Tales from a past life - still at Big American Company
The year ended with my boss being moved sideways and replaced by Jenny. He explained that he didn’t like me and would make it one of his goals for the year to get rid of me. I pointed out that I just had one deal that I wanted to close, before I would be very happy indeed to leave, (it would take over a year for both things to happen).
Jenny was the man who had interrupted a conversation he was having with someone one morning to turn to me and say:
”Hey, you’ll know the answer to this. Last night I was having dinner with some people and we got into an argument about what QED stands for. Some of us thought it was ‘question easily done’, others reckoned it was ‘quite easily done’”.
“It stands for quad erat demonstrandum”.
“No, but in English, does that mean quite easily done or question easily done”?
Of course, once I had closed the deal (the biggest in the history of the UK division), they sacked me without paying me the commission. It was quite easily annoying as it had been the only reason that I had stayed but I suppose I had had a good year. When I had asked the HR bloke how they could sack me, he cockily announced that they would “make something up”. The same thing happened to my friend only he got an excellent termination package, after revealing to Mr HR, (who had said the same thing to him), that he had recorded the conversation.
Meanwhile back in the previous year, the company was still riding along on that wave of 80’s optimism. My boss at that time was a bit of a loose canon, he was the first to admit that he was a bit wild. But looking back, I liked him and he supported me better than I him. He used to say that if we couldn’t do our jobs in three days a week, we were in the wrong job. He seemed to manage to do his in even fewer. Consequently he was often fully engaged with arranging extra curricular activities, like trips to the States.
We used to fly business and often Mike (my boss) would have managed to get quite a posse together, so those flights were quite good fun. I didn’t drink in those days (but more than one senior person approached me on the quiet and warned me about the dangers of abusing illegal substances), the truth is that I didn’t take anything except one sugar in my coffee. So we were flying to Boston, to meet with members of one of my customers. Much alcohol was consumed aboard the 747 and as usual I had the job of driving the hire car at the other end. There was quite a bit of snow. Have you ever tried handbrake turns with those American cars with hand brakes for your foot?
The following morning, after a big night, we all met at the office. Twenty minutes into the first day of three days of meetings with this customer, an American revealed that he had not done what he had previously said he had and so the raison d’etre for the trip no longer existed. I was quite a new boy and was fully expecting that that would mean an early flight home (and maybe even some kind of bollocking) but three days of shopping and partying followed. Another time we were meeting one of the big four banks at the same office. The president of our company had his own dining room on the top floor, there must have been ten or so of us (including members of the customer’s company) who all traipsed up there at midday to meet Mr Big. The main bank man was quite a scary bloke and it turned out that the president of my company was not. He spent the whole time shaking so badly that his cutlery rattled and much of the food that left his plate never made it to his mouth.
At the sales conference in Lisbon, I ended up in a taxi full of prostitutes. Some Americans had asked if anyone could speak French; I liked to think I could and stepped forward. “Can you translate for us?” “Bon soir”, I had offered. “You fucky fucky?” one of them had asked. (Don’t worry mum, fortunately I didn’t know as much French as I thought).
Twenty or so of us from the UK offices, as well as a number of others from around the world, went for two weeks training in Brussels. The attendance at the classes dropped off quite quickly; who knows if the tutor was still turning up by the end. The amenities that the town had to offer were indeed enticing when compared with listening to a chap with poor English and an apparent lack of desire to be there himself, talking about IT hardware. There were big, unofficial dinners to attend every night. During the day there was the fabulous swimming pool and cinema complex near Heisel Stadium to enjoy. I was particularly proud of my performance in a local snooker tournament (being the only non-Belgian to win a frame).
