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.