Its two thirty AM on Wednesday night and while there is plenty that’s odd about changing into a tight fitting rubber suit in the back of a vintage car, what’s making me feel really uncomfortable right now is that we are right in the centre of town.
You‘ve all seen Ry’s jet-black Morris Traveller. It looks like a cross between Bonnie and Clyde’s death wagon and a hearse. Like every other car he’s had since I’ve known him, it attracts attention.
We’re parked up in that little side street down the back of the Watershed Cinema, next to where the old Wild Walk was and where the new aquarium is going to be. It’s raining and a young couple are stumbling down the alleyway, sharing the shelter of a single large coat. They glare in the window, judging by the way they are dressed they are coming back from the nightclub, in the @Bristol complex. I switch on the torch and it makes them jump. They stumble off into the night.
Ryan has his Iphone running through a tape player that he’s rigged up to live in the glove compartment. It’s plays “We all fall down” by I Like Trains. As far as I can tell it’s about waiting for death (like all their other tunes). It’s not exactly getting me pepped up for this.
There is a knock on the other window, just behind my head. It’s Ryan, his ‘I was a teenage undertaker’ features lit up by his own torch and obscured by the rain on the glass. ‘Batteries’ he says,
‘What?’
‘Batteries, you’re going to need spare batteries.’
The rubber I am wearing is not for fetish purposes; it’s a full dry suit. I am also wearing a helmet with a torch on it. We’re not dogging, we’re going underground and despite my reservations about extreme urban exploration, there’s no getting out if it. Ryan’s come all the way down from London and I’m glad to see him. The last time we hung out we went to this weird Turkish restaurant in London with my wife, my dad and one of his Artist Employees. I had a plane to catch early the next morning and although we were pleased to see each other, the whole thing felt a little forced. It was mainly my fault. Ryan is doing very well in life compared to me. (He earns about 40k a year doing video editing for big company’s, I earn minimum wage in a bar.) I kept telling him he should buy a jet ski, I kept telling him he should buy a house. Trying to get him to do all the things I would do if I ever had any money.
At Uni it was different, I was the talented one, now it seems Ryan was the smart one, the one that didn’t rely on “talent” and buckled down to learn some actual skills. At the end of the night in the Turkish restaurant, he walked back towards his tube station looking completely at ease in a way I never can in London. At that moment I had the odd thought that I might not see him again. That perhaps he couldn’t wait to leave.
But then out of the blue, here he is.
Not including the various canals there are two rivers that run through the heart of Bristol: The river Avon and the river Frome. People barely see the Frome now. Most of it was covered over in 1893 and the rest in 1938. What’s left of it now flows beneath the houses and shops and offices of St Judes and Broadmead, the only clue to it's existance being the street names above: River, Anchor and Broadweir among others. The river used to come out from a large rectangular opening where the boardwalk and ferry dock is next to where they park the falafel van and the crepe wagon. Back then with the right equipment and with no one around to stop you, you could just get into the water and follow it back through the city, all the way back to Wades Street in St Jude’s. But the truth is most people would just get to Castle Park then get lost. According to our map, under the park it becomes part of extensive flood defence that should the Frome rise too high, splits the river up and sends it to various outlets along the Avon. One at Bristol bridge, one all the way down at Gaol Bridge near the Louisiana. It’s pretty much a rabbit warren down there. Of course there aren’t any actual rabbits, there are however a lot of rats.
Even as Ryan is pulling the two bright yellow, rolled-up inflatable canoes down off his roof rack, I am still not sure how we are going to get into the river with all that decking they’ve put in down there. ‘Don’t worry about it,’ he says, and points at the canoe he wants me to carry. I heft it up onto my shoulder. I feel a smuggler with a barrel of duty free whiskey. The two of us leave the little service alley off Cannons road and enter the waterfront. Torches off, we revert to the silent language of hunters. From now on in it is all nods, whispers and hand signals. We stick to the shadows. Move in quick little runs. There might not be a lot of people around right now, but there is a lot of CCTV in town. In one of the trendy little bars we pass I can see a group of staff enjoying an after-shift drink, they are still in their black and white uniforms but with their shirts no longer tucked in, the manager's tie is loose. One of them has her shoes off. Thankfully they don’t see us, they are too busy talking about how the night has gone, who fancies who, which manager is the biggest jerk. I wonder what happens if we do get spotted.
We are doing this in the same week that Andrew Ibrahim, the Bristol based amateur-extremist, was found guilty of plotting to blow himself up in the Galleries and was sentenced to ten years in prison. Perhaps they will think we are here smuggling explosives under the heart of Bristol, or casing the joint for some later attack. I don’t want to be the next to catch a decade for a crime I am yet to commit.
We’re a bit different to Andrew though; we don’t have the hard-drive full of propaganda, or the u-tube videos of us testing explosives. Also, I’m pretty sure the only link either of us have to Al-Qaeda would go via Kevin Bacon. I wonder briefly if I could mount a defence based on the right to ramble.
We reach the boarded up Crepe wagon and head down the steps to the decking and the ferry dock. I get increasingly nervous. I could see as we went down the steps that the taxi rank just a couple of hundred meters away was still full of cabs. There’s no privacy in this city, even at two thirty at night. I am sure that the only reason we are not spotted is the rain distorting the vision of the cameras, just as it distorted the face of that couple through the car window. I can’t believe they bother watching them too closely when it’s raining, people don’t get into fights or mug each other when it’s wet. They just want to go home and get warm. It’s different when you’re wearing a dry suit though. All this water, it’s mostly just noise.
‘How are we going to get under the decking?’ I whisper.
‘Were not.” Says Ryan
‘Then what the hell are we doing here?’
That’s when I see it. On the harbor wall there is a kind of sloping jetty that tourists walk down to get to the ferry. Just underneath that, there is a black empty space, a space that goes further back than the wall. Sitting on a set of stone steps, we inflate the canoes with a bike pump and quickly hide them under the sloping jetty. Once both are done we jump in. Holding my paddle in my right hand I use my left to inch along the wall towards the opening.
The opening goes in about four feet and reveals the fact that the harbour wall is not actually the harbour wall. The actual harbour wall is further back. The gap between the two creates a passageway that goes back along the dock. I move first into the darkness, it smells of damp and mold and moss, the sound of the rain on my dry suit stops. I don’t like cobwebs so rather than paddling I am frantically waving my paddle around as I attempt to navigate down the pitch-black tunnel. My shadow appears in front of me as Ryan turns on this head torch. Several smaller shadows disappear into cracks and crannies.
‘What are you doing you Muppet?’
I turn my torch on too. It doesn’t make me feel anymore comfortable. The black stones of the walls have become stained with limestone. Water seeping through the rocks is slowly turning this man made cave into a natural one. There are even mini Stalactites on the ceiling. Then I see that up ahead about halfway down the passage there is a metal grill locked up tight with a padlock and chain. It seems such a waste to have got all dressed up and come all this way only to be stopped by something like this. But it makes sense; they couldn’t just have anyone come down here. There was always going to be a locked gate somewhere.
‘End of the line,’ I say.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Have you got a pair of bold cutters?’ I’m half hoping he doesn’t because I’m feeling claustrophobic and would quite like the excuse to go back to the car, and besides, breaking and entering would totally destroy my "right to ramble" defence.
‘No I don’t,’ he says.
I breathe a sigh of relief.
‘How are we going to get past that?’
‘Don’t worry about it’ say’s Ryan
Uh oh.
Pushing his canoe past mine he blocks my view of the gate. Then he makes a show of cupping the lock in his hands and rattles and twists it. Then he stops. Looks me in the eye with what I imagine is a satisfied grin, but I can’t tell because I am blinded by his spotlight. When my vision returns I see that has got the lock open.
“Voila!” he says. I’m flabbergasted.
What I know now but didn’t know then is that Ryan’s brother James is an architectural surveyor and he came down here about three years ago with a team from the local council and a group of multinational business men called the Bristol Alliance. They wanted to make sure that the foundations for their Cabot Circus shopping centre were not going to be affected by the river. (Just for interest’s sake I’d like to point out that when this same group of international businessmen built the Bull Ring in the Midlands, they called themselves the ‘Birmingham Alliance’. According to James, at least one of them lives in Dubai.) Apparently they were originally going to have an underground car park, but opted for the one they have now, partly because of the flood risk presented by the underground river and partly because of a sight of historical interest.
Naturally James being the kind of guy he is, thought it might be a cool place to come back to, so when they sealed it up with the padlock, he kept the spare key. And it was that spare key and his brother’s description of the place that gave Ry the inspiration for this whole trip.
Even with the lock undone, the gate is quite rusty and gives off a massive squeak as we push it open. It must go down about seven feet into the water.
“I can’t believe you didn’t tell me you had a key”
Ry laughs.
Our canoes barely fit thought the hole that the door has left in the bars, and I am worried that they might snag on something and spring a leak. They’re pretty tough though and they seem to hold up OK. The canoes are designed for Water Sourcing, a sport that involves climbing mountains and then coming down by canoe. The sides and bottom are reinforced with Kevlar; a knife would have trouble getting through these. Obviously it was Ry that bought all this equipment.
I help pull the door closed again, and being very careful not to drop it into the inky black water. We put the padlock back in place. Just as the bolt clicks shut I turn to Ry.
‘Did we actually tell anyone we were coming down here?’
‘I told you?’
‘I didn’t tell anyone.’
‘We can tell them about it when we get back.’
‘Yeah’, I say… when we get back”
I’m currently thinking, 'if '.
We edge further into the tunnel towards the point where it opens out under Broad Quay and Anchor road. Suddenly with a lot more space we find ourselves Looking up at the concrete supports that hold up our city centre. We can see the working of the millennium fountains, an intricate maze of pipes; they are all brown and covered with cobwebs. Less than a decade old and they already look like they have been here for fifty years.
This section of the river acts as a screen for lots of floating crap. There is apparently a set of bars on the wade street entrance that is meant to catch a lot of the crud, but it can’t catch smaller stuff like Starbucks cups and yogurt pots. It doesn’t catch crisp packets either. At one point I see a child’s armband and for a moment I go cold, but thankfully on closer inspection it turns out to be just an armband. It was probably lost along way up river. Up past where it skirts the motorway, Past the Eastville Park lake, which is fed by the Frome, and up and out, beyond the gray boundary’s of the city. Up there in the green, the water that now fills this liquid landfill is fresh and clear and clean enough to support a colony of endangered White Clawed Cray Fish. There are no Salmon in the Frome. Which is a good thing. I’d feel sorry for any salmon that had to swim through this shit in order to get home.
Ry says they clean out the crap once every few years or so, but it can’t have been recently. We push on; the raft of detritus gets thinner as we go. We are now underneath where Baldwin Street meets Broad Quay. It’s actually opposite the chapel that was the place that Sir John Cabot left from when he went to the America’s. That church isn’t on the waterfront anymore; it’s not even a church anymore. It’s just a grand old building next to some horrific modernist buildings where my brother used to go and get his weekly bus tickets. it now borders the kind of building which is prime real estate for crack heads and crack addicts. Not that I’ve ever seen any in there. It just strikes me as the kind of place they would like.
From this angle it’s just another part of the wall, a change from hard grey blocks concrete and shiny black kerbstones to sandstone, all be it covered with a some slimy weed that can’t seem to find a purchase on anything else. It’s a wonder that anything can grow down here without any light. And then I remember that we are here at night. Judging by the sound of dripping, there are holes. During the day there may be places where golden beams of sunshine cut the gloom, underneath these, mini rainforests grow. Complete with Jurassic park style ferns and if i'm right, what looks like a very wiry buddleia.
I ask Ryan why he wanted to come here.
‘A man can’t just sit around.’
The river takes a right turn and I can see why it doesn’t appear to flow into the harbour. The water that Ry and me are on is actually a foot or so higher than the rest of the river, which is flowing down a ten foot channel. It appears that that the whole section of covered harbour is in fact just an over flow section.
‘We are going up river?’ I say,
‘Yeah unless you fancy ending up on the Avon’
Stepping out of the canoe onto the raised wall that separates us from the running water I am glad of the dry suit. The river itself is about a foot or so deep but it is flowing quite quickly and threatens to take my feet from under me if I am not careful. Perhaps doing this on a night when it really is raining quite heavily might not have been the best idea in the world. Ryan hands me down my canoe, which slides easily over the slimy bricks.
‘Hold onto that’ he says. The canoe is actually tied to my leg with a ripcord so theoretically I shouldn’t be able to lose it. Even so I keep it close.
I hear a splash as Ry drops into the water, his light disappearing as he goes under. Before I have time to be worried, He comes up again and I laugh. The water is much deeper on the harbour side of the lip, deeper than Ryan was expecting. He comes up spitting water and grabbing at his canoe. He get’s up into the dividing wall with that look on his face like cat’s get when they fall off a TV and then pretend like they did it on purpose. Then we are on our way again.
The plan is not for us to paddle, we are going to stay close to the edge and push ourselves along the sides. As we go we come across various places where the river splits and goes off in another direction. Some of the passages that lead off are dry. Ryan stops and looks at his map. Points and then we move on.
‘Where are we actually going?’ I say. He doesn’t reply.
We start talking about university and how odd it is, how it was everything in the world. How, now that it’s over it seems all that time and energy bought us very little beyond a line on our CV. We talk about friends that we haven’t seen, Jo’s wedding, which I got invited to, but Ryan didn’t. We talk about the girls, how it’s odd to think of Gisele being married to a soldier and Becky working as a teacher. Then there’s Dory off doing her MA in Ohio, still riding high on her potential. There’s something about education, it constantly teases you with greatness. All the time we were at Bath Spa it made me believe that we were all destined to do well. Ryan is doing best at living the dream, but even he’s not completely happy, He’d rather be making real films. Saddly the jump from corporate to creative is difficult and comes with a large pay cut, most of the time a creative project with actually cost you money.
I should have done more. This wasn’t how it was meant to be. Ryan and I were teacher’s favourites, the golden boys of our year. I was going to write the movies and Ryan was going to direct. I feel like I have not lived up to my side of the bargain. I’ve made mistakes. I’ve let a lot of people down.
He changes the subject; we are almost directly under Cabot circus now. Pretty soon we will be under River Street. We will follow it all the way up to our exit at Wade Street.
‘We’re almost there,’ say’s Ryan.
‘Almost where?’
‘The Chapel’
'The what?'
Bristol suffered pretty heavily during the blitz, like a lot of the larger towns in England It’s why we have a lot of new buildings in the city centre. One of the by products of that was that the roof that covers the Frome collapsed in places, and like in the underground in London, people would come down here to shelter from the bombing.
One group seeking shelter were Bristolian Italians, until Italy changed sides they were forbidden from fighting for the allies, instead they worked making uniforms in a textile factory on River Street. In the next-door house they built a small chapel where they could pray to the Virgin Mary. One morning they woke up and found that their church had been bombed out, and that the bomb had exposed an underground river they had no idea existed. They decided to rebuild the chapel down here instead, where they knew it would be safe. Throughout the war people came to the church and while it could only fit about fifteen people, by the end it was said to have a congregation of fifty or so, they would take turns to climb down into the hole and take the holy sacriment or give confession. When they built it, Italians weren’t the most popular people in Britain and they didn’t have a lot of money, so they just built it out of what they could get their hands on. Biscuit tins lids cut in the shape of 2D candles, an Alter on top of an old butcher’s block.
We pull the canoes up onto the patch of earth. Beneath the cobwebs and dust a lot of this is still there. I guess even in these modern times, people don’t feel right stealing from a church. At the back there is a statue of the Madonna, even in the light of the torches I can see that some of the paint has faded from her wooden face. It makes her look sad. As if she has been crying.
We sit in silence for a few minutes and listen to the sound of the water. I convince myself that I can hear the rain outside hitting the pavement above our heads. A bomb once fell here. Two men died. People prayed, and now we sit. University friends.
‘Lets make a move’
‘Yeah’
We follow the river all the way upstream to Wade Street. It’s a long straight slog but it passes quickly and before long we are opening another padlock and clambering out of the river.
‘How are we going to get back to the car?’
‘We walk.’
‘Dressed like this’
‘Yes dressed like this… Unless you’ve brought a change of clothes…’
‘I think we should get a taxi’
‘Dressed like this?’
‘Yeah… Unless you brought a change of clothes?’
It took us just over an hour to get back to the car. Squelching through the city streets as the sun came up behind the rain clouds. We walked over all of where we had been under, we walked through the new buildings, through Cabot Circus, and castle park. We stopped for a moment at the bombed out church. We walked down past the old city wall, and past John Cabot’s launch. In our bright yellow suits we walked straight down past the hippodrome and this time didn’t even think about the CCTV. Together we walked all the way back to Ryan’s car.
'You know what we should do?' Said Ryan,
'We should make a movie.'
'Yeah' I said, 'We really should'
Tuesday 28 July 2009
Monday 13 July 2009
ViVa La Bottom Line: PART 4
Lunch is a buffet and I immediately make my way to the deep-fried prawns and tempura vegetables. I load up on potatoes wedges and create a central pool of dipping sauces. People sit around the beer garden and talk about places they have worked in the past. They talk about how this company seem particularly bad at looking after it’s staff. They say that wages owed have not been paid, and complain about various aspects of management. I have heard this kind of talk in every corporate style company I have ever worked in.
Everyone I talk to has a negative opinion of the training. Most have negative opinions of the company. Many are planning to leave. Some say that they will stay until after the refit is complete, mostly just so they can see if their tips increase. Asking a few questions I find out that the longest serving member of staff outside of the kitchen is the Craig David look alike. He has been working here for just 11 months.
Most of the team joined in the weeks before Christmas which would make for an average of about 7 months. Turnover in the service industry is very high, so much so that it may be safe to assume that in another 7 months it may only be the managers who remain. This makes this kind of training all the more strange, why spend money training team members that are most likely about to leave. Most of the time service staff learn their trade on the job, they go from bar to bar picking up new skills on the grapevine. Many of the Team members have worked in several bars. They rate the best places to work as the independents, places that valued a common sense attitude rather than strict discipline. People talk about times spent sitting around sharing a staff drink after a busy shift. They say that that is far more important than this kind of training for building a team. It is a chance to wind down from the zombie-movie madness of a bar three deep in punters. In that kind of situation tensions can run high, people snap at each other and drop the formalities of polite language. At the end of the day a staff drink is a time to show that there are no hard feelings. There are apparently no staff drinks at The Company. People say that all that unites them here, is a common hatred of management; whispered moments in the middle of the pandemonium, like those between members of the resistance in an occupied country. Being fairly new I had no idea feeling ran this high. As I look around I realise that now, while we are eating lunch together we are actually bonding as a team. For the first time outside the stress of the floor and the structured, school-like claustrophobia of the training room, we are getting to know each other as people. There is a screech as one of the Polish chefs attempts to grab one of the buxom barmaids boobs.
The more popular of our managers comes to a table near us and immediately conversations turns to discussing the relative merits of the original animated transformers against the newer computer animated live action movie. It is decided that if a man denies crying at the death of the old school Optimus Prime, he is a liar, just the same as if he denies ever picturing Megan Fox in the nude.
We drift back up to the training room. There are still scraps of paper on the floor from the collages. I can see one of George Clooney's eyes, dismembered staring up at me from the floor. Just then our Trainer tells us, ‘it’s time to build a Giraffe!’
George winks from the floor. Why not?
We are divided into three groups, each group will be observed by one of our managers. These groups have been predetermined; groups for the collage were done by a random number selection so I wonder if there is a reason for these groupings.
I am grouped with the buxom barmaid, the steely Frenchman and a couple of other people I haven’t mentioned before and probably will not mention again. The task is to build the tallest Giraffe that we can out of newspaper and sticky tape. Oddly enough this is the kind of activity at which I excel most in the world. I immediately begin work on some sturdy legs. The trick being to unroll the sticky tape before rapping it around the rolls of newspaper. This is because you want the tape to just keep the shape of the tube and not be too tight and pull the newspaper together like a girdle. Someone else in the group makes the decision to make each leg two pieces of newspaper high. It’s not a bad Idea. I bunch up some newspaper and wrap it up and ball it up with tape to make a body. The Frenchman disappears; there is some suspicion that he has decided that this whole circus isn’t worth his time. Word starts to build that he has ‘walked out’. I can see how being asked to make a Giraffe might prove a step too far for a man like that. I feel the same emotion but don’t dwell on it. There is after all, a Giraffe to build. Just as I am fixing the neck to the body the Frenchman returns with a head he has made. No one says anything about how they doubted his commitment to the team. The head is the perfect size and shape. I stick it on, our giraffe is now five and a half feet tall and it stands proud. I look around to check the progress of the other groups. I am expecting something special from the architect but progress is laughable. We are told we have ‘one minute to go’ for the third time, it is clear that the other groups will have trouble finishing on time let alone competing with our megalith for height. The Frenchman begins to decorate it with post it notes, giving it that characteristic yellow spot pattern. He was never going to walk out. He is loving this. We all join in. I laugh when I see what a piss poor job is going on across the room. They are trying to use scrunched up pieces of paper for legs… Behind us things are going no better, the architect has rolls of sticky tape stuck to the backside of her Giraffe to ‘counterweight the head’. The extra weight collapses the back legs. She has stuck drinking straws to the legs to try and buy them some stability. We look back at ours, from somewhere the Frenchman has managed to find two foam balls, he is taping them together. He sticks them between the legs of our giraffe. The architect attempts to hang her giraffe from a light fitting with tape. This is deemed to be ‘not allowed’ I laugh harder still as the straws are also removed. One of our giraffe balls falls off leaving him with only one. We decide to call him Hitler. We sit around bored as the trainer eeks out ‘thirty seconds people...’ to it’s maximum possible length. I put a head dress on our beast to gain us an extra few inches. We decide to stick the other ball back on and rename the animal to something less controversial. We’re going to call him Mr T. At the end of the time Mr T is a clear foot taller than the other two efforts and on top of that looks like the teacher in special needs school for giraffes.
I am proud, rightly proud of myself as we wait for our chance to feed back to the group, to be analysed as a team by our manager. Welsh trainer lady asks us what we have named our giraffe. The Frenchman tells the group his name. Referencing the advert for snickers he adds ‘because he’s got nuts’. People laugh. I love it when a plan comes together.
Our Giraffe has won hands down, there is no prize, bar the fact that it is still standing as a newspaper monument to good team work and leadership. it is its own trophy.
Our watching manager feeds back on our performance. She singles me out. She puts me in front of the group and tells me that I am a natural leader. While she is talking I hold a poker face. I wasn’t expecting this. I feel like if they are going to get me, then flattery is how they will get me. I don’t know what to think. Natural leader… Part of me wants to burst into tears and yell ‘thank god you noticed!’ Part of me wants to walk the hell out of the room and go do something that means a damn. But the've got me right up and down, they figured out that all they really need to do to get me onside is to stand behind me and work the knots out my ego. Is this why I was put in this team? Did they put together an A team to show how it should be done? perhaps we were picked at random.
Half wanting to fight the feeling of pride that now feels twisted and wrong in my chest and half wanting to underline the fact that they are in fact right about my leadership qualities, I step forward to ‘out leader’ my watching manager. I declare that the group had no leader, that we all just kept our eyes open, looked to see what needed doing and then played our part. It’s what Hanibal would do. I’m sure of it. Most of the rest of the Team just look at me confused. I am sure at least three of them are thinking, ‘What an Arsehole.’
Welsh trainer, takes the hint, sees my bluff performance as what it is, a lure for the compliment fish. She looks me in the eye and throws the fish right at me. She tells the group that sometimes ‘a good leader doesn’t tell people what do, he just allows them to do it for themselves.’ And in that moment I snap out of it. I am the one left looking perplexed, and I am suddenly angry. If she hadn’t been saying nice things about me, I might have yelled it at her ‘If you know this to be true, then why the hell are we in this room? I stay quiet.
The next activity of the day is going to involve us watching a video. The laptop is rigged to an overhead-projector screen, but unfortunately the cord that would connect the laptop to the inbuilt sound system has been left somewhere, so we are asked to come and crowd around the minuscule laptop speakers in order to hear. Still trapped in good leader mode I am the one that organises a detail of team members to get the windows closed and the blinds down. I watch myself and despair at how easily bought I can be.
Huddled around her laptop likes scouts around a campfire we wait to hear what stories are to be told. What unfolds is a half hour documentary about the working practices of the fish sellers of Pike Place Market in Seattle. Seattle: my second home. The fish sellers of Pike Place Market are world famous. Some of The Fishmen wear long hair and earrings, many have half beards and three day stubble. One of them looks like howling mad Murdock. Their gray hoodies are dirty with fish guts and dislodged scales. They look tired but manage to move around with a lot of energy. The Fishmen have invented their own language. One shouts something I don’t quite follow. Something like “red in the heart of Montana!” and then the rest repeat it in unison, I still don’t quite get what they are saying. Then from off screen somewhere, something comes flying in at fifty miles an hour. The central Fishman sticks out his arm and with one hand, scoops a mighty salmon from the air.
This video is about how to have fun at work. the story is that these people could 'just be working in a fish joint somewhere'. They could be any fishmonger anywhere in the world except they chose not to be. They chose to goof around; to chant about, and throw and catch fish; to put on a show about fish for the crowd; they chose to have fun.
Almost as a by-product of having fun, they sell a lot of fish and they got to be world famous.
In an interview with one of the Fishmen, he tells us that we can choose our attitude. That there is no need for us to come in and be grumpy and angry. The interview is interspersed with shots of the Fishman at work. He tells us that he had three hours sleep last night, and that he’s looking at a 14 hour day. Then he stops and says. ‘But I’m still smiling! No point getting down about it. That would just make my day worse!’ I know a girl whose best friend dated a Pike Place Fishguy. She said they drink a lot and take a lot of drugs. It’s just hearsay, but as I watch the tape I think, ‘a 14 hour day on top of three hours of sleep is going to require some serious Red Bull at the very least.’ We see him catch a fish thrown in from off screen, his reflexes are somehow unaffected by extreme fatigue. He turns to the camera, and yells ‘I never miss! I never miss!’ the laptop speakers distort. The camera cuts away.
We see more interviews with more Pike Place Market Fishmen. They tell us that work needn’t be work, that if we can just be ourselves and have fun, then ‘work can in fact… be play.’ It’s a great message. A message completely at odds with the pre-lunch uniform session about leaving our ‘selves’ behind the yellow lines of the Disney tunnel. The two messages seem not just to be conflicting but so different as to be at war with each other. I look at my managers to try to figure out which side they would be on.
As the images roll over me I look at the men and wonder if they are being paid minimum wage? I notice that they are all men, there are no women, and that their banter reminds me a lot of my limited experience of team sports. I look at their exposed tattoos and jewellery, their facial hair and dirty clothes, and the way that the customers don’t care about that because it’s all part of the show. For a moment I picture them in this room, a close nit group of testosterone roughnecks, going through a training session like this one. Being taught how to goof off properly, being told if they don’t, then they are failing the company and failing themselves. It’s not a pretty sight, I am totally convinced that they would tear this room apart. Fish f**king everywhere.
On the screen we see the Fishmen, goofing around with the customers. On the very edge of audibility we are told by the laptop to ‘Make our customers day!’ What is bothering me about this video isn’t so much the message as the fact that it is being told to me. I pride myself on actually doing these things. But I do all these things ‘for me’. Now that the Company is asking me to do it ‘for them’, so that they can make more profit, it just fills my stomach with bile. I feel like they have taken my moral acts of kindness and friendliness and made them into immoral sales tactics, I feel that they are making me into a hypocrite.
My wife is portrait painter and we have talked a lot about the nature of art. We sometimes watch commercials and ask how we would feel about them if the selling was removed. Could they make it as artistic short films, life affirming video poems describing lazy mornings or the conflicting pressure’s of the modern hectic lifestyle? perhaps they could be animated comedys about Meer cats or minidocs describing sportsmen at the top of their game. We came to the conclusion that there seems to be something that changes in the human brain when we know that someone is trying to sell us something, even if it’s something we like. Even if it’s for our own good, the very act of being sold to is so unpleasant and uncomfortable as to render all potential artistic merit to pap.
After the video is finished, we return to our seats. Trainer Lady dissects and repeats the information from the video. She asks questions like. “How did they cope when they were tired and had to come into work anyway?” and “What did they try to do for each customer?” she makes us repeat the phrases. ‘Choose your attitude to work!’ and ‘Make their day!’ as often as she can. She tells us that it is this kind of attitude that will make the Company unique, that if we can take this on board we will truly be one of a kind.
Apparently I learn, almost everyone except me has seen Fish! before. One of the chefs has seen it three times. One of my mangers tells me he has seen it four times, once each in three separate companies and once during his degree course in service management.
Just a few months ago the whole management team went on a training exercise where they threw and caught fish together for an entire day. This seems to me like a classic case of putting the cart before the horse. I can see the thought process. ‘ These Fish! people are a great team, because they A: know and trust each other to be themselves without recrimination, or because they B throw fish?'
'lets go with B... B is much easier to emulate, in fact lets get the team to do B.'
The trouble is there is no B in team.
Our Trainer uses the pictures of management throwing trout about to illustrate the fact that They don’t just talk about these things they are asking us to do here today, 'We go and do them ourselves!’ I can't resist it, controlling my voice to make it seem like an innocent question I ask her if she has ever worked as a server in a bar and grill.
Catch that one.
She looks flustered. She babbles something about having once worked as a waitress many years ago. For a moment, silence is golden. One of my mangers steps in. ‘Yes, Yes of course you have, we did all that training… Remember.’
‘Oh yes.’ she says ‘of course I have.’
Everyone I talk to has a negative opinion of the training. Most have negative opinions of the company. Many are planning to leave. Some say that they will stay until after the refit is complete, mostly just so they can see if their tips increase. Asking a few questions I find out that the longest serving member of staff outside of the kitchen is the Craig David look alike. He has been working here for just 11 months.
Most of the team joined in the weeks before Christmas which would make for an average of about 7 months. Turnover in the service industry is very high, so much so that it may be safe to assume that in another 7 months it may only be the managers who remain. This makes this kind of training all the more strange, why spend money training team members that are most likely about to leave. Most of the time service staff learn their trade on the job, they go from bar to bar picking up new skills on the grapevine. Many of the Team members have worked in several bars. They rate the best places to work as the independents, places that valued a common sense attitude rather than strict discipline. People talk about times spent sitting around sharing a staff drink after a busy shift. They say that that is far more important than this kind of training for building a team. It is a chance to wind down from the zombie-movie madness of a bar three deep in punters. In that kind of situation tensions can run high, people snap at each other and drop the formalities of polite language. At the end of the day a staff drink is a time to show that there are no hard feelings. There are apparently no staff drinks at The Company. People say that all that unites them here, is a common hatred of management; whispered moments in the middle of the pandemonium, like those between members of the resistance in an occupied country. Being fairly new I had no idea feeling ran this high. As I look around I realise that now, while we are eating lunch together we are actually bonding as a team. For the first time outside the stress of the floor and the structured, school-like claustrophobia of the training room, we are getting to know each other as people. There is a screech as one of the Polish chefs attempts to grab one of the buxom barmaids boobs.
The more popular of our managers comes to a table near us and immediately conversations turns to discussing the relative merits of the original animated transformers against the newer computer animated live action movie. It is decided that if a man denies crying at the death of the old school Optimus Prime, he is a liar, just the same as if he denies ever picturing Megan Fox in the nude.
We drift back up to the training room. There are still scraps of paper on the floor from the collages. I can see one of George Clooney's eyes, dismembered staring up at me from the floor. Just then our Trainer tells us, ‘it’s time to build a Giraffe!’
George winks from the floor. Why not?
We are divided into three groups, each group will be observed by one of our managers. These groups have been predetermined; groups for the collage were done by a random number selection so I wonder if there is a reason for these groupings.
I am grouped with the buxom barmaid, the steely Frenchman and a couple of other people I haven’t mentioned before and probably will not mention again. The task is to build the tallest Giraffe that we can out of newspaper and sticky tape. Oddly enough this is the kind of activity at which I excel most in the world. I immediately begin work on some sturdy legs. The trick being to unroll the sticky tape before rapping it around the rolls of newspaper. This is because you want the tape to just keep the shape of the tube and not be too tight and pull the newspaper together like a girdle. Someone else in the group makes the decision to make each leg two pieces of newspaper high. It’s not a bad Idea. I bunch up some newspaper and wrap it up and ball it up with tape to make a body. The Frenchman disappears; there is some suspicion that he has decided that this whole circus isn’t worth his time. Word starts to build that he has ‘walked out’. I can see how being asked to make a Giraffe might prove a step too far for a man like that. I feel the same emotion but don’t dwell on it. There is after all, a Giraffe to build. Just as I am fixing the neck to the body the Frenchman returns with a head he has made. No one says anything about how they doubted his commitment to the team. The head is the perfect size and shape. I stick it on, our giraffe is now five and a half feet tall and it stands proud. I look around to check the progress of the other groups. I am expecting something special from the architect but progress is laughable. We are told we have ‘one minute to go’ for the third time, it is clear that the other groups will have trouble finishing on time let alone competing with our megalith for height. The Frenchman begins to decorate it with post it notes, giving it that characteristic yellow spot pattern. He was never going to walk out. He is loving this. We all join in. I laugh when I see what a piss poor job is going on across the room. They are trying to use scrunched up pieces of paper for legs… Behind us things are going no better, the architect has rolls of sticky tape stuck to the backside of her Giraffe to ‘counterweight the head’. The extra weight collapses the back legs. She has stuck drinking straws to the legs to try and buy them some stability. We look back at ours, from somewhere the Frenchman has managed to find two foam balls, he is taping them together. He sticks them between the legs of our giraffe. The architect attempts to hang her giraffe from a light fitting with tape. This is deemed to be ‘not allowed’ I laugh harder still as the straws are also removed. One of our giraffe balls falls off leaving him with only one. We decide to call him Hitler. We sit around bored as the trainer eeks out ‘thirty seconds people...’ to it’s maximum possible length. I put a head dress on our beast to gain us an extra few inches. We decide to stick the other ball back on and rename the animal to something less controversial. We’re going to call him Mr T. At the end of the time Mr T is a clear foot taller than the other two efforts and on top of that looks like the teacher in special needs school for giraffes.
I am proud, rightly proud of myself as we wait for our chance to feed back to the group, to be analysed as a team by our manager. Welsh trainer lady asks us what we have named our giraffe. The Frenchman tells the group his name. Referencing the advert for snickers he adds ‘because he’s got nuts’. People laugh. I love it when a plan comes together.
Our Giraffe has won hands down, there is no prize, bar the fact that it is still standing as a newspaper monument to good team work and leadership. it is its own trophy.
Our watching manager feeds back on our performance. She singles me out. She puts me in front of the group and tells me that I am a natural leader. While she is talking I hold a poker face. I wasn’t expecting this. I feel like if they are going to get me, then flattery is how they will get me. I don’t know what to think. Natural leader… Part of me wants to burst into tears and yell ‘thank god you noticed!’ Part of me wants to walk the hell out of the room and go do something that means a damn. But the've got me right up and down, they figured out that all they really need to do to get me onside is to stand behind me and work the knots out my ego. Is this why I was put in this team? Did they put together an A team to show how it should be done? perhaps we were picked at random.
Half wanting to fight the feeling of pride that now feels twisted and wrong in my chest and half wanting to underline the fact that they are in fact right about my leadership qualities, I step forward to ‘out leader’ my watching manager. I declare that the group had no leader, that we all just kept our eyes open, looked to see what needed doing and then played our part. It’s what Hanibal would do. I’m sure of it. Most of the rest of the Team just look at me confused. I am sure at least three of them are thinking, ‘What an Arsehole.’
Welsh trainer, takes the hint, sees my bluff performance as what it is, a lure for the compliment fish. She looks me in the eye and throws the fish right at me. She tells the group that sometimes ‘a good leader doesn’t tell people what do, he just allows them to do it for themselves.’ And in that moment I snap out of it. I am the one left looking perplexed, and I am suddenly angry. If she hadn’t been saying nice things about me, I might have yelled it at her ‘If you know this to be true, then why the hell are we in this room? I stay quiet.
The next activity of the day is going to involve us watching a video. The laptop is rigged to an overhead-projector screen, but unfortunately the cord that would connect the laptop to the inbuilt sound system has been left somewhere, so we are asked to come and crowd around the minuscule laptop speakers in order to hear. Still trapped in good leader mode I am the one that organises a detail of team members to get the windows closed and the blinds down. I watch myself and despair at how easily bought I can be.
Huddled around her laptop likes scouts around a campfire we wait to hear what stories are to be told. What unfolds is a half hour documentary about the working practices of the fish sellers of Pike Place Market in Seattle. Seattle: my second home. The fish sellers of Pike Place Market are world famous. Some of The Fishmen wear long hair and earrings, many have half beards and three day stubble. One of them looks like howling mad Murdock. Their gray hoodies are dirty with fish guts and dislodged scales. They look tired but manage to move around with a lot of energy. The Fishmen have invented their own language. One shouts something I don’t quite follow. Something like “red in the heart of Montana!” and then the rest repeat it in unison, I still don’t quite get what they are saying. Then from off screen somewhere, something comes flying in at fifty miles an hour. The central Fishman sticks out his arm and with one hand, scoops a mighty salmon from the air.
This video is about how to have fun at work. the story is that these people could 'just be working in a fish joint somewhere'. They could be any fishmonger anywhere in the world except they chose not to be. They chose to goof around; to chant about, and throw and catch fish; to put on a show about fish for the crowd; they chose to have fun.
Almost as a by-product of having fun, they sell a lot of fish and they got to be world famous.
In an interview with one of the Fishmen, he tells us that we can choose our attitude. That there is no need for us to come in and be grumpy and angry. The interview is interspersed with shots of the Fishman at work. He tells us that he had three hours sleep last night, and that he’s looking at a 14 hour day. Then he stops and says. ‘But I’m still smiling! No point getting down about it. That would just make my day worse!’ I know a girl whose best friend dated a Pike Place Fishguy. She said they drink a lot and take a lot of drugs. It’s just hearsay, but as I watch the tape I think, ‘a 14 hour day on top of three hours of sleep is going to require some serious Red Bull at the very least.’ We see him catch a fish thrown in from off screen, his reflexes are somehow unaffected by extreme fatigue. He turns to the camera, and yells ‘I never miss! I never miss!’ the laptop speakers distort. The camera cuts away.
We see more interviews with more Pike Place Market Fishmen. They tell us that work needn’t be work, that if we can just be ourselves and have fun, then ‘work can in fact… be play.’ It’s a great message. A message completely at odds with the pre-lunch uniform session about leaving our ‘selves’ behind the yellow lines of the Disney tunnel. The two messages seem not just to be conflicting but so different as to be at war with each other. I look at my managers to try to figure out which side they would be on.
As the images roll over me I look at the men and wonder if they are being paid minimum wage? I notice that they are all men, there are no women, and that their banter reminds me a lot of my limited experience of team sports. I look at their exposed tattoos and jewellery, their facial hair and dirty clothes, and the way that the customers don’t care about that because it’s all part of the show. For a moment I picture them in this room, a close nit group of testosterone roughnecks, going through a training session like this one. Being taught how to goof off properly, being told if they don’t, then they are failing the company and failing themselves. It’s not a pretty sight, I am totally convinced that they would tear this room apart. Fish f**king everywhere.
On the screen we see the Fishmen, goofing around with the customers. On the very edge of audibility we are told by the laptop to ‘Make our customers day!’ What is bothering me about this video isn’t so much the message as the fact that it is being told to me. I pride myself on actually doing these things. But I do all these things ‘for me’. Now that the Company is asking me to do it ‘for them’, so that they can make more profit, it just fills my stomach with bile. I feel like they have taken my moral acts of kindness and friendliness and made them into immoral sales tactics, I feel that they are making me into a hypocrite.
My wife is portrait painter and we have talked a lot about the nature of art. We sometimes watch commercials and ask how we would feel about them if the selling was removed. Could they make it as artistic short films, life affirming video poems describing lazy mornings or the conflicting pressure’s of the modern hectic lifestyle? perhaps they could be animated comedys about Meer cats or minidocs describing sportsmen at the top of their game. We came to the conclusion that there seems to be something that changes in the human brain when we know that someone is trying to sell us something, even if it’s something we like. Even if it’s for our own good, the very act of being sold to is so unpleasant and uncomfortable as to render all potential artistic merit to pap.
After the video is finished, we return to our seats. Trainer Lady dissects and repeats the information from the video. She asks questions like. “How did they cope when they were tired and had to come into work anyway?” and “What did they try to do for each customer?” she makes us repeat the phrases. ‘Choose your attitude to work!’ and ‘Make their day!’ as often as she can. She tells us that it is this kind of attitude that will make the Company unique, that if we can take this on board we will truly be one of a kind.
Apparently I learn, almost everyone except me has seen Fish! before. One of the chefs has seen it three times. One of my mangers tells me he has seen it four times, once each in three separate companies and once during his degree course in service management.
Just a few months ago the whole management team went on a training exercise where they threw and caught fish together for an entire day. This seems to me like a classic case of putting the cart before the horse. I can see the thought process. ‘ These Fish! people are a great team, because they A: know and trust each other to be themselves without recrimination, or because they B throw fish?'
'lets go with B... B is much easier to emulate, in fact lets get the team to do B.'
The trouble is there is no B in team.
Our Trainer uses the pictures of management throwing trout about to illustrate the fact that They don’t just talk about these things they are asking us to do here today, 'We go and do them ourselves!’ I can't resist it, controlling my voice to make it seem like an innocent question I ask her if she has ever worked as a server in a bar and grill.
Catch that one.
She looks flustered. She babbles something about having once worked as a waitress many years ago. For a moment, silence is golden. One of my mangers steps in. ‘Yes, Yes of course you have, we did all that training… Remember.’
‘Oh yes.’ she says ‘of course I have.’
Disclaimer.
This Blog does not reflect the true nature of anyone or anything described within it, and while it may use aspects from my life to illustrate certain ideas and concepts it is not intended to represent a portrait of any man woman or company living or dead.
In an unrelated note, restaurant work turns out to be extremely lucrative for the charismatic waiter with a great sense of fun.
I really don't want to get fired.
In an unrelated note, restaurant work turns out to be extremely lucrative for the charismatic waiter with a great sense of fun.
I really don't want to get fired.
Wednesday 8 July 2009
ViVa La Bottom Line: PART 3
We are given an exercise to do involving paper and scissors and glue. As the art materials are handed out I am surprised that they do not tell us to find an adult to help us with the scissors. I think more about the purpose of these constant regressionary tactics. I think that what they want from us is faith. At school I believed. I believed that what we were being told was true, I believed that the words of our teachers were universally acknowledged, that I was being taught without mendacity or guile. My teachers were the metaphorical waiters of knowledge, handing out facts to hungry minds that might well starve without them. It was not until later that I learned to question the ideological framework through which I was fed my factual diet. Not till later did I loose my unblinking faith in the god-like figure that stands in front of a crowd.
The glue and the scissors and the paper have been given to us so that we can make a collage that demonstrates the difference between a Canteen and a Grill. Before we start we are spoon fed what they would like to see when it’s finished. Almost word for word. Our trainer tells us that ‘A grill is for upmarket people, and a canteen is for downmarket people. So cut out pictures of upmarket people and stick them on.’ she continues ‘A grill is food based and a canteen is drink based, so cut out pictures of expensive looking food.’ My group is to do the opposite we are to demonstrate canteen culture. ‘So you know, people looking dowdy, maybe people in dirty clothes… that kind of thing’
After our instructions we are allowed access to the magazines, some of them are men’s magazines. The criteria as explained by our trainer are instantly forgotten as the Polish chefs begin cutting out all the pictures of naked or semi named women they can find. I take charge of the glue and start sticking things down at random as they are handed to me. Deciding to let go and have some fun I get quite into sticking male heads onto female bodies and vice-versa. I make a central image from the body of the queen. I give her new arms so that it looks like she is doing Jazz Hands then replace her head with that of a devout Muslim. Stopping to look at it I am convinced that with the right contacts and marketing I could win a turner prize. The chefs grab the glue and begin sticking random slogans and scraps of writing to the paper, many of them could be viewed as racist in the context of the images they are stuck too. My Islamic queen becomes ‘The Human Bomb.’ A large picture of a black man, whose eyes have been replaced with smaller pictures of Heston Blumenthal’s face, has the words ‘Dark Horse Cock’ written across it in three separate typefaces. I realise that It’s probably me that’s going to have to feed this back to the group and time is swiftly running out. I come up with a plan. I stick stuff over the racism with odd phrases like ’20 pints and still standing’ and ‘Bench Test!’. Then I swiftly re-organise all the half naked women and my genderless freaks around a new picture of Freddy Flintoff. In a final act of artistic dementia I cannot resist replacing Freddie’s grinning mug with the luscious features of Kelly Brook. I stand back. It’s done. I begin to prepare myself to present the collage to the group.
So ‘explain what this is about’, says our trainer.
‘Well…’ I say, ‘You said people were confused about the brand and what it was, well these people here, with the heads, they’re very confused. And they’re confusing too, so that, you know… count’s double. And um, these women, they’re like a hen night and Freddy, well Freddy likes a drink right?’
‘Why does he have Kelly Brooks head?’
‘Because he’s also confused about the brand.’
‘OK.’
She then asks me a load more questions, about what a canteen and a bar should mean to me. She pulls out the “correct” answers like they’re my teeth.
Then it’s the other groups turn one of the chefs is chosen to talk us through their poster. It looks like a total mess. I pick out a woman, a watch, Gordon Ramsey and a steak. I relax, mine was bad but at least it had Artistic merit. As he starts to explain the collage my jaw drops. In broken English he tells the story of the perfect night out. ‘You take this woman, to this place, you get this food cooked on time, by this man.’ He finishes by pointing at Gordon and bowing to an impromptu round of applause. I realise in that moment that this tubby affable chef is a genius. I turn to one of my managers, the most approachable one. ‘That was amazing, I say, way better than ours’
‘Yeah’ he says ‘He had a plan, you just made a piece of art and then blagged your way through’
Story of my life.
The collage is meant to be the wind-down exercise before lunch. But we are told, before we get to eat, there is something they want to give us. The Management have produced a booklet that they want us to keep with us at all times. ‘Company Vision and Values’ I later found out that this booklet cost £12000 to produce. I can immediately tell that most of the booklets will be either thrown away, lost or shown to friends as an example of what a moronic arsehole of a company this is to work for. This cannot be what they had in mind when they earmarked the money.
On the back of the booklet are the words “Until a Company value is demonstrated by behavior it remains an aspiration” I later Google this but sadly I am unable to find out who it was that said these words first. It could have been Lance Armstrong, it could have been Timmy Mallet I have trouble shaking the feeling that it spat out at random from an unplugged army super-computer. I eventually found the quote minus the company name on a management consultancy website belonging to a woman called Sue Newton. On her site she said that she uses the quote “To drive home the understanding that creating a values driven organisation is about behaviour day in & day out and not plaques on the wall or entries in company handbooks” She was the only hit I got.
With a rising sense of panic it becomes increasingly clear that none of us are going to get to eat until we have read through at least one section of the booklet.
Page one is a letter from Our CEO, it is nestled next to the Jazz hands photograph that was on the projector this morning.
‘A Very Warm Welcome to The Company- You are Joining a winning team, Our Vision is simple: The Company – a simply perfect experience’ for both you and our guests’
This seems fair enough, our trainer continues to read out loud.
‘It’s simple for a reason – there are no wasted words or complications’
At this point I flip through booklet looking for a word that has not been wasted.
‘Our shared Values are our biggest strength; we believe that those are what makes us strong and sets us apart from the competition.’
This seems odd, as every company seems to promote ‘shared Values.’ I have sat through training like this in at least three other companies, The genius chef will tell me at lunch that the reason he is such a genius at this is because he has been through training like this so many times it has become second nature. Can they really think we believe they are the only ones doing this?
‘They describe the way we should all behave at work’
Surely those are rules and not values.
‘providing us with guiding principles which help us to make the right decisions.
Welcome to our team, embrace our vision and values and enjoy your personal journey with the company.
Best wishes
The CEO’
Embrace our vision and values… is that an order? Are we being ordered to take this on board? Perhaps it is simply advice advice. For a brief moment I read it as a threat, implying that if we do not embrace the vision and values, will we not enjoy our personal journey with the company? Like it’s saying perhaps we’ll have a hard time enjoying our personal journey with two broken legs… best wishes.
The rest of the booklet is divided into five sections or Values each with it’s own cryptic subheading.
‘people- less body more soul
guest-whatever it takes
sales- never leave a sale on the table
profit –show me the money
brand-brand obsession!’
It becomes clear that the one we are going to cover before lunch is ‘Less body more Soul.’ Stomachs grumble. Chefs grumble in Polish. It’s hard for me to imagine how Less Body More Soul! Became a catch phrase they decided to put in print. In the booklet there is a quote from a team member in Bristol, it say’s ‘if you smile, you succeed; for me, that relates to less body, more soul.’ I think… really? What with my empty stomach I am sure it has something to do with weight loss. I ask my trainer twice what it was supposed to mean. She cannot answer but merely repeats the phrase at me with more and more expressive body language. “You know. Less Body..” she lets her shoulders sag and does a sad face “more Soul!” she does the kind of half dance, that looks the sign language for ‘boxer’.
‘I still don’t get it.’ Eventually she says I will understand after we do the role-plays. My heart sinks; if those role-plays are scheduled before lunch then this place is going to turn ugly.
The ‘less body more soul ‘ section is dealt with over a double page spread on the left hand side of the left page is a photograph of five team members and a manager. Two of the team members are chefs. Three of them are front-of-house. One of the team members is wearing a thumb ring. This is not allowed according to uniform regulations. The manager has a clipboard. The team members are laughing. One of them looks adoringly at the manager.
On the left page, under the cryptic heading discussed above is written…
‘What the Company Expects from you:
This is about how we behave as one team:
• Smile-‘it’s show time’
• Have the passion to do a great job
• Stand and deliver-
‘what a great job looks like’
• Live life! As a team player
-giving one another praise and feedback
-it’s about every job being as important as any other
-Treat others with respect
• It’s good to be different
-shout about your ideas and opinions
-be yourself-less body more soul
At this point any confusion I had as to the true meaning of ‘Less body more soul’ is been completely cleared up. Wait a minute, no I still have no idea what that means. I live in England and have spoken English all my life and it is utterly incomprehensible, I can’t imagine what I would make of it if I were Polish. I think I understand what they want from me. But my immediate feeling is that this list of values was born in a meeting in which members of the management shouted out vague ideas to a third party who then wrote them on a flipchart. That flip chart was then copied word for word into this booklet. Job done, everyone went back to doing Jazz hands and wearing sombreros, ‘ViVa la company!’ shouts the CEO, ‘Lets shoot some guns in the air!’
I am in love with this corporate booklet. It is the worst I have ever seen. I love the midsentence exclamation mark on Live Life! I love that ‘It’s about every job being as important as any other’ is differs massively in grammar from the other points on the list. I love the visual image that is conjured when I think of taking its advice literally and coming into work ‘shouting about my idea and opinions’. Surely that would get me fired faster that writing this letter. I think about what it would be like, actually ‘Being my self. Less body more soul…’
Before writing this I googled the phrase. As far as I can tell it originates as an advertising slogan for ‘Skinny Cow, Low fat ice cream.’ It has also been used by ‘Ben and Jerrys’ to advertise their frozen yogurt. I am more confused than I have ever been in my life.
I decided I should give them a chance and look up the words ‘body’ and ‘soul’ in a dictionary to see if there was some obscure meaning that had escaped me inside the training room. Apparently not. There were some interesting usages, that were halfway applicable, like the life and soul of the party, and the soul of discretion. The word body also, it can mean a group of people, or the size of a persons hair (long hair should be tied back according to uniform regulations) It can also be used to describe a corpse. Less dead, more alive.
Nothing in the dictionary really seemed to fit exactly.
Perhaps ‘Less body More Soul’ means this. “When we pay you, we agree to rent out your body for a certain amount of time, in which it will do what we tell it to do. We would also like your soul.” Perhaps it doesn’t mean anything. Perhaps it’s a collection of wasted words that do little but complicate and confuse. I know one thing for sure, it won’t help me learn how to make Cocktails.
On the left hand side of the right hand page to counter “what the company expects from you” the following text.
‘what you can expect from the company:
We will:
• Exude high levels of passion and energy
• Demonstrate ‘what a good job looks like’
• Give honest and straightforward feedback
• Enable you to grow and develop during your time with us
• Respect you, listen to you and involve you in a monthly team meeting
• Keep you engaged with clear and regular communications’
These were my thoughts as my bowels demanded the sweet release of carbs and protein and the trainer went painstakingly though the list one by one.
Passion and energy’ how about instead of this they exude competence and acumen.
So far in this training they have failed to demonstrate ‘what a good job looks like’ not in the photograph of the cocktails, not in the way our managers modelled the uniform, not even in the way this booklet was written.
Something snaps and part of me gives up the ghost. My sugar levels plummet, I hit the lowest point of the caffeine cycle. I despair. Face down on the desk with my arms outstretched in front of me I simply cannot take any more. The smell of the immanent buffet comes wafting up the stairs. Tiny particles of deep fried shrimp and potato wedges in a bar-be-que sauce. I open my eyes and look pleadingly toward our trainer. To my joy she seems to be rapping things up. She catches my glare, stares deep into the hollows of my desperate eyes and reiterates how important it is that we keep hold of these ‘very special and unique books.’ She wants us to ‘carry them with us in our pouches whenever we are working.’ She says with great emphasis that they are ‘very special’ and that they ‘mean a lot to everyone in the company.’
I do not ask a question that wants to explode out of me like trapped gas in a vacuum.
What the hell am I going to do with a book full of nonsense on the restaurant floor?
The glue and the scissors and the paper have been given to us so that we can make a collage that demonstrates the difference between a Canteen and a Grill. Before we start we are spoon fed what they would like to see when it’s finished. Almost word for word. Our trainer tells us that ‘A grill is for upmarket people, and a canteen is for downmarket people. So cut out pictures of upmarket people and stick them on.’ she continues ‘A grill is food based and a canteen is drink based, so cut out pictures of expensive looking food.’ My group is to do the opposite we are to demonstrate canteen culture. ‘So you know, people looking dowdy, maybe people in dirty clothes… that kind of thing’
After our instructions we are allowed access to the magazines, some of them are men’s magazines. The criteria as explained by our trainer are instantly forgotten as the Polish chefs begin cutting out all the pictures of naked or semi named women they can find. I take charge of the glue and start sticking things down at random as they are handed to me. Deciding to let go and have some fun I get quite into sticking male heads onto female bodies and vice-versa. I make a central image from the body of the queen. I give her new arms so that it looks like she is doing Jazz Hands then replace her head with that of a devout Muslim. Stopping to look at it I am convinced that with the right contacts and marketing I could win a turner prize. The chefs grab the glue and begin sticking random slogans and scraps of writing to the paper, many of them could be viewed as racist in the context of the images they are stuck too. My Islamic queen becomes ‘The Human Bomb.’ A large picture of a black man, whose eyes have been replaced with smaller pictures of Heston Blumenthal’s face, has the words ‘Dark Horse Cock’ written across it in three separate typefaces. I realise that It’s probably me that’s going to have to feed this back to the group and time is swiftly running out. I come up with a plan. I stick stuff over the racism with odd phrases like ’20 pints and still standing’ and ‘Bench Test!’. Then I swiftly re-organise all the half naked women and my genderless freaks around a new picture of Freddy Flintoff. In a final act of artistic dementia I cannot resist replacing Freddie’s grinning mug with the luscious features of Kelly Brook. I stand back. It’s done. I begin to prepare myself to present the collage to the group.
So ‘explain what this is about’, says our trainer.
‘Well…’ I say, ‘You said people were confused about the brand and what it was, well these people here, with the heads, they’re very confused. And they’re confusing too, so that, you know… count’s double. And um, these women, they’re like a hen night and Freddy, well Freddy likes a drink right?’
‘Why does he have Kelly Brooks head?’
‘Because he’s also confused about the brand.’
‘OK.’
She then asks me a load more questions, about what a canteen and a bar should mean to me. She pulls out the “correct” answers like they’re my teeth.
Then it’s the other groups turn one of the chefs is chosen to talk us through their poster. It looks like a total mess. I pick out a woman, a watch, Gordon Ramsey and a steak. I relax, mine was bad but at least it had Artistic merit. As he starts to explain the collage my jaw drops. In broken English he tells the story of the perfect night out. ‘You take this woman, to this place, you get this food cooked on time, by this man.’ He finishes by pointing at Gordon and bowing to an impromptu round of applause. I realise in that moment that this tubby affable chef is a genius. I turn to one of my managers, the most approachable one. ‘That was amazing, I say, way better than ours’
‘Yeah’ he says ‘He had a plan, you just made a piece of art and then blagged your way through’
Story of my life.
The collage is meant to be the wind-down exercise before lunch. But we are told, before we get to eat, there is something they want to give us. The Management have produced a booklet that they want us to keep with us at all times. ‘Company Vision and Values’ I later found out that this booklet cost £12000 to produce. I can immediately tell that most of the booklets will be either thrown away, lost or shown to friends as an example of what a moronic arsehole of a company this is to work for. This cannot be what they had in mind when they earmarked the money.
On the back of the booklet are the words “Until a Company value is demonstrated by behavior it remains an aspiration” I later Google this but sadly I am unable to find out who it was that said these words first. It could have been Lance Armstrong, it could have been Timmy Mallet I have trouble shaking the feeling that it spat out at random from an unplugged army super-computer. I eventually found the quote minus the company name on a management consultancy website belonging to a woman called Sue Newton. On her site she said that she uses the quote “To drive home the understanding that creating a values driven organisation is about behaviour day in & day out and not plaques on the wall or entries in company handbooks” She was the only hit I got.
With a rising sense of panic it becomes increasingly clear that none of us are going to get to eat until we have read through at least one section of the booklet.
Page one is a letter from Our CEO, it is nestled next to the Jazz hands photograph that was on the projector this morning.
‘A Very Warm Welcome to The Company- You are Joining a winning team, Our Vision is simple: The Company – a simply perfect experience’ for both you and our guests’
This seems fair enough, our trainer continues to read out loud.
‘It’s simple for a reason – there are no wasted words or complications’
At this point I flip through booklet looking for a word that has not been wasted.
‘Our shared Values are our biggest strength; we believe that those are what makes us strong and sets us apart from the competition.’
This seems odd, as every company seems to promote ‘shared Values.’ I have sat through training like this in at least three other companies, The genius chef will tell me at lunch that the reason he is such a genius at this is because he has been through training like this so many times it has become second nature. Can they really think we believe they are the only ones doing this?
‘They describe the way we should all behave at work’
Surely those are rules and not values.
‘providing us with guiding principles which help us to make the right decisions.
Welcome to our team, embrace our vision and values and enjoy your personal journey with the company.
Best wishes
The CEO’
Embrace our vision and values… is that an order? Are we being ordered to take this on board? Perhaps it is simply advice advice. For a brief moment I read it as a threat, implying that if we do not embrace the vision and values, will we not enjoy our personal journey with the company? Like it’s saying perhaps we’ll have a hard time enjoying our personal journey with two broken legs… best wishes.
The rest of the booklet is divided into five sections or Values each with it’s own cryptic subheading.
‘people- less body more soul
guest-whatever it takes
sales- never leave a sale on the table
profit –show me the money
brand-brand obsession!’
It becomes clear that the one we are going to cover before lunch is ‘Less body more Soul.’ Stomachs grumble. Chefs grumble in Polish. It’s hard for me to imagine how Less Body More Soul! Became a catch phrase they decided to put in print. In the booklet there is a quote from a team member in Bristol, it say’s ‘if you smile, you succeed; for me, that relates to less body, more soul.’ I think… really? What with my empty stomach I am sure it has something to do with weight loss. I ask my trainer twice what it was supposed to mean. She cannot answer but merely repeats the phrase at me with more and more expressive body language. “You know. Less Body..” she lets her shoulders sag and does a sad face “more Soul!” she does the kind of half dance, that looks the sign language for ‘boxer’.
‘I still don’t get it.’ Eventually she says I will understand after we do the role-plays. My heart sinks; if those role-plays are scheduled before lunch then this place is going to turn ugly.
The ‘less body more soul ‘ section is dealt with over a double page spread on the left hand side of the left page is a photograph of five team members and a manager. Two of the team members are chefs. Three of them are front-of-house. One of the team members is wearing a thumb ring. This is not allowed according to uniform regulations. The manager has a clipboard. The team members are laughing. One of them looks adoringly at the manager.
On the left page, under the cryptic heading discussed above is written…
‘What the Company Expects from you:
This is about how we behave as one team:
• Smile-‘it’s show time’
• Have the passion to do a great job
• Stand and deliver-
‘what a great job looks like’
• Live life! As a team player
-giving one another praise and feedback
-it’s about every job being as important as any other
-Treat others with respect
• It’s good to be different
-shout about your ideas and opinions
-be yourself-less body more soul
At this point any confusion I had as to the true meaning of ‘Less body more soul’ is been completely cleared up. Wait a minute, no I still have no idea what that means. I live in England and have spoken English all my life and it is utterly incomprehensible, I can’t imagine what I would make of it if I were Polish. I think I understand what they want from me. But my immediate feeling is that this list of values was born in a meeting in which members of the management shouted out vague ideas to a third party who then wrote them on a flipchart. That flip chart was then copied word for word into this booklet. Job done, everyone went back to doing Jazz hands and wearing sombreros, ‘ViVa la company!’ shouts the CEO, ‘Lets shoot some guns in the air!’
I am in love with this corporate booklet. It is the worst I have ever seen. I love the midsentence exclamation mark on Live Life! I love that ‘It’s about every job being as important as any other’ is differs massively in grammar from the other points on the list. I love the visual image that is conjured when I think of taking its advice literally and coming into work ‘shouting about my idea and opinions’. Surely that would get me fired faster that writing this letter. I think about what it would be like, actually ‘Being my self. Less body more soul…’
Before writing this I googled the phrase. As far as I can tell it originates as an advertising slogan for ‘Skinny Cow, Low fat ice cream.’ It has also been used by ‘Ben and Jerrys’ to advertise their frozen yogurt. I am more confused than I have ever been in my life.
I decided I should give them a chance and look up the words ‘body’ and ‘soul’ in a dictionary to see if there was some obscure meaning that had escaped me inside the training room. Apparently not. There were some interesting usages, that were halfway applicable, like the life and soul of the party, and the soul of discretion. The word body also, it can mean a group of people, or the size of a persons hair (long hair should be tied back according to uniform regulations) It can also be used to describe a corpse. Less dead, more alive.
Nothing in the dictionary really seemed to fit exactly.
Perhaps ‘Less body More Soul’ means this. “When we pay you, we agree to rent out your body for a certain amount of time, in which it will do what we tell it to do. We would also like your soul.” Perhaps it doesn’t mean anything. Perhaps it’s a collection of wasted words that do little but complicate and confuse. I know one thing for sure, it won’t help me learn how to make Cocktails.
On the left hand side of the right hand page to counter “what the company expects from you” the following text.
‘what you can expect from the company:
We will:
• Exude high levels of passion and energy
• Demonstrate ‘what a good job looks like’
• Give honest and straightforward feedback
• Enable you to grow and develop during your time with us
• Respect you, listen to you and involve you in a monthly team meeting
• Keep you engaged with clear and regular communications’
These were my thoughts as my bowels demanded the sweet release of carbs and protein and the trainer went painstakingly though the list one by one.
Passion and energy’ how about instead of this they exude competence and acumen.
So far in this training they have failed to demonstrate ‘what a good job looks like’ not in the photograph of the cocktails, not in the way our managers modelled the uniform, not even in the way this booklet was written.
Something snaps and part of me gives up the ghost. My sugar levels plummet, I hit the lowest point of the caffeine cycle. I despair. Face down on the desk with my arms outstretched in front of me I simply cannot take any more. The smell of the immanent buffet comes wafting up the stairs. Tiny particles of deep fried shrimp and potato wedges in a bar-be-que sauce. I open my eyes and look pleadingly toward our trainer. To my joy she seems to be rapping things up. She catches my glare, stares deep into the hollows of my desperate eyes and reiterates how important it is that we keep hold of these ‘very special and unique books.’ She wants us to ‘carry them with us in our pouches whenever we are working.’ She says with great emphasis that they are ‘very special’ and that they ‘mean a lot to everyone in the company.’
I do not ask a question that wants to explode out of me like trapped gas in a vacuum.
What the hell am I going to do with a book full of nonsense on the restaurant floor?
Monday 6 July 2009
ViVa La Bottom Line: PART 2
To my surprise and joy, someone has written exactly how I feel on a post-it Note and stuck it in the back section of The Company Bus. It is one solitary post-it note, but it lifts my spirits. It speaks for all of us that felt the same way but didn’t have the guts to stick it up there. It say’s “I am not comfortable” in thick black felt tip pen. I look around to see who got the black felt tip. I can see our manager doing the same thing. The felt tip is gone. Very smart move. Uncomfortable is just the right word. We are being paid to be here, on paper it should be easier than working, but there is something about it that is disturbing. It’s like sitting in front of a salesman when you haven’t had enough sleep. Just show me where to sign so I can go home.
What bothers me about the bus exercise is that it is not even a particularly good metaphor for what they want to promote. Even if we ride in the middle we are still on a bus that belongs to someone else. We have no say in its maintenance or direction; we are not at all team members in this metaphor, but passive passengers, killing time until our next stop.
There is also the always-present Polish question. What are the foreign chefs making of all this? What does the KP think is going on here? By the way they are giggling I suspect that many of their post-it notes contain Polish swear words. This really is like being back at school.
She reads back some of the notes. She puts on a caring face and says that she hopes that whoever is uncomfortable will feel better once we have finished the training. She says we will do the bus exercise again towards the end of our training. For some reason she then hands out a bowls of sweeties. Haribo Tangfastics, Sherbert Lemons and those rock hard little white mints you get at the end of a meal. It is a children’s reward for sitting through something unpleasant, like a dental appointment.
With a mouth full of tangy lemon, I have time to reflect on the purpose of the Bus exercise. It would seem to be something more useful for managers than for staff. A great metaphor for coming into work and assessing your ‘team members’ perhaps identifying where you might want to take action. But it’s not very relevant to those on the shop floor. Real back of bus people will just lie in order to remain hidden, front of bus people also; they don’t want to rock the boat before they jump ship. I have heard that a lie detector kit is really a stress detector, not telling the truth makes people sweat, it raises their heartbeat, makes them want to get up and leave the room, in extreme cases it can make people physically sick. Perhaps this is what is so uncomfortable about this situation, the fact that we feel we have to lie continuously in order to get through it without upsetting anyone. I smile at our trainer. I am sure she thinks it was me that wrote the post it. I am happy to take the heat off whoever it was who did.
Breaking through the outer shell of my sherbet lemon to the powder within, I imagine the process that led to my being here. I see a consultant talking to upper management (complete with sombreros) Telling them that people will buy more if served by happy people, that staff will work harder for companies they care about. I see them picking up cell phones and calling middle managers. The middle managers passing this information on to the general managers who then step out into the bar and yell, “Be Happier and care about The Company.” That doesn’t seem to work so we get this instead. A two-day lesson in happiness and caring. It is the lack of art and creativity with which this is done that bothers me. You cannot just tell people to be happy, especially when it comes between “Work harder, dress smarter and use less of our resources you jerk!” Telling unhappy people to cheer up just makes them sad. If you want us to be happy you need to give us reasons to be happy. Don’t just demand that we care about you, show us that you’re worth caring for, more importantly be worth caring for.
Now that we have all met each other, ridden the Bus and been given our sweets, our trainer would like to talk to us about the Brand. She wants to explain why things have changed. Why the Bar/Cantina is to become a Bar/Grill. She says that in the past people were confused as to what kind of thing ‘The Company!’ did. They did not know if ‘The Company!’ was a comedy club or a nightclub or what? To combat this, the exclamation mark and capital letters have been removed from the company name, we will now be called ‘the company’. The company colour has also changed from jovial green to a more serious dark maroon. I am willing to bet that this change cost them more than I will earn here in a year.
Up on the projector we are shown pictures of the happy team member handing a cocktail over the bar with the caption ‘A simply perfect experience every time…’ People start laughing. The drink has obviously not been made properly, its meant to be a three colour Key West Cooler, cranberry and vodka floating on orange archers and rum, in turn floating on a thin stripe of Mellon liqueur. Red yellow and green, like a traffic light. The team member’s drink has only two colours, the orange and cranberry have mixed to make a kind of rusty nakarat colour. He has also used far too much Mellon Liqueur, so the green stripe is much too thick. People laugh and point this out.
I wonder about this lapse of detail. On the one hand it makes our managers look like idiots for not knowing what a ‘simply perfect’ Key West Cooler looks like. On the other, it is teaching us to spot when a drink has been made badly and then to point at it and laugh. Perhaps this training is more subtle and artful than I had first suspected. A new caption comes up beneath the picture “It’s the way we do things around here.”
We are told more about what is expected of us in an upmarket Grill. We should apparently ‘Never say no to a guest.’ I am tempted to ask the question, what if they don’t want to pay for their meal, because they simply can’t be bothered? What if they want to touch us in an inappropriate way? ‘What if they want me to serve them a glass full of pee? I decide that comment’s like this are too easy. There is no point to them other than showing off. We all know what she means and slowing her down would not make me popular with my teammates. It would just make this process longer and more gruelling. Also the Polish contingent are doing enough muttering and giggling for everyone. I start to stare out of the windows as it all washes over me… I am staring out the back of the bus. I am day dreaming like I’m back in a third year science lesson, thinking about the space shuttle. Don’t forget that this is the middle of a heat wave, it’s boiling in here and as the windows are open we can hear the sound of the street outside; car horns and snippets of drama; girls in summer dresses that at any moment could get caught by the wind. It’s all to easy to lose concentration. I make a point to snap myself back, to keep aware of what’s going on. A Manager has come and sat next to me. I have up until this point been making notes, now I have to stop. I don’t want to have to answer the question, ‘Why are you making notes?’
The new upmarket branding has been explained and now it’s time for us to see our new uniforms; our managers and team leaders will model them for us. It is virtually the same as our old uniform. We will wear the same sexless apron and pinney, but it will be in the new dark maroon rather than the old green. We will wear the same short sleeved black shirt but with the new exclamationless logo. There will be no Jeans and no trainers. There will be only black trousers and black polished shoes. There will be no visible tattoos or facial piercing; we shall have stud earrings and wedding bands only. Make up will be tasteful. We will be given a badge to wear that says ‘I’ve got Soul’. All other badges will be forbidden. All our clothes will be ironed flat.
Our manager models the uniform while wearing jeans and flip-flops, and a necklace. We are asked to ignore the infractions. Another of our managers comes out dressed as a chef. He is also wearing jeans. He is not wearing shoes that are kitchen safe, we are asked to imagine that he is. A minor argument breaks out between a chef and a manager as to the nature of kitchen safe shoes. Our manager talks about ‘all kitchen ‘staff’ and is fined a pound for not saying team. She is not happy about having her authority undermined in the middle of a disagreement. In the end the chef wins the argument.
While they are fighting, I start to wonder why it should be important to call us team members instead of staff? Why we have to talk about guests instead of customers? Why our managers have such a hard time actually doing it? The new terms seem to deny that our fundamental relationship is financial. They seem to want us to pretend that there is no money involved, that we are here for some other reason than looming direct debits, council tax, broadband and ever approaching rent. Despite knowing from our earlier Q and A that none of us ever wanted to be waiters or chefs, they want us to pretend that we have somehow all chosen to be here.
I think the managers have a hard time using the words is because without that financial relationship, none of us would do what they tell us to do.
'Wipe that down.'
'But it's already clean, I just..."
'Wipe it down anyway.'
It seems to me that in the world of linguistics the sound of the word is relatively unimportant, it is what it stands for that counts, the meaning that it expresses. For example when we learn French we accept that 'Bon Jour' means 'Hello' despite the fact that it obviously means ‘good day’. In the same way we accept that in this context ‘team member’ means the same as ‘staff ‘or even ‘unit of human resource’ (Which I am about to learn is what they call their staff in Disney Land apparently). Guest can just as well mean customer, punter or pain in the arse. Using another sound creates nothing more than a homonym: a word that sounds the same as another but has a completely different meaning. IE Guest meaning someone who is visiting your home and Guest meaning a guy I've never met who want's me to make him a cocktail. (If I ever learn how). It’s made worse by the fact that the idea is so transparent, it implies that the company considers its staff to be stupid enough to be fooled by such a simple slight of hand. In this way it is somehow insulting, belittling even patronizing to be called a team member, rather than a member of staff.
I suspect that if things continue in the same vain we will start to refer to our managers as Aunts and Uncles (like in Margaret Attwoods The Handmaids Tale.) Perhaps our mighty CEO would prefer to be called our Big Brother, or would he in-fact find the homonym created by George Orwell too uncomfortable for a man who’s company song implies he no longer rules the world.
After the fight about shoes, the uniform session takes a turn for the strange. Our trainer asks us to close our eyes as we prepare for a Californian style group meditation. Those of us don’t close our eyes are singled out, pointed at and then forced to do so. Once all eyes are closed, the soft welsh voice of our trainer drifts out over the room. She walks up down the centre of the horseshoe table arrangement, obscured by ten sets of eyelids. ‘Imagine yourself in the bar’ she says, ‘It’s a beautiful sunny day when a member of staff... I mean team member, comes in and she’s wearing jeans and a shaggy un-ironed shirt and her hair is a mess and her make up is all smudgy and she smells too… Imagine her standing there, with a sad look on her face, all of a mess… What would you think about that person? What message is she sending out about herself and the Company… Ok open your eyes. What would you say to that person?’
The Polish moustache killer mumbles something and the other Chefs can’t hold their laughter.
Our trainer picks out a front of house team member. ‘I’d tell them to go home and get changed’
‘That’s right, because they are in no fit state to come to work’
We are told to close our eyes again as we imagine a new scenario. This time it is a chef, who comes in looking like crap. Resenting the kidnapping of my imagination I go off topic, I imagine him dressed like a Vegas era Elvis impersonator, complete with sunglasses and a wig. Everyone else see’s a tobacco stained, unshaven mess. She directs the question at the head Chef. The answer is the same. The response to the answer is the same.
Now we are told about Disneyland where they demand that all their units ‘get into character before each shift,' Units can actually be fired for slipping out of character on company time. She asks us 'if we went to Disney land and Mickey Mouse was in a bad mood what would we go away thinking?' (We are back to being children again, crying because Santa is slurring his words.) She makes one of us answer this obviously rhetorical question. Forcing them to take part. ‘I wouldn’t be very happy’ ‘No, no you wouldn’t be… ' she pauses for dramatic effect.
'I want you to think of your uniform as more than just the suit of clothes, it has to go deeper than that.’
In Disneyland we are told the team members enter the site through an underground tunnel. Every ten feet there is a yellow line painted on the floor, units are instructed to leave a little bit more of themselves behind each yellow line. What’s more, because they come on site underground, the guests never see them as having a life outside.
This is the additional unwritten section of the uniform code. We will wear the smiling face of the upmarket grill, We will not be ourselves, as we get changed we will let go of all negative aspects of our personality, all our personal problems will slip away. Such will be the power of this new set of clothes.
The Managers change out of the uniforms and back into their shirts. Managers don’t have to wear uniforms; That’s how you can tell they are in charge.
What bothers me about the bus exercise is that it is not even a particularly good metaphor for what they want to promote. Even if we ride in the middle we are still on a bus that belongs to someone else. We have no say in its maintenance or direction; we are not at all team members in this metaphor, but passive passengers, killing time until our next stop.
There is also the always-present Polish question. What are the foreign chefs making of all this? What does the KP think is going on here? By the way they are giggling I suspect that many of their post-it notes contain Polish swear words. This really is like being back at school.
She reads back some of the notes. She puts on a caring face and says that she hopes that whoever is uncomfortable will feel better once we have finished the training. She says we will do the bus exercise again towards the end of our training. For some reason she then hands out a bowls of sweeties. Haribo Tangfastics, Sherbert Lemons and those rock hard little white mints you get at the end of a meal. It is a children’s reward for sitting through something unpleasant, like a dental appointment.
With a mouth full of tangy lemon, I have time to reflect on the purpose of the Bus exercise. It would seem to be something more useful for managers than for staff. A great metaphor for coming into work and assessing your ‘team members’ perhaps identifying where you might want to take action. But it’s not very relevant to those on the shop floor. Real back of bus people will just lie in order to remain hidden, front of bus people also; they don’t want to rock the boat before they jump ship. I have heard that a lie detector kit is really a stress detector, not telling the truth makes people sweat, it raises their heartbeat, makes them want to get up and leave the room, in extreme cases it can make people physically sick. Perhaps this is what is so uncomfortable about this situation, the fact that we feel we have to lie continuously in order to get through it without upsetting anyone. I smile at our trainer. I am sure she thinks it was me that wrote the post it. I am happy to take the heat off whoever it was who did.
Breaking through the outer shell of my sherbet lemon to the powder within, I imagine the process that led to my being here. I see a consultant talking to upper management (complete with sombreros) Telling them that people will buy more if served by happy people, that staff will work harder for companies they care about. I see them picking up cell phones and calling middle managers. The middle managers passing this information on to the general managers who then step out into the bar and yell, “Be Happier and care about The Company.” That doesn’t seem to work so we get this instead. A two-day lesson in happiness and caring. It is the lack of art and creativity with which this is done that bothers me. You cannot just tell people to be happy, especially when it comes between “Work harder, dress smarter and use less of our resources you jerk!” Telling unhappy people to cheer up just makes them sad. If you want us to be happy you need to give us reasons to be happy. Don’t just demand that we care about you, show us that you’re worth caring for, more importantly be worth caring for.
Now that we have all met each other, ridden the Bus and been given our sweets, our trainer would like to talk to us about the Brand. She wants to explain why things have changed. Why the Bar/Cantina is to become a Bar/Grill. She says that in the past people were confused as to what kind of thing ‘The Company!’ did. They did not know if ‘The Company!’ was a comedy club or a nightclub or what? To combat this, the exclamation mark and capital letters have been removed from the company name, we will now be called ‘the company’. The company colour has also changed from jovial green to a more serious dark maroon. I am willing to bet that this change cost them more than I will earn here in a year.
Up on the projector we are shown pictures of the happy team member handing a cocktail over the bar with the caption ‘A simply perfect experience every time…’ People start laughing. The drink has obviously not been made properly, its meant to be a three colour Key West Cooler, cranberry and vodka floating on orange archers and rum, in turn floating on a thin stripe of Mellon liqueur. Red yellow and green, like a traffic light. The team member’s drink has only two colours, the orange and cranberry have mixed to make a kind of rusty nakarat colour. He has also used far too much Mellon Liqueur, so the green stripe is much too thick. People laugh and point this out.
I wonder about this lapse of detail. On the one hand it makes our managers look like idiots for not knowing what a ‘simply perfect’ Key West Cooler looks like. On the other, it is teaching us to spot when a drink has been made badly and then to point at it and laugh. Perhaps this training is more subtle and artful than I had first suspected. A new caption comes up beneath the picture “It’s the way we do things around here.”
We are told more about what is expected of us in an upmarket Grill. We should apparently ‘Never say no to a guest.’ I am tempted to ask the question, what if they don’t want to pay for their meal, because they simply can’t be bothered? What if they want to touch us in an inappropriate way? ‘What if they want me to serve them a glass full of pee? I decide that comment’s like this are too easy. There is no point to them other than showing off. We all know what she means and slowing her down would not make me popular with my teammates. It would just make this process longer and more gruelling. Also the Polish contingent are doing enough muttering and giggling for everyone. I start to stare out of the windows as it all washes over me… I am staring out the back of the bus. I am day dreaming like I’m back in a third year science lesson, thinking about the space shuttle. Don’t forget that this is the middle of a heat wave, it’s boiling in here and as the windows are open we can hear the sound of the street outside; car horns and snippets of drama; girls in summer dresses that at any moment could get caught by the wind. It’s all to easy to lose concentration. I make a point to snap myself back, to keep aware of what’s going on. A Manager has come and sat next to me. I have up until this point been making notes, now I have to stop. I don’t want to have to answer the question, ‘Why are you making notes?’
The new upmarket branding has been explained and now it’s time for us to see our new uniforms; our managers and team leaders will model them for us. It is virtually the same as our old uniform. We will wear the same sexless apron and pinney, but it will be in the new dark maroon rather than the old green. We will wear the same short sleeved black shirt but with the new exclamationless logo. There will be no Jeans and no trainers. There will be only black trousers and black polished shoes. There will be no visible tattoos or facial piercing; we shall have stud earrings and wedding bands only. Make up will be tasteful. We will be given a badge to wear that says ‘I’ve got Soul’. All other badges will be forbidden. All our clothes will be ironed flat.
Our manager models the uniform while wearing jeans and flip-flops, and a necklace. We are asked to ignore the infractions. Another of our managers comes out dressed as a chef. He is also wearing jeans. He is not wearing shoes that are kitchen safe, we are asked to imagine that he is. A minor argument breaks out between a chef and a manager as to the nature of kitchen safe shoes. Our manager talks about ‘all kitchen ‘staff’ and is fined a pound for not saying team. She is not happy about having her authority undermined in the middle of a disagreement. In the end the chef wins the argument.
While they are fighting, I start to wonder why it should be important to call us team members instead of staff? Why we have to talk about guests instead of customers? Why our managers have such a hard time actually doing it? The new terms seem to deny that our fundamental relationship is financial. They seem to want us to pretend that there is no money involved, that we are here for some other reason than looming direct debits, council tax, broadband and ever approaching rent. Despite knowing from our earlier Q and A that none of us ever wanted to be waiters or chefs, they want us to pretend that we have somehow all chosen to be here.
I think the managers have a hard time using the words is because without that financial relationship, none of us would do what they tell us to do.
'Wipe that down.'
'But it's already clean, I just..."
'Wipe it down anyway.'
It seems to me that in the world of linguistics the sound of the word is relatively unimportant, it is what it stands for that counts, the meaning that it expresses. For example when we learn French we accept that 'Bon Jour' means 'Hello' despite the fact that it obviously means ‘good day’. In the same way we accept that in this context ‘team member’ means the same as ‘staff ‘or even ‘unit of human resource’ (Which I am about to learn is what they call their staff in Disney Land apparently). Guest can just as well mean customer, punter or pain in the arse. Using another sound creates nothing more than a homonym: a word that sounds the same as another but has a completely different meaning. IE Guest meaning someone who is visiting your home and Guest meaning a guy I've never met who want's me to make him a cocktail. (If I ever learn how). It’s made worse by the fact that the idea is so transparent, it implies that the company considers its staff to be stupid enough to be fooled by such a simple slight of hand. In this way it is somehow insulting, belittling even patronizing to be called a team member, rather than a member of staff.
I suspect that if things continue in the same vain we will start to refer to our managers as Aunts and Uncles (like in Margaret Attwoods The Handmaids Tale.) Perhaps our mighty CEO would prefer to be called our Big Brother, or would he in-fact find the homonym created by George Orwell too uncomfortable for a man who’s company song implies he no longer rules the world.
After the fight about shoes, the uniform session takes a turn for the strange. Our trainer asks us to close our eyes as we prepare for a Californian style group meditation. Those of us don’t close our eyes are singled out, pointed at and then forced to do so. Once all eyes are closed, the soft welsh voice of our trainer drifts out over the room. She walks up down the centre of the horseshoe table arrangement, obscured by ten sets of eyelids. ‘Imagine yourself in the bar’ she says, ‘It’s a beautiful sunny day when a member of staff... I mean team member, comes in and she’s wearing jeans and a shaggy un-ironed shirt and her hair is a mess and her make up is all smudgy and she smells too… Imagine her standing there, with a sad look on her face, all of a mess… What would you think about that person? What message is she sending out about herself and the Company… Ok open your eyes. What would you say to that person?’
The Polish moustache killer mumbles something and the other Chefs can’t hold their laughter.
Our trainer picks out a front of house team member. ‘I’d tell them to go home and get changed’
‘That’s right, because they are in no fit state to come to work’
We are told to close our eyes again as we imagine a new scenario. This time it is a chef, who comes in looking like crap. Resenting the kidnapping of my imagination I go off topic, I imagine him dressed like a Vegas era Elvis impersonator, complete with sunglasses and a wig. Everyone else see’s a tobacco stained, unshaven mess. She directs the question at the head Chef. The answer is the same. The response to the answer is the same.
Now we are told about Disneyland where they demand that all their units ‘get into character before each shift,' Units can actually be fired for slipping out of character on company time. She asks us 'if we went to Disney land and Mickey Mouse was in a bad mood what would we go away thinking?' (We are back to being children again, crying because Santa is slurring his words.) She makes one of us answer this obviously rhetorical question. Forcing them to take part. ‘I wouldn’t be very happy’ ‘No, no you wouldn’t be… ' she pauses for dramatic effect.
'I want you to think of your uniform as more than just the suit of clothes, it has to go deeper than that.’
In Disneyland we are told the team members enter the site through an underground tunnel. Every ten feet there is a yellow line painted on the floor, units are instructed to leave a little bit more of themselves behind each yellow line. What’s more, because they come on site underground, the guests never see them as having a life outside.
This is the additional unwritten section of the uniform code. We will wear the smiling face of the upmarket grill, We will not be ourselves, as we get changed we will let go of all negative aspects of our personality, all our personal problems will slip away. Such will be the power of this new set of clothes.
The Managers change out of the uniforms and back into their shirts. Managers don’t have to wear uniforms; That’s how you can tell they are in charge.
Saturday 4 July 2009
ViVa La Bottom Line: PART 1
It’s 9.15 am and right now the bar where I have worked for the past week or so is being gutted and ripped apart by builders. While they play grab-ass with each other and shout sexist remarks to passers by, I will be going through a course of re-education. It will begin in 15 minutes. The Bar/Cantina where I currently work is to be replaced with a Bar/Grill. We are going upmarket. The next two days is to be the managements idea of what it is like inside a brain chrysalis. We will enter as lowly Bar/Canteen staff, serving burger-eating, beer-swigging canteen-customers and emerge as Team Members, serving steak-eating, cocktail-drinking “Guests”.
I decided at 9.02 that this time rather than sit passively through the corporate re-education experience as a sarcastic and passive observer, this time I am going to make notes about the things I think and feel during that process, I am going to do my best to stay awake during the entire process and produce at the end a document that I will send to the CEO of the company. In short I am going to analyse and deconstruct the cryptic language of the corporate ideology and feed it back to itself. In even shorter I am going to provide extensive quality control feedback. In Uber-Micro, I am probably going to get myself fired.
We are to train at another bar. It actually belongs to different chain run by the same company. They are a step down in the cash-demographic they aim to capture. After our refit they will be 2 steps down. Suckers.
I don’t really know what today is going to be about. I assume that it might involve cocktail training and wine tasting. I don't know whether to wear my uniform or not. I decide that I will go for the best of both worlds and half wear it. I have put on smart trousers and polished black shoes with a T-shirt that says "I'm made of meat!" on it. For some odd Pavlovian reason I iron my T-shirt.
I arrive for coffee at 9.30am. A couple of other staff members are already there. My colleagues all arrive in jeans and T-shirts or summer dresses. It is to be the start of a three-day heat wave so some of the chefs are even wearing shorts. I didn’t need to wear any uniform at all.
There is a definite divide between front of house staff and back of house staff. The most obvious thing is the language barrier. All of our chefs are Polish. All of our KPs are Polish. They also tend towards the hired killer look: shaved heads and unshaved faces. Sunken eyes and hands full of knives. The oldest chef, has the darkest, most pitted eyes and couples them with the kind of moustache that would provide ample cover should he ever find himself in a gunfight. Perhaps buying him just enough time so he could get close enough to use his knife. Front of house is another story. We are like Abercrombie and Fitch. We are all English, except one of us who is French. One of us looks a lot like singer-songwriter Craig David.
Two of us are comely buxom-barmaids, a red-head and a blond, the blond is more buxom the redhead more comely. I am 29 years old, a freelance out-of-work journalist and broadcaster. I like to think that have a face that could be on TV but I have worked primarily on the radio. I have ‘radio hair’ right now. ‘TV hair’ is different. ‘TV hair’ glows like a sunset.
I am working in a restaurant due to the fact that there is a recession going on. I am working here because freelance work is hard to come by. Despite my obvious in demand skills (um… Broadcasting and um… writing I guess…) the only trade I can prove I’m any good at is carrying plates to the hungry, and then taking them away from the full.
I don’t think I’m the only one in this boat. We have an architect in out midst. And I believe the Frenchman is just biding his time until he can find a restaurant more worthy of his impossibly high standards of service. He's great, he's like a walking Bar Tender’s Guide. He looks, like a lover and a fighter. He looks like he might do both with a stiletto dagger gripped in the white knuckles of his bony fist.
We have three managers that will be going through this with us. Firstly there is our general manager. Sometimes she seems angry at life; sometimes she seems lonely inside, the kind of lonely that pushes people away for fear of being rejected. People have told me stories of tantrums thrown and of one particular waitress who was made to cry over a mystery diner report the day after her best friends funeral. To be fair she has never had a problem with me so at this point it's all hear-say. She seems to like tennis, we tend to talk about that. There is another manager who is a friend of hers. She reminds me a of general who has been promoted from the unit, not wanting to leave the safety of the rank and file, keeping her head low, asking for favours rather than giving orders. Then their is the third manager a natural, charismatic leader perhaps at little overly obsessed with statistics.
All of us are lured into the conference room above the bar by the smell of fresh coffee. There is milk and sugar, but no milk substitute. This strikes me as odd because two staff members and the general manager are all lactose intolerant. I am lactose intolerant. Milk makes me fart. I am glad to see that in this hot weather the windows will be open.
We are summoned to the table by music and some gentle coughing from our timid welsh trainer. She has put on Coldplay’s Viva La Vida. The lyrics of which are sung from the perspective of a man who at one time ruled the world, but sadly no longer does. “He sweeps the streets that he used to own.” Hearing that song, I can’t help being reminded of the fact that I used to have a pretty decent job. I would walk into bars look at the staff and consciously think. “My jobs better than yours mate” I thought the reason I had a great job because I was smarter or more motivated than most people; I thought it was because I had talent and verve. But that was when I ruled the world. Now I pour the drinks that I used to.... drink.
Our trainer tells us that the company CEO chose this song personally. Four different people express the opinion that they hate Coldplay, and in particular they hate this song. I feel sorry for our trainer already; this is going to be an annoying two days for everyone, but especially for her. The likely hood is she'll be off doing this whole thing again in a weeks time. I am not ashamed to admit to my readers that I like Coldplay quite a lot, I was however ashamed to admit it to my Teammates. Trainer lady, flicks a strand of dark brown hair from her face and tells us that our CEO was at a Coldplay concert when he heard this song and had a eureka moment. In a flash of inspiration he thought Viva La Company!
Viva in English literally means ‘it lives’ but it’s kind of an expression for ‘Up With!’ Or ‘long live…’ Here Viva means something else. It is an acronym for “vision and Values” ViVa. As a result of this happy accident Viva La Vida has now been adopted as the company song. Vida a word meaning ‘Life’ has been replaced with ‘The Company’.
A projector has been set up linked to our trainers lap-top. We are shown a picture of our CEO doing Jazz hands with some embarrassed looking higher management awkwardly grinning in the background. One is a man and the other the woman. The woman has tightly tied blond hair and she looks like she is saying something through gritted teeth, perhaps she’s saying 'he's doing the fucking jazz hands again...' This is the first of many pictures we are to be shown of higher management doing something stupid or embarrassing.
We are told that our CEO ‘is a very passionate man.’ He is apparently ‘All about passion.’ Trainer lady tells us that at some point he will come into the bar/restaurant and that when he does, in one glorius act of synergy, we are to do Jazz hands and shout Viva!
We practice this. The first shout is lacklustre at best, the second slightly louder, the third pretty loud but angry sounding. Our trainer figures rightly that this is the best she is going to get.
I wonder about three things. Firstly I wonder if Coldplay are aware of this usage of their song. I wonder it there are in fact rights issues here as it could be argued that presumably using the song to promote synergy, the company wishes to make increased profit, a share of that profit should surly go to the artists who wrote it. Secondly as the lyrics spill from tin-pan Ipod speakers at a barely audible level, I wonder why the company song should be about former greatness. Surely they want us to think of glories to come. Perhaps Elvis Presley’s Viva Las Vegas might have been a better choice. Also Elvis is dead so if he ever did find out, he probably won’t be able to ask for PRS . I wonder if our passionate, jazz-hands throwing CEO has picked this song because he feels that he does in fact rule the world… I picture him in a high-end automobile, cruising through an episode of Top Gear, singing along, but purposely getting the words wrong, changing the tense in his mind. Thinking about how seas will rise when he gives the word... picturing roman cavalry choirs chanting 'ViVa mighty CEO' when ever he enters a room. It does sound a little like Ceasar doesn't it?
The third thing I wonder about is the polish issue, looking back at our new KP (dishwasher) and the man with the murder moustache, I wonder what they make of this. The words Vision and Values are quite obscure in the way that they are being used. Retroactively translated into broken Polish they could be deemed to mean good eyesight and low prices. Most likely though, they are wondering why everyone is being asked to shout ViVa whenever they see the guy in the suit.
For some reason we are shown more pictures of management, we see them wearing sombreros, we see them attempting to catch fish, not with a rod and reel, but rather out of the air. This is not explained until the end of the day.
My favourite picture is of upper management dressed up like characters from a pantomime. A close second it the one where they are dressed like Christmas foods. A Turkey, a Cracker and a Christmas pudding. In some of the pictures they actually look drunk. We are ten minutes into the training and I am starting to wonder: Who am I working for? When the hell do these guys stop dressing up like idiots and actually get some work done? I understand that they want to present the company as a fun place to work, But it appears more that I am being led by a troop of clowns.
Having been introduced to the managers in this way, we are asked to get to know each other through an icebreaker exercise. It’s pretty typical stand up and talk stuff. We are broken up into groups, we are asked to pair off with our opposite. front of house with back of house, as different as possible. I pick the new KP. We are told to find out our opposite number’s name, job title and relevant experience. We are told to ask them what they want to get out of the training. Finally we are asked to find out two things they wanted to be when they grow up.
This seems like an odd selection of questions.
The young KP has worked washing dishes in a Care Home. When he was a kid he wanted to work as a Fire Rescuer. I like the term, much more descriptive than Fireman. I tell him I have worked in a lot of bars and restaurants. I toy with saying that when I was a kid I wanted to be a woman... I decide that that's a step too far and tell him I wanted to be a knife thrower in the circus. I obviously don’t tell him the truth.
Apart from the fact that I am ashamed of my own failures, I lie to the KP because he wouldn't understand the words Marine Biologist and then I would have to explain. ‘You know… with dolphins and that…’ The ironic thing is at one point I actually did want to be a bar man. I liked the idea of dishing out life-advice to customers in a quiet little bar somewhere in the deep-south, perhaps with a hound dog on the porch lookin’ out for twisters. The reality of the bar experience changed my mind. It made me want to go to University and learn how to do something else. I don’t reveal this fact to the group because it’s personal. My dreams are my own.
The hardest question of all of them is, ‘What do you want to get out of the training?’ I have no idea what to say. Really I just want to get out of the training, I want to be left alone to do the good job I know I can do. I don’t want to go through the embarrassing ritual of having a multi-million pound business crawl towards me on it’s knees and beg me to love it. I look up at the pictures of our CEO doing jazz-hands. How could anybody not love that? Especially when it’s paying you the lowest amount it can legally get away with.
I decide to ask the architect what to say. She says she’s going to say cocktails. I decide to say cocktails too; it’s much easier that way. This is team synergy in motion.
It’s time for us to feedback to the group. No one baring the Craig David look-alike wanted to be a bar man or a waitress when they grow up and he's lyeing. He claims he wanted to be a part time footballer and work full time for The Company. Everybody laughs. This is not a case of things being funny because they are true.
The trainer points at the different groups like a blush conductor, of the front of house staff I hear ‘She wanted to be an actress, or a singer’ repeated again and again, as to back of house, one of the Polish chefs wanted to drive a dump truck. The one that looks like a hired killer wanted to be a builder. When it gets to our group the KP stumbles over relating my answers, He say ‘He was work in many bars… and he want, with knives… I don’t know… Circus?’
I jump in to help. ‘I wanted to throw knives in the circus, or just you know… just fight with knives... for money’ people laugh nervously. The full time barman gag went down better. It’s probably too early for me to be making this kind of joke. I’m left a little embarrassed. They don’t know if it’s true or not.
‘Well thank god you don’t work in the kitchen… And what did he want to get out of the training?’ says our trainer. ‘Cocktails’ says the KP.
‘Good’ she says and writes the world Cocktails on the board. The answers to all the other questions are disregarded. Apparently it is not important what we have done before, or what we wanted to do with our lives, the only piece of information that is flipchart worthy is what we want out of this training session.
Then it’s my turn to talk about the KP. We have not talked about what he wants to get out of this. I decide to make it up. I decided to do what Craig David did, to kill them with kindness, but to phrase it in a way that will be completely obvious did not come out of this KP’s mouth. Controlling my face and voice I tell our trainer that, 'He wants to come through this with a greater sense of Team Unity' She looks a little shocked, but really happy that this has come up. She writes it on the flip chart, then spends ten minutes telling the KP that she is sure that this will happen, that this is what the training is really about. Never for one second does she acknowledge the fact that I obviously made it up.
Despite the fact that it’s on a piece of flipchart paper somewhere, I can’t remember what anyone else said they wanted to get out of the training. Even though I was trying to concentrate and actively trying to remember, it has totally slipped my mind.
Trainer Lady flips the flip chart and begins to draw a picture of a bus. ‘This is The Company Bus,’ she says. My heart sinks. What does the company bus have to do with how to make cocktails? But as she keeps drawing it begins to make sense, sort of… She tells us that she wants us to think of the company as a school bus. She asks us where on the schoolbus we sat when we were kids. Did we hide at the back, behind all the seats? Not at all comfortable with where we were, or did we ride at the front so that we could hop on and hop off easily? Or did we ride in the middle of the bus, happy balanced, in it for the long haul. She draws a picture of out CEO driving the buss doing jazz-hands. What is it with jazz-hands?
I think about my days on the School Bus. I remember conversations with attractive teenage girls, I remember a little bully with a big mate that never said a word. I remember playing mercy with a friend of mine and smashing my hand through a piece of Formica panelling.
I once saw an Episode of Trick or Treat with TV magician and hypnotist Derren Brown in which he regressed someone back to child hood by having them drink orange squash and draw a crayon picture of a pussycat. This is the first of a few activities today that make me feel like I’m back at school.
I look at the bus. We have been given post-it notes and a selection of multi-coloured pens. We can write what we like and then stick it onto the bus to show where we feel we are riding on the company bus. Are we hiding, are we desperate to get off, or are we in the middle, where we obviously should be. I feel carsick.
We are told that this excersise will be anonymous. But there are three colours of post-it note and everyone has a different pen. I draw someone diving in front to avoid having to sit through any more of this training then cross it out. I draw someone being squashed beneath its wheels with a beatific smile on his face then screw it up and put the evidence in my pocket. I draw a school child dreaming of being a bus driver as the darn thing rushes past his stop. Finally I just write the word ‘fine.’ on my post-it and stick it in the middle of the bus. This is in fact a very back of the bus thing to do. I am extremely uncomfortable; I just don’t want the extra discomfort of having to explain why.
I decided at 9.02 that this time rather than sit passively through the corporate re-education experience as a sarcastic and passive observer, this time I am going to make notes about the things I think and feel during that process, I am going to do my best to stay awake during the entire process and produce at the end a document that I will send to the CEO of the company. In short I am going to analyse and deconstruct the cryptic language of the corporate ideology and feed it back to itself. In even shorter I am going to provide extensive quality control feedback. In Uber-Micro, I am probably going to get myself fired.
We are to train at another bar. It actually belongs to different chain run by the same company. They are a step down in the cash-demographic they aim to capture. After our refit they will be 2 steps down. Suckers.
I don’t really know what today is going to be about. I assume that it might involve cocktail training and wine tasting. I don't know whether to wear my uniform or not. I decide that I will go for the best of both worlds and half wear it. I have put on smart trousers and polished black shoes with a T-shirt that says "I'm made of meat!" on it. For some odd Pavlovian reason I iron my T-shirt.
I arrive for coffee at 9.30am. A couple of other staff members are already there. My colleagues all arrive in jeans and T-shirts or summer dresses. It is to be the start of a three-day heat wave so some of the chefs are even wearing shorts. I didn’t need to wear any uniform at all.
There is a definite divide between front of house staff and back of house staff. The most obvious thing is the language barrier. All of our chefs are Polish. All of our KPs are Polish. They also tend towards the hired killer look: shaved heads and unshaved faces. Sunken eyes and hands full of knives. The oldest chef, has the darkest, most pitted eyes and couples them with the kind of moustache that would provide ample cover should he ever find himself in a gunfight. Perhaps buying him just enough time so he could get close enough to use his knife. Front of house is another story. We are like Abercrombie and Fitch. We are all English, except one of us who is French. One of us looks a lot like singer-songwriter Craig David.
Two of us are comely buxom-barmaids, a red-head and a blond, the blond is more buxom the redhead more comely. I am 29 years old, a freelance out-of-work journalist and broadcaster. I like to think that have a face that could be on TV but I have worked primarily on the radio. I have ‘radio hair’ right now. ‘TV hair’ is different. ‘TV hair’ glows like a sunset.
I am working in a restaurant due to the fact that there is a recession going on. I am working here because freelance work is hard to come by. Despite my obvious in demand skills (um… Broadcasting and um… writing I guess…) the only trade I can prove I’m any good at is carrying plates to the hungry, and then taking them away from the full.
I don’t think I’m the only one in this boat. We have an architect in out midst. And I believe the Frenchman is just biding his time until he can find a restaurant more worthy of his impossibly high standards of service. He's great, he's like a walking Bar Tender’s Guide. He looks, like a lover and a fighter. He looks like he might do both with a stiletto dagger gripped in the white knuckles of his bony fist.
We have three managers that will be going through this with us. Firstly there is our general manager. Sometimes she seems angry at life; sometimes she seems lonely inside, the kind of lonely that pushes people away for fear of being rejected. People have told me stories of tantrums thrown and of one particular waitress who was made to cry over a mystery diner report the day after her best friends funeral. To be fair she has never had a problem with me so at this point it's all hear-say. She seems to like tennis, we tend to talk about that. There is another manager who is a friend of hers. She reminds me a of general who has been promoted from the unit, not wanting to leave the safety of the rank and file, keeping her head low, asking for favours rather than giving orders. Then their is the third manager a natural, charismatic leader perhaps at little overly obsessed with statistics.
All of us are lured into the conference room above the bar by the smell of fresh coffee. There is milk and sugar, but no milk substitute. This strikes me as odd because two staff members and the general manager are all lactose intolerant. I am lactose intolerant. Milk makes me fart. I am glad to see that in this hot weather the windows will be open.
We are summoned to the table by music and some gentle coughing from our timid welsh trainer. She has put on Coldplay’s Viva La Vida. The lyrics of which are sung from the perspective of a man who at one time ruled the world, but sadly no longer does. “He sweeps the streets that he used to own.” Hearing that song, I can’t help being reminded of the fact that I used to have a pretty decent job. I would walk into bars look at the staff and consciously think. “My jobs better than yours mate” I thought the reason I had a great job because I was smarter or more motivated than most people; I thought it was because I had talent and verve. But that was when I ruled the world. Now I pour the drinks that I used to.... drink.
Our trainer tells us that the company CEO chose this song personally. Four different people express the opinion that they hate Coldplay, and in particular they hate this song. I feel sorry for our trainer already; this is going to be an annoying two days for everyone, but especially for her. The likely hood is she'll be off doing this whole thing again in a weeks time. I am not ashamed to admit to my readers that I like Coldplay quite a lot, I was however ashamed to admit it to my Teammates. Trainer lady, flicks a strand of dark brown hair from her face and tells us that our CEO was at a Coldplay concert when he heard this song and had a eureka moment. In a flash of inspiration he thought Viva La Company!
Viva in English literally means ‘it lives’ but it’s kind of an expression for ‘Up With!’ Or ‘long live…’ Here Viva means something else. It is an acronym for “vision and Values” ViVa. As a result of this happy accident Viva La Vida has now been adopted as the company song. Vida a word meaning ‘Life’ has been replaced with ‘The Company’.
A projector has been set up linked to our trainers lap-top. We are shown a picture of our CEO doing Jazz hands with some embarrassed looking higher management awkwardly grinning in the background. One is a man and the other the woman. The woman has tightly tied blond hair and she looks like she is saying something through gritted teeth, perhaps she’s saying 'he's doing the fucking jazz hands again...' This is the first of many pictures we are to be shown of higher management doing something stupid or embarrassing.
We are told that our CEO ‘is a very passionate man.’ He is apparently ‘All about passion.’ Trainer lady tells us that at some point he will come into the bar/restaurant and that when he does, in one glorius act of synergy, we are to do Jazz hands and shout Viva!
We practice this. The first shout is lacklustre at best, the second slightly louder, the third pretty loud but angry sounding. Our trainer figures rightly that this is the best she is going to get.
I wonder about three things. Firstly I wonder if Coldplay are aware of this usage of their song. I wonder it there are in fact rights issues here as it could be argued that presumably using the song to promote synergy, the company wishes to make increased profit, a share of that profit should surly go to the artists who wrote it. Secondly as the lyrics spill from tin-pan Ipod speakers at a barely audible level, I wonder why the company song should be about former greatness. Surely they want us to think of glories to come. Perhaps Elvis Presley’s Viva Las Vegas might have been a better choice. Also Elvis is dead so if he ever did find out, he probably won’t be able to ask for PRS . I wonder if our passionate, jazz-hands throwing CEO has picked this song because he feels that he does in fact rule the world… I picture him in a high-end automobile, cruising through an episode of Top Gear, singing along, but purposely getting the words wrong, changing the tense in his mind. Thinking about how seas will rise when he gives the word... picturing roman cavalry choirs chanting 'ViVa mighty CEO' when ever he enters a room. It does sound a little like Ceasar doesn't it?
The third thing I wonder about is the polish issue, looking back at our new KP (dishwasher) and the man with the murder moustache, I wonder what they make of this. The words Vision and Values are quite obscure in the way that they are being used. Retroactively translated into broken Polish they could be deemed to mean good eyesight and low prices. Most likely though, they are wondering why everyone is being asked to shout ViVa whenever they see the guy in the suit.
For some reason we are shown more pictures of management, we see them wearing sombreros, we see them attempting to catch fish, not with a rod and reel, but rather out of the air. This is not explained until the end of the day.
My favourite picture is of upper management dressed up like characters from a pantomime. A close second it the one where they are dressed like Christmas foods. A Turkey, a Cracker and a Christmas pudding. In some of the pictures they actually look drunk. We are ten minutes into the training and I am starting to wonder: Who am I working for? When the hell do these guys stop dressing up like idiots and actually get some work done? I understand that they want to present the company as a fun place to work, But it appears more that I am being led by a troop of clowns.
Having been introduced to the managers in this way, we are asked to get to know each other through an icebreaker exercise. It’s pretty typical stand up and talk stuff. We are broken up into groups, we are asked to pair off with our opposite. front of house with back of house, as different as possible. I pick the new KP. We are told to find out our opposite number’s name, job title and relevant experience. We are told to ask them what they want to get out of the training. Finally we are asked to find out two things they wanted to be when they grow up.
This seems like an odd selection of questions.
The young KP has worked washing dishes in a Care Home. When he was a kid he wanted to work as a Fire Rescuer. I like the term, much more descriptive than Fireman. I tell him I have worked in a lot of bars and restaurants. I toy with saying that when I was a kid I wanted to be a woman... I decide that that's a step too far and tell him I wanted to be a knife thrower in the circus. I obviously don’t tell him the truth.
Apart from the fact that I am ashamed of my own failures, I lie to the KP because he wouldn't understand the words Marine Biologist and then I would have to explain. ‘You know… with dolphins and that…’ The ironic thing is at one point I actually did want to be a bar man. I liked the idea of dishing out life-advice to customers in a quiet little bar somewhere in the deep-south, perhaps with a hound dog on the porch lookin’ out for twisters. The reality of the bar experience changed my mind. It made me want to go to University and learn how to do something else. I don’t reveal this fact to the group because it’s personal. My dreams are my own.
The hardest question of all of them is, ‘What do you want to get out of the training?’ I have no idea what to say. Really I just want to get out of the training, I want to be left alone to do the good job I know I can do. I don’t want to go through the embarrassing ritual of having a multi-million pound business crawl towards me on it’s knees and beg me to love it. I look up at the pictures of our CEO doing jazz-hands. How could anybody not love that? Especially when it’s paying you the lowest amount it can legally get away with.
I decide to ask the architect what to say. She says she’s going to say cocktails. I decide to say cocktails too; it’s much easier that way. This is team synergy in motion.
It’s time for us to feedback to the group. No one baring the Craig David look-alike wanted to be a bar man or a waitress when they grow up and he's lyeing. He claims he wanted to be a part time footballer and work full time for The Company. Everybody laughs. This is not a case of things being funny because they are true.
The trainer points at the different groups like a blush conductor, of the front of house staff I hear ‘She wanted to be an actress, or a singer’ repeated again and again, as to back of house, one of the Polish chefs wanted to drive a dump truck. The one that looks like a hired killer wanted to be a builder. When it gets to our group the KP stumbles over relating my answers, He say ‘He was work in many bars… and he want, with knives… I don’t know… Circus?’
I jump in to help. ‘I wanted to throw knives in the circus, or just you know… just fight with knives... for money’ people laugh nervously. The full time barman gag went down better. It’s probably too early for me to be making this kind of joke. I’m left a little embarrassed. They don’t know if it’s true or not.
‘Well thank god you don’t work in the kitchen… And what did he want to get out of the training?’ says our trainer. ‘Cocktails’ says the KP.
‘Good’ she says and writes the world Cocktails on the board. The answers to all the other questions are disregarded. Apparently it is not important what we have done before, or what we wanted to do with our lives, the only piece of information that is flipchart worthy is what we want out of this training session.
Then it’s my turn to talk about the KP. We have not talked about what he wants to get out of this. I decide to make it up. I decided to do what Craig David did, to kill them with kindness, but to phrase it in a way that will be completely obvious did not come out of this KP’s mouth. Controlling my face and voice I tell our trainer that, 'He wants to come through this with a greater sense of Team Unity' She looks a little shocked, but really happy that this has come up. She writes it on the flip chart, then spends ten minutes telling the KP that she is sure that this will happen, that this is what the training is really about. Never for one second does she acknowledge the fact that I obviously made it up.
Despite the fact that it’s on a piece of flipchart paper somewhere, I can’t remember what anyone else said they wanted to get out of the training. Even though I was trying to concentrate and actively trying to remember, it has totally slipped my mind.
Trainer Lady flips the flip chart and begins to draw a picture of a bus. ‘This is The Company Bus,’ she says. My heart sinks. What does the company bus have to do with how to make cocktails? But as she keeps drawing it begins to make sense, sort of… She tells us that she wants us to think of the company as a school bus. She asks us where on the schoolbus we sat when we were kids. Did we hide at the back, behind all the seats? Not at all comfortable with where we were, or did we ride at the front so that we could hop on and hop off easily? Or did we ride in the middle of the bus, happy balanced, in it for the long haul. She draws a picture of out CEO driving the buss doing jazz-hands. What is it with jazz-hands?
I think about my days on the School Bus. I remember conversations with attractive teenage girls, I remember a little bully with a big mate that never said a word. I remember playing mercy with a friend of mine and smashing my hand through a piece of Formica panelling.
I once saw an Episode of Trick or Treat with TV magician and hypnotist Derren Brown in which he regressed someone back to child hood by having them drink orange squash and draw a crayon picture of a pussycat. This is the first of a few activities today that make me feel like I’m back at school.
I look at the bus. We have been given post-it notes and a selection of multi-coloured pens. We can write what we like and then stick it onto the bus to show where we feel we are riding on the company bus. Are we hiding, are we desperate to get off, or are we in the middle, where we obviously should be. I feel carsick.
We are told that this excersise will be anonymous. But there are three colours of post-it note and everyone has a different pen. I draw someone diving in front to avoid having to sit through any more of this training then cross it out. I draw someone being squashed beneath its wheels with a beatific smile on his face then screw it up and put the evidence in my pocket. I draw a school child dreaming of being a bus driver as the darn thing rushes past his stop. Finally I just write the word ‘fine.’ on my post-it and stick it in the middle of the bus. This is in fact a very back of the bus thing to do. I am extremely uncomfortable; I just don’t want the extra discomfort of having to explain why.
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