Saturday 22 August 2009

The Mariana Trench on Facebook

Friday 7 August 2009

Viva La Bottom Line: PART 5

That night I dreamed of disabled giraffes throwing fish at women with men’s heads. I dreamed of a server in ripped jeans and an old led zepplin T Shirt arriving at working with a fag butt in his mouth a full tramps beard and birds-nest hair. I saw myself throwing up all over his trainers and then making a run for the kitchen. Then I was running through a tunnel and every ten feet I crossed a line had to change into a new uniform, new shirt, new shoes, a new smiling mouth to replace my own. over the loudspeaker came our soft welsh trainer lady whispering, ‘less body… more soul,’ over and over again until even the individual words ceased making sense and it began to sound like a Buddhist mantra. Slowley everyone began chanting together, The giraffes, the fish, the tardy server, my managers and the rest of the bar maids, the stiletto Frenchman, even Craig David. And in the way that these things happen in dreams I found that they were chanting something else. They were chanting ‘come and join us, come and join us’. They were chanting ‘Cross the Yellow Line! Then they raised high their steak knives and moved in for the kill.

I wake up with fifteen minutes to get back to the training room, pull on some jeans and a top and run for the door, There is no way I am going to miss the free coffee that I know I am going to need. Half way out the house I stop turn and run back in. I grab some soy milk, enough for all the lactose intolerant team-members. I am sure I was going to be late but when I arrive I am actually the first one there. Cradled in my hands is warm coffee, sweet dark ballast for the coming storm. With no breakfast inside me the jitters begin to set in. Figuring it's a good idea to also drink some orange juice with my coffee I go back to the drink station. As I approach
the Frenchman pours himself an entire glass of soy milk. ‘That’s my soy milk’ I say just as he takes a large mouthful. He spits it back into the glass. ‘Oh my god… Soy milk… disgusting…. I had, I had no idea.’ He doesn’t apologize for wasting an entire glass. He goes down in my estimations.

We go back to the table and sit down. I am next to the Frenchman on one side and Craig David on the other. Looking up at the trainer preparing for today’s session I feel a sudden wave of Panicked Claustrophobia. Perhaps it's just adrenalin from the milk incident riding the back of the caffeine and sugar, but it takes all that I have to resist the urge to just get up and just run for the door. Instead I clench my fists and close my eyes. Tough it out. The moment passes, turning my head to the right.
“I don’t know if I can take another day of this, man. I really don't”
“I know what you mean.” Says Craig David.

Trainer lady asks us if we still have the booklets she had handed out yesterday.

Last night in order to take my mind off things I did a bit of DIY. I was making a kind of climbers grip trainer that involved drilling a hole through a broomstick. I used my Company booklet as a mat to prevent the drill from damaging my coffee table. my booklet is still there, it’s cover wilfully scratched and cut by the drill. No one had brought their booklets back. She reminds us of how important they are to the whole team.

She has spare booklets for everyone.

We flip past, Less Body More Soul and into the section marked 'Our Guest Value- whatever it takes.'

'What ever it takes.'

Around 7000% less cryptic than ‘less body more soul. 'What ever it takes' is the slogan that denotes what we will do to make sure that the guest has a good time. Trainer lady has drawn a set of three concentric circles on the flip-chart. The outer circle being ‘the customer experience’, the middle circle is labeled ‘the service’ and the inner core ‘the central infrastructure.’ I am having a hard time concentrating today. So it's not really registering what these circles are meant to represent. I'm still thinking about 'Whatever it takes'. It's already a lie, I know there are lots of things we will not do in order to make a customer happy.

To go with the circles there is the usual burst of ridiculously obvious questions. Which part of this does the customer experience? What part of this is to do with Service? What is service? what is the inner core of our business? We try and give her the answers she want's to hear.

The questions finally stop and she places her hands on the desk and faces us. There is a pause. clearly she want's to make a point. The way her shirt has folded has caused a gap to appear between two buttons. It has created a little window in the cloth through which I can see part of her bra. I’m not proud of myself for looking. but in my defense, judging from the hushed Polish whispers, I wasn’t the only one.

‘How much does a complaint cost us?’ she says with a force that snaps us out of our lechery. No one is sure if they are meant to put their hand up and answer or not. Apparently not.

She begins to draw a pyramid next to the concentric diagram. At the top she puts one person with a sad face. Each person with a bad experience will apparently tell ten people and each one of them will tell six people and each one of them will tell an additional five people. She works this out as being 301 people that may never come to The Company again. At an average of £35 a visit, a single complaint could cost the company £10335, the difference between a good month and a bad one. The difference between the Company staying afloat and going under.

My main thought is that this information is at least five years old. This little tally predates the total proliferation of the internet. All a complainer need do is post a bad review on a where to eat website, make a status update and a tweet that says, I found a finger in a Company Burger, and that’s already five times as many people turned off the Company than in her model, Add to this figure the possibility of unpredictable pickups like that the guy that got his guitar busted up by United Airlines. They refused compensation so he made a song about it. ‘United break guitars’ it has four and a half million views on Youtube and as a result, it made the national news. Forget about word of mouth, the internet is a global megaphone.

After explaining the spiraling cost of the complaints pyramid our trainer returns to the three circles. And things take a turn for the metaphysical, almost mythical in fact. She gets her pen and draws a swan on the flip chart. ‘This is you’ she says, you are this swan, here, swimming on this line. And the guest should only ever see this part, the top of the swan. They should never ever see this part. Your ugly little legs kicking as hard as they can to make sure that everything is perfect.' Apparently they don’t want to know that we’re a chef down. They don’t want to hear that we can’t do something, they just want their food, and they want it to be good. And they want you to be smart and to smile when you put it on their plate.’

Then she says my favorite sentence of the whole two days.
‘This Swan here, is what fish is all about.’ Why I don't get up and leave I don't know. perhaps it's because we have been so beaten into submission by this point that ‘This swan is what fish is all about’ barely raises and eyebrow with the rest of the group. They stare blankly forward as the words fades into the general miasma of jargonous white-noise. Part of the reason I make no comment it that I don’t want to cause any trouble; trouble will just make this go on longer. What I want to do is make my trainer happy, I want to answer her questions quickly and correctly.

Outside the open window I hear the beachboys coming from the stereo of convertible sports car. A man, a boy really, sits in the front seat. It’s a harsh reminder. Somehow I am a few days off turning 30 and I am still working in a bar. I work hard, they tell me I have talent. Even this trainer says I’m a natural leader. How the hell did this happen?

I don’t want to be a billionaire. I don’t want a luxury yacht and a palace, but is a BMW z4 and some leisure time too much to ask.

'that's were we wanna go, we'll get there fast and then we'll take it slow.'

I feel trapped, Like a hostage held and gun point, I cannot leave. I look pleadingly towards our trainer. The gap in the shirt is still there. She is really quite an attractive woman in a kind of well kempt office girl kind of a way. Mid-thirties with a great figure. If things were different, if the world hadn’t conspired against us we could run away, right now, together, away from all this.
I wonder if may be I am starting to suffer from Stockholm Syndrome.

‘Bermuda, Bahamas, come on pretty mama...’

I picture the two of us holding hands and leaving the room. I hear the stunned silence comming up at from the horseshoe of desks as we make our way to a Caribbean island. Welsh trainer lady exchanges her expensive shirt for a bikini and we sip fruit cocktails in the sun, a steal band plays,

‘Key largo, montego baby why dont we go’

The traffic lights change and the man in the convertible drives away taking the Bahamas with him. Then I remember that I am married, happily married. Still I have been day dreaming for the last ten minutes. I need to start paying attention again. It’s too dangerous to let stuff like this drift over you. That's how it slips into your brain unnoticed, and without your paying attention becomes a part of who you are. Questions come from the front, 'what should we do to make a guest happy?'

Across the group hands that were once raised proudly, now rise, slow and limp, like three day old celery. Craig answers 'Whatever it takes' you can tell wanted it to sound ironic but to his own horror and surprise it doesn't. He cannot muster the energy.

I need more coffee. By the time I get back to the table we are being split into groups again. to prevent us from falling asleep I guess, we are going to do a role-play of ‘the service journey’. We will in turn play the part of the server and the guest. Guests will be given the same sheet of paper that the mystery diners use to judge us. Like everything else it is insane in it’s attention to detail. Every minute of 'The Service Journey' is accounted for.

We will start off by offering drinks, we will recommend wine. Expensive wine. We will then offer bread and olives and explain the soup of the day. We will say that there is a choice of bread. We will take orders for Starters and finally mains. We will recommend mains, expensive mains. We will recommend expensive wines to go with the mains. We will deliver the food, offer more drinks. Check back on the food, clear the food. We will bring additional cutlery. We will offer more drinks and ask if they need any sauce at all. We will check back asking if ‘everything is ok with the food’. We will make sure to add ‘with the food’ so that the guest does not tell us about their emotional problems. We will clear the food and offer desert menus, we will offer more drinks. We will bring the food. We will check back on it. We will clear it away. Like children we will do all of this in our heads, miming the actions with empty hands. We will sit while a Polish chef who is never ever going to do this again takes us through the service journey. When it is our turn will confuse this chef by describing the soup of the day as French semen and onion. We will tell him that it is very fresh. We will say that all our starters come with erotic toast. We will pretend to have a wheat allergy. We will demand that the waiter bring us seven shots of tequila for our 10 year old son. We will then ask for bread explaining that we will simply eat round the wheat. While the trainer is out of the room we will explode in laughter and rebellion and childish puerile humor. When she comes back we will feed back to the group. We will lie. We will say ‘No feedback’ We will say, ‘Everyone did great’.

It’s a lie that get’s us through to lunchtime. Lunch is going to be a little different today. Instead of eating ‘in house’ we have all been given a budget and told to go and spy on our competition. Divided into another set of groups we are to visit a set of random Bistros and “Grills”. We are going to be like mystery diners. We will come back and feedback to the group. Feedback feedback feedback.

Money has been handed out. Management are insistent that we do not have an alcoholic drink. They also don’t want us to spend more than £10 each. Fair enough. This is pretty close to freedom, we’ll take whatever we can get right now.

My group goes to an over 21’s bar where they serve Tapas. It’s lunch time and as luck would have it the same day that the student of three universities hold their graduations. As a result everywhere in town is rammed. We order the tapas deal for five intending to share it between three of us. When it arrives there is three of everything. Clearly we have been scammed here We ordered food enough for five, we will pay for food enough for five. We don’t say anything, just note it down. This is no good. Too us it’s free, so we don’t feel the need to complain.

Talk around the table is pretty much the same as yesterday. We talk about how it seems much more of a pain in the arse today. That it’s so much more tiring. We talk about how hot it is. We decide that despite the obvious skimming we are still going to tip the waiter.

That is one thing about everyone who works in service. We tip. We tip because we know how important it is. How much they deserve it. We tip because if we didn’t we would see the looks we were getting, we would feel the virtual daggers in our backs as we walked out. Non tippers are the devil.

You know who you are.

Stop it.