pile of wires and a blinking, beeping box. This new and unknown device was not working, claimed The Bully, who spoke with the anger that comes when an individual masks incompetence with denial. The Wizard sat down and began to untangle the toys and it soon became apparent that the problem was two-fold. Not only had The Bully failed to operate the new toys correctly, he had also failed to integrate the toys into the existing and necessary communal vision device stood in front of his empty hearth.

Selfishly keen for his problems to be solved and for his offspring to again be amused, The Bully offered The Wizard sustenance in the form of some Earl Grey tea. The Wizard took this to be part of the general upper-class facade that The Bully so desperately crafted but nonetheless in politeness agreed to partake of this refreshment.

The tea itself was disgusting, and the cup unclean. Moreover, it was consumed whilst sitting in the smelliest of armchairs towards the back of the room. Artifacts of the upper-class myth littered the refreshment table: publications on higher breeding, various histories of the famed and also some pseudo antiques. The Wizard finished the noxious tea and set about concluding his work. Before long the 'non working' toys were functioning properly and in conjunction with the communal vision device. The Wizard gave The Bully a debrief on what had been necessary and also a demonstration of how to keep the toys working in a predictable way. The Bully became gleeful and animated, and pledged to reward The Wizard with much ale later that day, for he claimed that The Wizard had saved his skin. And so once again and behind closed doors, The Bully had achieved his ends through the knowledge, skill and effort of others.