Thinking about John How, I've just recalled that he was a founder member of The Feelers' Club in Middle School.
The Feelers Club was a group of likeminded boys - comprising solely of John How - who granted themselves the unique permission to fondle (through clothing) the genitals of any other boy whenever and wherever they wanted. Why most of the straight boys put up with this I don't know, but I was lucky enough to be 'feeled' on at least one memorable occasion and I recall it being very pleasant indeed.
Not being a member of the club, alas, I did not have the opportunity to return the favour.
[Time: 1985/6]
Monday 29 June 2009
An Awfully Big Adventure
During my pre-school years I hung out a lot with a boy from down the street, John How, who would later become the school's most noted homosexual. We tended to play together with our various soft toys and I recall I had a home-made blue frog stuffed with dried beans whose head would regularly split open, and froggy would ride on my ambulance bicycle to John's house where we would play Doctors and Nurses to get it fixed (i.e. his mum would get out a needle and thread).
There was also at this time a boy called Adam Broughton who lived across the street from John. Adam was less emotionally developed than us and was going through what Freud described as the "anal stage", but which might better be described as the "shitting in improbable places" stage. I recall he had a sand pit which he liked shitting in, and also a small push buggy which had a flap opening up into the boot at the back. He loved shitting into that, and he loved being watched while he did it. God knows why his mum didn't kill him. He would also wee in improbable places, but that was less disgusting. He smelled precisely as one would imagine.
The three of us enjoyed collecting snails. John's parents had an old aquarium which they put in the backyard, and we filled it with leaves and then collected dozens of snails to live in it. The snails often escaped, and there would be countless snails climbing up the walls of the house. I recall that Adam's anal fascination stretched to the snails. He would peer with horror at those snails which had pooed themselves - a sort of black thread leading out of their invertebrate asses - and his solution would be to lick the snails' bottoms clean. Even as a very young child, I sensed this was very wrong.
However - this particular memory relates to the Sunday night before John and I were due to start primary school. We decided that we were clearly grown up boys now, as we were about to start school, and so now was as good a time as any to explore the town. I was strictly forbidden from going further than the cul-de-sacs on either side of the house, but I felt that my new maturity was sufficiently evident that I would not on this occasion need to ask permission.
We thus wandered down into the valley to visit the playpark, where there were a couple of older girls that John knew. They were very surprised we were allowed out on our own, but we explained we were mature now. We played on the swings and slide, and then decided it would be good to visit the Rainbow Play Group one last time before school. This was quite a trek, and I cannot recall if we made it. I do vaguely remember the dark, overgrown passageway one had to walk down to get there, and the harsh stench of the creosote used to protect the fence, but I made this journey so often with so many people I can't recall if I really did manage to go there with John or not.
We were just walking home up the main road leading to the bottom of The Gills when a man on a motorbike stopped next to us. I was a bit concerned with talking to strangers, but it turned out this stranger had been sent out to find us. We were next to a phone booth, so he phoned for my parents and my dad came down immediately to pick us up. It turned out we had been gone much longer than we had realised, and that we certainly did not have their permission to go on walkabout. While we were waiting, the man told us how naughty we had been and how worried everyone was. I couldn't help but dislike him, and a niggling thought in my head suggests that it may have been Mr Stacey from the cub scouts anecdote - the peeping tom in the showers - but I cannot be certain.
My dad dropped John off at his house and I was taken home, and the moment I entered the kitchen I could sense the adults' relief turn almost instantaneously into anger. My grandparents were down, and my grandfather - usually one of the gentlest creatures on the planet - was furious with me. I've since discussed this with my mum, and apparently my granddad had been absolutely frantic with worry while I was missing. She also tells me the whole street had been roused and sent out on the search mission. Even now I feel a bit guilty for causing so much trouble, and when I think how I would feel if one of my nieces did the same thing it is entirely unbearable.
Once we'd joined primary school John and I grew apart and I never really hung out with him as friends again. He became very popular at middle school, adopting the cute-yet-succinct nickname 'Hommo', and then at grammar school he was streamed in the lower classes and he became a distant figure in my life, spotted occasionally having a smoke behind the swimming pool or hanging out with the rougher kids. I have no idea what happened to him after that.
[Time: September 1980]
There was also at this time a boy called Adam Broughton who lived across the street from John. Adam was less emotionally developed than us and was going through what Freud described as the "anal stage", but which might better be described as the "shitting in improbable places" stage. I recall he had a sand pit which he liked shitting in, and also a small push buggy which had a flap opening up into the boot at the back. He loved shitting into that, and he loved being watched while he did it. God knows why his mum didn't kill him. He would also wee in improbable places, but that was less disgusting. He smelled precisely as one would imagine.
The three of us enjoyed collecting snails. John's parents had an old aquarium which they put in the backyard, and we filled it with leaves and then collected dozens of snails to live in it. The snails often escaped, and there would be countless snails climbing up the walls of the house. I recall that Adam's anal fascination stretched to the snails. He would peer with horror at those snails which had pooed themselves - a sort of black thread leading out of their invertebrate asses - and his solution would be to lick the snails' bottoms clean. Even as a very young child, I sensed this was very wrong.
However - this particular memory relates to the Sunday night before John and I were due to start primary school. We decided that we were clearly grown up boys now, as we were about to start school, and so now was as good a time as any to explore the town. I was strictly forbidden from going further than the cul-de-sacs on either side of the house, but I felt that my new maturity was sufficiently evident that I would not on this occasion need to ask permission.
We thus wandered down into the valley to visit the playpark, where there were a couple of older girls that John knew. They were very surprised we were allowed out on our own, but we explained we were mature now. We played on the swings and slide, and then decided it would be good to visit the Rainbow Play Group one last time before school. This was quite a trek, and I cannot recall if we made it. I do vaguely remember the dark, overgrown passageway one had to walk down to get there, and the harsh stench of the creosote used to protect the fence, but I made this journey so often with so many people I can't recall if I really did manage to go there with John or not.
We were just walking home up the main road leading to the bottom of The Gills when a man on a motorbike stopped next to us. I was a bit concerned with talking to strangers, but it turned out this stranger had been sent out to find us. We were next to a phone booth, so he phoned for my parents and my dad came down immediately to pick us up. It turned out we had been gone much longer than we had realised, and that we certainly did not have their permission to go on walkabout. While we were waiting, the man told us how naughty we had been and how worried everyone was. I couldn't help but dislike him, and a niggling thought in my head suggests that it may have been Mr Stacey from the cub scouts anecdote - the peeping tom in the showers - but I cannot be certain.
My dad dropped John off at his house and I was taken home, and the moment I entered the kitchen I could sense the adults' relief turn almost instantaneously into anger. My grandparents were down, and my grandfather - usually one of the gentlest creatures on the planet - was furious with me. I've since discussed this with my mum, and apparently my granddad had been absolutely frantic with worry while I was missing. She also tells me the whole street had been roused and sent out on the search mission. Even now I feel a bit guilty for causing so much trouble, and when I think how I would feel if one of my nieces did the same thing it is entirely unbearable.
Once we'd joined primary school John and I grew apart and I never really hung out with him as friends again. He became very popular at middle school, adopting the cute-yet-succinct nickname 'Hommo', and then at grammar school he was streamed in the lower classes and he became a distant figure in my life, spotted occasionally having a smoke behind the swimming pool or hanging out with the rougher kids. I have no idea what happened to him after that.
[Time: September 1980]
Friday 26 June 2009
The Child Entrepreneur
One summer when I was eight years old, I came up with a fool-proof money making idea that even Alan Sugar could not criticise: collecting up lots of old newspapers and turning them into cash. It was a perfect business model. Everyone had unwanted newspapers, no one minded giving them to kids and they were easy to pick up and store. We were quids in. I don't really remember who did this with me, but for the sake of the Memory Project let's say it was my brother and Adrian Conor.
The three of us went from door to door asking for left-over newspapers, and the response was so overwhelmingly positive we soon accumulated a big stack of papers. We had set quite a wide collection radius for our age, trekking along the Whartons, down The Gills and even up to the scary big houses up towards The Spite, where a lovely old woman was delighted to help and even offered us lemonade.
I also recall one particularly risque moment, when we barged into a back garden on The Gills asking for newspaper and discovered a middle aged woman bathing topless. I remember she had an exotic looking drink of some kind too - a cocktail maybe - and this struck me as just about the most decadent and sorid thing I had ever seen. Otley, a small town? Nah.
I don't think she gave us any newspapers.
Following an afternoon's gathering, it occurred to us we could make even more money by seeking sponsorship for our activities. We considered ourselves fully aware of how sponsorship worked - people gave you money for doing something - and this time we could make it work for us. If everyone in the street pledged us 1p for each newspaper we gathered, we'd be rich beyond our wildest dreams.
I grabbed a blank piece of paper, wrote "SPONSERSHIP FORM" across the top and then crudely drew a table in below in which the neighbours could declare their spoils.
"Is that how you spell sponsorship?" asked Adrian.
"Uh, I dunno," I said.
And so I went to my mom asking her how to spell sponsoship, and she asked why we were asking, and I explained our amazing money making scam, and she revealed that the reason no one else was making money being sponsored to do relatively mundane tasks is because sponsorship is for charities. It isn't usual to ask for people to sponsor you money just for - you know - buying sweets with.
Oh, we said.
My mother then enquired what we proposed to be sponsored to do. We explained in broad terms about the newspapers, leaving out the bit about the topless lady with the dry martini. Fortunately, my mother has the insight of the superior class of business analyst, and asked almost immediately, "And what will you do with all the newspapers afterwards?"
When we explained we would turn them into cash, she turned the question on us with the cunning of a barrister: "But how?"
And that was when we realised our plan to collect huge numbers of old newspapers and convert them into cash had not been thought through to the final stage. The sheer logistics of gathering and storing so much waste paper had been such a challenge in itself, we hadn't bothered to work out how to monetise our project. And thus my first business venture ended with my dad driving us down to the chip shop to see if they would pay pennies for old newspapers to wrap chips in, and we learned that health and safety regulations now required takeways to use fresh, food-grade paper for their wrappers, and we ended up chucking the lot in a newspaper recylcling skip in the middle of town and making fully no money whatsoever.
Our only profit was the fish and chips my dad bought to console us with.
[Time: Summer 1984]
The three of us went from door to door asking for left-over newspapers, and the response was so overwhelmingly positive we soon accumulated a big stack of papers. We had set quite a wide collection radius for our age, trekking along the Whartons, down The Gills and even up to the scary big houses up towards The Spite, where a lovely old woman was delighted to help and even offered us lemonade.
I also recall one particularly risque moment, when we barged into a back garden on The Gills asking for newspaper and discovered a middle aged woman bathing topless. I remember she had an exotic looking drink of some kind too - a cocktail maybe - and this struck me as just about the most decadent and sorid thing I had ever seen. Otley, a small town? Nah.
I don't think she gave us any newspapers.
Following an afternoon's gathering, it occurred to us we could make even more money by seeking sponsorship for our activities. We considered ourselves fully aware of how sponsorship worked - people gave you money for doing something - and this time we could make it work for us. If everyone in the street pledged us 1p for each newspaper we gathered, we'd be rich beyond our wildest dreams.
I grabbed a blank piece of paper, wrote "SPONSERSHIP FORM" across the top and then crudely drew a table in below in which the neighbours could declare their spoils.
"Is that how you spell sponsorship?" asked Adrian.
"Uh, I dunno," I said.
And so I went to my mom asking her how to spell sponsoship, and she asked why we were asking, and I explained our amazing money making scam, and she revealed that the reason no one else was making money being sponsored to do relatively mundane tasks is because sponsorship is for charities. It isn't usual to ask for people to sponsor you money just for - you know - buying sweets with.
Oh, we said.
My mother then enquired what we proposed to be sponsored to do. We explained in broad terms about the newspapers, leaving out the bit about the topless lady with the dry martini. Fortunately, my mother has the insight of the superior class of business analyst, and asked almost immediately, "And what will you do with all the newspapers afterwards?"
When we explained we would turn them into cash, she turned the question on us with the cunning of a barrister: "But how?"
And that was when we realised our plan to collect huge numbers of old newspapers and convert them into cash had not been thought through to the final stage. The sheer logistics of gathering and storing so much waste paper had been such a challenge in itself, we hadn't bothered to work out how to monetise our project. And thus my first business venture ended with my dad driving us down to the chip shop to see if they would pay pennies for old newspapers to wrap chips in, and we learned that health and safety regulations now required takeways to use fresh, food-grade paper for their wrappers, and we ended up chucking the lot in a newspaper recylcling skip in the middle of town and making fully no money whatsoever.
Our only profit was the fish and chips my dad bought to console us with.
[Time: Summer 1984]
Wednesday 24 June 2009
My Life in Mathematics
I wasn't very good at mathematics at the start of my life.
When I was seven years old I had to sit a single short exam which trotted through all of my school subjects. I was a superb student and most of the questions were a breeze, but I remember the Maths question completely stumped me: "How is the number One Hundred written in digits?".
I spent more time thinking about that question than on the rest of the test put together, and when the headmaster finally announced the end of the exam I hurriedly wrote down my best and most logical guess. Never before having heard of the number 'One Hundred', I came up with the reasonable logic that if 'hundred' was written '100', then 'one hundred' was logically the same thing only with an extra 1 at the start. I wrote down my answer: 1100.
With literally a single stroke, I completely failed my maths exam.
When I was eight years old we were supposed to learn our times tables, however Mrs Fox - a golden-haired woman who all the boys idolised - was off on maternity leave and the temporary teachers had no idea what we were supposed to be learning. I remember there was a stack of flash cards you could use with a partner if you wanted to teach it to yourself, but lessons were generally very unstructured that year, so much so that I was able to focus on woodwork for most of the time. I thus spent a lot of that year making myself model boats, which was not as impressive as it sounds as it largely comprised nailing two or three pieces of scrap wood together.
I ended primary school with a collection of pretty awful wooden boats and absolutely no knowledge of the times tables. When the headmaster realised the problem was endemic, he instructed my entire year to learn the multiplication tables during the summer holidays before joining middle school, but somehow I forgot all about it and frolicking in the sun and eating ice cream took over.
Joining middle school, aged nine, it turned out that most of the other decent students had learned their tables during the holidays, and as it was immediately spotted that I didn't know how to multiply at all it was naturally assumed I was a dunce. I was immediately streamed into the remedial maths class, which was a bit of a shock for someone who was otherwise streamed in the top class for all of the other subjects. For one thing, remedial mathematics was taught by the art teacher, Mrs Rees, and there was therefore no chance I would ever learn anything.
The one vital lesson I did learn was: always check the back of the book to see if the answers are printed there. With this single skill, I went in one year from mathematical retard to mathematical genius, scoring maximum points in every test. At the end of the year I was promoted to the top set, and I imagine Mrs Rees earned herself great respect in the staff room. As I left the class, I whispered my secret to Stuart Colefaks in the clandestine hope he too might wield my hidden talent to reveal his hidden potential, but alas he was such an extraordinary idiot I doubt he was even able to find the back of the book.
And so I turned ten, and was in the top class for maths where they didn't print the answers in the same book as the questions. This wasn't just tragic because I still hadn't learned my times tables, but also because everyone else in top set had been taught long division, while I was effectively being taught how to drool over a protractor. I had literally no idea what I was doing. I was able to scrape by without knowing how to multiply - mathematics finally started getting theoretical, and so we spent a lot of time drawing triangles and then cutting them up to prove the angles added up to a straight line - but I recall one particularly painful test of our long division.
It was an oral exam, and the teacher would read out a division puzzle and we'd have a minute or two to work out the answer. "135 divided by 5", the teacher would announce. David Harrelson - who sat beside me - would immediately put the first number in a little box, the second number to its left and then suddenly and mysteriously the answer would start writing itself across the top of the box. I was fasincated by this black magic, but wholly unable to emulate it.
Instead, I would turn to the back of my exercise book and mark five dots - well-spaced out - and then add another round of dots, counting to ten, and then more and more until I'd counted up to 135. I'd then have 5 groups containing 135 dots in total, and could work out the answer to the question simply by counting the number of dots in one group (in this case, 27). Simple, if time consuming.
I got through most of the test this way, but towards the end the numbers started getting so high I was taking too long to draw out all of the dots and was missing questions out. I recall David Harrelson saw what I was doing and started mocking me, but fortunately he was not remotely cool and so no-one else joined in.
By age eleven I was moved to Mr Nicholson's class, still in the top set by some fluke of chance. My lack of knowledge of multiplication tables was no problem here as there was a chart of them up on the wall, and 50% of the time Mr Nicholson forgot to take them down during tests. The chart was also helpful as I found mathematics so boring I sought entertainment elsewhere, and found it in memorising the numbers on the wall and - as I have both a strong numerical brain and a superb visual memory, or at least I did before I started drinking - finally I started to understand the structure of numbers, and to realise that division is really just the times tables in reverse. This was a realisation I should have had three years earlier.
Twelve was a breeze with this new information, and I think by then my dad had also explained long division (however, looking back, long division makes no real sense anymore). At thirteen I transferred to big school, where calculators were allowed, and suddenly numbers were not remotely important anymore. You literally didn't even need to be able to count, so I started doing extremely well.
I remember scoring 98% on a GCSE mock paper in 1991, and getting the highest score in my class (58%) on an 'A' Level mock paper in 1993 (despite being the only one in the room not to have realised there were two sides to the exam paper). Of course, by this stage the real geniuses were in the Advanced Math class, preparing for Oxbridge entrance exams. I decided I was lucky enough to be doing this well without pushing it any further, which somewhat upset the teacher who'd hoped I would go on to be a rising star on the math stage. Seeing how much trouble Olivia had with Cambridge-level mathematics (you really had to be either autistic or truly devoted) I am quite glad I allowed my life in mathematics to end there.
And now I work for an accountancy firm. Go figure.
When I was seven years old I had to sit a single short exam which trotted through all of my school subjects. I was a superb student and most of the questions were a breeze, but I remember the Maths question completely stumped me: "How is the number One Hundred written in digits?".
I spent more time thinking about that question than on the rest of the test put together, and when the headmaster finally announced the end of the exam I hurriedly wrote down my best and most logical guess. Never before having heard of the number 'One Hundred', I came up with the reasonable logic that if 'hundred' was written '100', then 'one hundred' was logically the same thing only with an extra 1 at the start. I wrote down my answer: 1100.
With literally a single stroke, I completely failed my maths exam.
When I was eight years old we were supposed to learn our times tables, however Mrs Fox - a golden-haired woman who all the boys idolised - was off on maternity leave and the temporary teachers had no idea what we were supposed to be learning. I remember there was a stack of flash cards you could use with a partner if you wanted to teach it to yourself, but lessons were generally very unstructured that year, so much so that I was able to focus on woodwork for most of the time. I thus spent a lot of that year making myself model boats, which was not as impressive as it sounds as it largely comprised nailing two or three pieces of scrap wood together.
I ended primary school with a collection of pretty awful wooden boats and absolutely no knowledge of the times tables. When the headmaster realised the problem was endemic, he instructed my entire year to learn the multiplication tables during the summer holidays before joining middle school, but somehow I forgot all about it and frolicking in the sun and eating ice cream took over.
Joining middle school, aged nine, it turned out that most of the other decent students had learned their tables during the holidays, and as it was immediately spotted that I didn't know how to multiply at all it was naturally assumed I was a dunce. I was immediately streamed into the remedial maths class, which was a bit of a shock for someone who was otherwise streamed in the top class for all of the other subjects. For one thing, remedial mathematics was taught by the art teacher, Mrs Rees, and there was therefore no chance I would ever learn anything.
The one vital lesson I did learn was: always check the back of the book to see if the answers are printed there. With this single skill, I went in one year from mathematical retard to mathematical genius, scoring maximum points in every test. At the end of the year I was promoted to the top set, and I imagine Mrs Rees earned herself great respect in the staff room. As I left the class, I whispered my secret to Stuart Colefaks in the clandestine hope he too might wield my hidden talent to reveal his hidden potential, but alas he was such an extraordinary idiot I doubt he was even able to find the back of the book.
And so I turned ten, and was in the top class for maths where they didn't print the answers in the same book as the questions. This wasn't just tragic because I still hadn't learned my times tables, but also because everyone else in top set had been taught long division, while I was effectively being taught how to drool over a protractor. I had literally no idea what I was doing. I was able to scrape by without knowing how to multiply - mathematics finally started getting theoretical, and so we spent a lot of time drawing triangles and then cutting them up to prove the angles added up to a straight line - but I recall one particularly painful test of our long division.
It was an oral exam, and the teacher would read out a division puzzle and we'd have a minute or two to work out the answer. "135 divided by 5", the teacher would announce. David Harrelson - who sat beside me - would immediately put the first number in a little box, the second number to its left and then suddenly and mysteriously the answer would start writing itself across the top of the box. I was fasincated by this black magic, but wholly unable to emulate it.
Instead, I would turn to the back of my exercise book and mark five dots - well-spaced out - and then add another round of dots, counting to ten, and then more and more until I'd counted up to 135. I'd then have 5 groups containing 135 dots in total, and could work out the answer to the question simply by counting the number of dots in one group (in this case, 27). Simple, if time consuming.
I got through most of the test this way, but towards the end the numbers started getting so high I was taking too long to draw out all of the dots and was missing questions out. I recall David Harrelson saw what I was doing and started mocking me, but fortunately he was not remotely cool and so no-one else joined in.
By age eleven I was moved to Mr Nicholson's class, still in the top set by some fluke of chance. My lack of knowledge of multiplication tables was no problem here as there was a chart of them up on the wall, and 50% of the time Mr Nicholson forgot to take them down during tests. The chart was also helpful as I found mathematics so boring I sought entertainment elsewhere, and found it in memorising the numbers on the wall and - as I have both a strong numerical brain and a superb visual memory, or at least I did before I started drinking - finally I started to understand the structure of numbers, and to realise that division is really just the times tables in reverse. This was a realisation I should have had three years earlier.
Twelve was a breeze with this new information, and I think by then my dad had also explained long division (however, looking back, long division makes no real sense anymore). At thirteen I transferred to big school, where calculators were allowed, and suddenly numbers were not remotely important anymore. You literally didn't even need to be able to count, so I started doing extremely well.
I remember scoring 98% on a GCSE mock paper in 1991, and getting the highest score in my class (58%) on an 'A' Level mock paper in 1993 (despite being the only one in the room not to have realised there were two sides to the exam paper). Of course, by this stage the real geniuses were in the Advanced Math class, preparing for Oxbridge entrance exams. I decided I was lucky enough to be doing this well without pushing it any further, which somewhat upset the teacher who'd hoped I would go on to be a rising star on the math stage. Seeing how much trouble Olivia had with Cambridge-level mathematics (you really had to be either autistic or truly devoted) I am quite glad I allowed my life in mathematics to end there.
And now I work for an accountancy firm. Go figure.
Thursday 18 June 2009
My First Job
My first job lasted about eight minutes, after which I was obliged to resign. It was the Summer of 1995 and my Dad pulled in a favour through his office, scoring me a role at Irwins the construction contractors in Leeds. My parents handed me the address as they left for a holiday in Egypt, and I was on my own.
Turning up at 9am in what I imagined might be work gear - polished shoes, old school trousers, an almost ironed shirt and tie - I enquired at reception and was instructured to go round the back of the building and talk to Jeff.
Jeff, it turned out, was an obese old man living in a portakabin filled only with cigarette smoke. He decided that I should be a lorry driver, handed me a pair of keys and instructed me to put some diesel into one of the articulated lorries and drive it to Pontefract.
I had been expecting an easy role in a comfortable office, but as this was my very first job I didn't really want to cause a fuss. It seemed rude somehow to point out that I didn't have a license to drive an articulated lorry, nor indeed that the largest thing I'd ever driven in my life was my mum's mini metro (having gained my license only the year before). To show willing, I took the keys, climbed into the cabin and tried to work out how to start the thing.
The cabin of an articulated lorry is very different to that of a mini metro. For one thing, everything is so much larger: the driving wheel is like that on the deck of a ship, the pedals like steps on an escalator and the gearstick the size of a gentleman's umbrella. I felt like one of the Numbskulls from The Beano, operating comically giant machinery inside the human head.
The engine started easily, I pressed down the accelarator and ten or more tonnes of metal lurched at speed towards the building housing the typing pool. Turning the wheel in panic, the back of the lorry seemed to sweep across the car park and risked crushing a row of directors' cars. I then managed to manoeuvre the vehicle close enough to the diesel pumps to attempt to fill it up.
I'd not tried to put fuel inside anything before, not even a mini-metro, and so I took hold of the nozzle with some trepidation. I squeezed the trigger lightly to see what might occur, and diesel sprayed all up the side of the lorry and then onto my shoes. I hunted for what might be a petrol cap but without much luck, and so stuck the nozzle in the nearest likely-sized hole. It didn't fit, and I was wise enough not to pull the trigger a second time.
I decided that I probably had enough fuel to get to Pontefract anyway (not that I had any idea where the hell on god's earth that might be), so rationalised that I should speed things up by driving there first and then filling up on fuel. I climbed back into the lorry, reversed slightly, realised there was a row of cars directly behind the lorry, edged forward a bit and realised there was now a wall directly in front of me, and then - after repeating this three or four times - realised the lorry was now effectively trapped lengthways between the typing pool and a row of incredibly expensive directors' cars.
I did not, by choice, wish to crush either of them. I searched inside my soul and found it empty of enthusiasm for this new task, and so it was that eight minutes into my first job I found myself resigning. And reeking of diesel.
I took the rest of the week off, and when my dad got home from Cairo he got onto the phone to Irwins and discovered the whole thing had been a mistake. I should have been given an office job. How mistakes like that happen I don't know, but I was very grateful for a clandestine week of sunny freedom before the doom of office work clouded my days.
[Time: Summer of 1995]
Turning up at 9am in what I imagined might be work gear - polished shoes, old school trousers, an almost ironed shirt and tie - I enquired at reception and was instructured to go round the back of the building and talk to Jeff.
Jeff, it turned out, was an obese old man living in a portakabin filled only with cigarette smoke. He decided that I should be a lorry driver, handed me a pair of keys and instructed me to put some diesel into one of the articulated lorries and drive it to Pontefract.
I had been expecting an easy role in a comfortable office, but as this was my very first job I didn't really want to cause a fuss. It seemed rude somehow to point out that I didn't have a license to drive an articulated lorry, nor indeed that the largest thing I'd ever driven in my life was my mum's mini metro (having gained my license only the year before). To show willing, I took the keys, climbed into the cabin and tried to work out how to start the thing.
The cabin of an articulated lorry is very different to that of a mini metro. For one thing, everything is so much larger: the driving wheel is like that on the deck of a ship, the pedals like steps on an escalator and the gearstick the size of a gentleman's umbrella. I felt like one of the Numbskulls from The Beano, operating comically giant machinery inside the human head.
The engine started easily, I pressed down the accelarator and ten or more tonnes of metal lurched at speed towards the building housing the typing pool. Turning the wheel in panic, the back of the lorry seemed to sweep across the car park and risked crushing a row of directors' cars. I then managed to manoeuvre the vehicle close enough to the diesel pumps to attempt to fill it up.
I'd not tried to put fuel inside anything before, not even a mini-metro, and so I took hold of the nozzle with some trepidation. I squeezed the trigger lightly to see what might occur, and diesel sprayed all up the side of the lorry and then onto my shoes. I hunted for what might be a petrol cap but without much luck, and so stuck the nozzle in the nearest likely-sized hole. It didn't fit, and I was wise enough not to pull the trigger a second time.
I decided that I probably had enough fuel to get to Pontefract anyway (not that I had any idea where the hell on god's earth that might be), so rationalised that I should speed things up by driving there first and then filling up on fuel. I climbed back into the lorry, reversed slightly, realised there was a row of cars directly behind the lorry, edged forward a bit and realised there was now a wall directly in front of me, and then - after repeating this three or four times - realised the lorry was now effectively trapped lengthways between the typing pool and a row of incredibly expensive directors' cars.
I did not, by choice, wish to crush either of them. I searched inside my soul and found it empty of enthusiasm for this new task, and so it was that eight minutes into my first job I found myself resigning. And reeking of diesel.
I took the rest of the week off, and when my dad got home from Cairo he got onto the phone to Irwins and discovered the whole thing had been a mistake. I should have been given an office job. How mistakes like that happen I don't know, but I was very grateful for a clandestine week of sunny freedom before the doom of office work clouded my days.
[Time: Summer of 1995]
Tuesday 16 June 2009
May Angels Watch Me While I Sleep
I've always thought that I didn't have much of a religious upbringing, but lying in bed the other day 'Praying to Imaginary God' for the sake of a friend's unborn baby (status: critical) I suddenly realised I knew two prayers off by heart, which I was tought to say each night in my pyjamas before going to bed. The first we were taught was clearly designed to reinforce the protestant work ethic:
Jesus grant me every day,
That I might work as well as play.
Help me to learn and understand.
Please guide my mind and guide my hand.
Amen.
I think that poem may even have come with a picture book, but even as a child I seemed to instinctively have less interest in religious picture books than ones about happy dogs called Scamp. A later addition - with a less overt message, although possibly more redolent of a world filled with vampires - came this prayer:
Lord keep me safe this night,
Secure from all my fears,
May angels watch me while I sleep,
'til morning light appears.
Amen.
It occurs to me, the more I probe my mind for religious material, that my mother would spend every morning reading from the Bible while drying her hair, although there was never indication that the same was expected of me.
A number of church trips also spring to mind. I was christened in All Saints Parish Church on Kirkgate, and I recall at least three trips there on a Sunday for a service. These were unbearably mundane affairs: sitting on hard wooden seats (why the hell are the cushions always on the floor?), listening to complex parables intended for adults, and singing drab songs to which no-one knows the tune.
I was not a patient child, and I suspect my fidgeting and open expressions of boredom during these early trips would have quickly put paid to the idea of taking me to church again. I remember during my last trip there as a child - perhaps aged five - I was shown a numbered plastic token hanging on a hook on a wooden board, which I was supposed to turn over when I attended services in future so that the vicar could keep track of attendance. It is no exagerration to say that I do not recall ever turning that token over.
My father is a devout atheist, so I suspect there was pressure at home to stop taking me to church too (he certainly never came along). Still, my mum was not defeated and one year decided to take us to an evangelical church in a school hall near our house. Her reasoning was that there would be less droning and more singing and clapping, which would really engage the children.
Alas, the 'church' comprised us standing in a circle in a school hall and a man screaming "Can you feel it? Can you feel god's love?" and the more regular members of the grouping swooning and screaming about how yes, indeed, they could feel God's love. My mum is a very polite woman and would not typically wish to offend, but even her faith has limits and after about 20 minutes she grabbed my brother and I by the hand and marched out before things got any more extreme. This was probably a good thing, as I was quite getting into it.
At the back of my head is a memory which claims that during the evangelical service someone daubed their hands in red and started talking in tongues. I cannot vouch for this, but I cannot rule it out.
And since then, I've had no religious influences on me. Attending a Comprehensive School my R.E. lessons were of course strictly pantheist, and so we spent much more time learning about Omega Point (a mystical place in the outer realms of the galaxy where all the positive thoughts go and, when we've all been sufficiently positive, a rainbow space-bridge will open up and suck us all into heaven) as we did the Church of England (a mystical place in middle England with fully no mystical rainbow space-bridges). We also watched Lord of the Flies and Amadeus during R.E., and the only lesson to stick with me was learning not to say "My pen has run out" (if you did, the teacher would open the door and urge you to chase after it. Ho fucking ho).
And that is my life in religion. And yet somehow, when I attended a small Bible Study class at the Carlisle chapter of the Church of Christ in Pennsylvania during the Summer of 1997, I was able to convince the Minister I was a good and devout Christian and thus secure myself lodgings for the summer. But as I've said before, that's an entirely different story.
[Time: Passim]
Jesus grant me every day,
That I might work as well as play.
Help me to learn and understand.
Please guide my mind and guide my hand.
Amen.
I think that poem may even have come with a picture book, but even as a child I seemed to instinctively have less interest in religious picture books than ones about happy dogs called Scamp. A later addition - with a less overt message, although possibly more redolent of a world filled with vampires - came this prayer:
Lord keep me safe this night,
Secure from all my fears,
May angels watch me while I sleep,
'til morning light appears.
Amen.
It occurs to me, the more I probe my mind for religious material, that my mother would spend every morning reading from the Bible while drying her hair, although there was never indication that the same was expected of me.
A number of church trips also spring to mind. I was christened in All Saints Parish Church on Kirkgate, and I recall at least three trips there on a Sunday for a service. These were unbearably mundane affairs: sitting on hard wooden seats (why the hell are the cushions always on the floor?), listening to complex parables intended for adults, and singing drab songs to which no-one knows the tune.
I was not a patient child, and I suspect my fidgeting and open expressions of boredom during these early trips would have quickly put paid to the idea of taking me to church again. I remember during my last trip there as a child - perhaps aged five - I was shown a numbered plastic token hanging on a hook on a wooden board, which I was supposed to turn over when I attended services in future so that the vicar could keep track of attendance. It is no exagerration to say that I do not recall ever turning that token over.
My father is a devout atheist, so I suspect there was pressure at home to stop taking me to church too (he certainly never came along). Still, my mum was not defeated and one year decided to take us to an evangelical church in a school hall near our house. Her reasoning was that there would be less droning and more singing and clapping, which would really engage the children.
Alas, the 'church' comprised us standing in a circle in a school hall and a man screaming "Can you feel it? Can you feel god's love?" and the more regular members of the grouping swooning and screaming about how yes, indeed, they could feel God's love. My mum is a very polite woman and would not typically wish to offend, but even her faith has limits and after about 20 minutes she grabbed my brother and I by the hand and marched out before things got any more extreme. This was probably a good thing, as I was quite getting into it.
At the back of my head is a memory which claims that during the evangelical service someone daubed their hands in red and started talking in tongues. I cannot vouch for this, but I cannot rule it out.
And since then, I've had no religious influences on me. Attending a Comprehensive School my R.E. lessons were of course strictly pantheist, and so we spent much more time learning about Omega Point (a mystical place in the outer realms of the galaxy where all the positive thoughts go and, when we've all been sufficiently positive, a rainbow space-bridge will open up and suck us all into heaven) as we did the Church of England (a mystical place in middle England with fully no mystical rainbow space-bridges). We also watched Lord of the Flies and Amadeus during R.E., and the only lesson to stick with me was learning not to say "My pen has run out" (if you did, the teacher would open the door and urge you to chase after it. Ho fucking ho).
And that is my life in religion. And yet somehow, when I attended a small Bible Study class at the Carlisle chapter of the Church of Christ in Pennsylvania during the Summer of 1997, I was able to convince the Minister I was a good and devout Christian and thus secure myself lodgings for the summer. But as I've said before, that's an entirely different story.
[Time: Passim]
Wednesday 10 June 2009
Southwestern Sales Camp
1997. A bus pulls up on the side of the freeway in Nashville, Tennessee. Four men step out into the dusty hard shoulder and look around them. It did not take long for me to realise I had no idea what the hell I was doing there.
The four of us had travelled down together on a Greyhound bus from New York city, a hideous journey which had taken a full 24 hours. It was the middle of summer, the Greyhound's aircon had broken and its toilet was blocked up, all of which had fermented into a very unpleasant combination. I'd had one book to pass the time - a rather dry guide to writing screenplays - and we'd had just three stops en route for milling around. The bus stations had all looked identical: grey concrete affairs filled with the dregs of American society. Through these halls wandered us four young Cambridge graduates out to make their fortune (or, in my case, out to get drunk and have an adventure).
Heading to Nashvile had felt like the biggest mistake ever. This was my first time in the US and I'd only got to spend a day in New York. Unlike Nashville, Manhattan was beautiful, and full of people who seemed to have their fingers on the pulse. We'd eaten frozen yoghurt and gone to the top of the Empire State Building - a breathtaking view which gave the start of our adventure a magical quality, and which hasn't lost its impact on repeated viewings - and slept in a dorm at Columbia University, less magically in four beds to a room as though we were immigrants fresh off the boat. Two days before that I'd had my graduation ceremony back in Cambridge. My parents smiling in the rain, drinking beers, and crouched in the darkness blasting at my friends' parents with laser guns.
So, we stood in the dust in the middle of nowhere, Tennessee. We'd been booked by the Company into the Residence Inn, on the farside of the freeway, and so our Great American Adventure began with us dodging cars across six lanes of traffic, climbing over a fence, rolling through gorse bushes down a grassy embankment and then walking (or hobbling, in the case of the obeser member of our group, who'd we'd picked up at the airport and couldn't seem to shake off) through a remote car park in search of our motel. It turned out we'd been booked eight to a room: two to each of the double beds, and four on the floor. As we'd arrived late we were on the floor by default, so I found a quiet corner beside the fridge and staked out my territory with the single blanket left for my enjoyment. The hotel was very basic, with free lemon squash and popcorn, which comprised my main diet over the week.
I had planned to have a shower, maybe a cocktail and then check out the Waffle House up the road. Jeremy, our leader, had different ideas however. He caught us in the lobby and marched us off to sales camp, the filth of three days' travel still smeared across our faces. We crossed the turnpike and headed up a long, long road to Landers Plaza, the home of the Southwestern Sales School.
There were perhaps 300 other students at sales school, crammed in a rather drab glass and concrete building. We were each handed our bookbag for the season - a cheap turquoise satchel containing five book samples, a credit card machine and various bits of paperwork. The lot weighed an absolute tonne. As we left the room we were also handed a piece of paper, which proved to be our first company invoice. We were charged omething like $250 for the bag and contents, which was indicative of the mindset that made Southwestern their money. In this case, they charged their sales team retail prices on all samples. It was also why I was losing money before I'd even started selling, which made me slightly uneasy.
We were then led into a meeting room where our fellow pupils were being lectured by The Great Mort Utley ... from beyond the grave. Apparently, this motivational speaker was so great he could build just as much rapport when dead (in video form) as he could when alive. I am not a fan of motivational speaking. It is at best drab bullshit, and at worse a manipulative confidence trick. I feel that people taken in by a witty and uplifting story could really be made to believe anything. Alas, this was to be our life for the full five days of sales camp.
The routine was mind-numbing: we woke up at the motel absurdly early, dragged our impossibly expensive and heavy book bags up Atrium Way to Landers Plaza, were lectured for five hours by motivational speakers (some living, some dead), and spent the remaining time practising our sales pitch on each other. Over and over again ("Hi, Mrs Jones, you've probably heard about me. I'm the guy who's going round town spouting out bullshit...") We were taught about opening lines, building rapport, dealing with objections (the first objection, ignore. The second, use a standard line. The third, use a standard line. The fourth, get the hell out of there ... I now always deal with unwanted salesmen by barking four clear objections right at the beginning). All of this was learned off a script which had apparently been written by Charlie Brown in the 1950s. Scripted sayings like "Aw gee whiz, Mrs Jones ..." hardly rolled off my English tongue.
Lunch was served in the expensive canteen, which was again clearly intended to wring every last penny from the student sales force. There was no where else to eat and certainly no time to go to a supermarket in the evenings, and while most other places in the US Iwould feed you like a king for $2, here I could barely afford one slice of cheese and tomato pizza consumed from a plastic plate in the unlit canteen.
In the evenings we had our "execs" - short, I think, for "executive exercises" - which were intended to bond us and build confidence and enthusiasm, but which only left me drained, aloof and miserable. We were also supposed to do these with our team every single morning once we were selling in the field. I couldn't recall the execs in full, but this website thankfully jogged my memory.
Execs were to be conducted every day, first thing in the morning after breakfast and ideally in front of members of the public (say, in the parking lot of a diner or in front of a shopping mall. This was fine at sales school, but in the field it was just Zack and me and we kinda losed enthusiasm). First, someone would spontaneously hold their hand in the air and run around ina circle bellowing "Ohhhhhh!" at the top of their voice. The other salesmen would then join in until the circle is complete, whereupon you can put your arm down and start singing the following song:
It's a great day to be a bookman.
It's a great day I know.
It's a great day to be a bookman everywhere I go.
Goodbye no-nevers, goodbye doubts and fears
It's a great day to be a bookman. Be of good cheer.
I feel happy.
I feel terrific.
I feel GREAT!
Make no mistake - we had to sing this at least four times while clapping our hands and shouting beastly noises inbetween. Someone - presumably sick of this asinine song - would then leap into the centre of the circle and scream, "Now let me see that funky chicken!" Pretending deafness, we would ask him to repeat himself three times. It wouldn't always be a funky chicken, but that one was inexplicably popular. You could ask for anything. After three repeats, the cirle is broken and everyone is left screaming and jumping around pretending to be a funky chicken, or whatever else had been requested.
I hated this. More than that, I hated the people who took inspiration from this.
We were also one time divided up by gender. It later transpired the women were having their 'How Not To Be Raped' talk indoors, while the men were taken outside into the baking heat of the carpark and told to strip to their underpants. We did this without question, knowing that putting up resistance was futile in Sales Camp. We also did it despite the fact the car park was overlooked by residential housing. We were again made to form a circle, and started with a lifetime's worth of Maori war chants. We then had to turn to out right and put our hands around the waist of the person in front of us, and run in a circle chanting that stupid fucking bookman song again.
Ritual and the deferral of pleasure was also central to their lectures to us. We were told of the need to avoid enjoyment and instead do what would make us succesful. Some found this inspirational and declared themselves devotees to the deferral of pleasure, but I found it a disappointment. Who wants to be a success if it means having a rotten time? This may explain why I was not quick to take up the daily routine we were instructed to follow while selling in the field: we were required to get up at one minute to six in the morning, to take a cold shower precisely one minute long, and to leave the house and start selling in the field all day long until nine o'clock in the evening. We were then to phone in our performance figures to Jerry - number of doors knocked on, number of demonstrations performed and number of sales generated in dollars - and retire to bed. This was to be our routine every day except Sundays, which was officially our day off but which in fact we had to spend at a team meeting with our managers, discussing relative progress, awarding the most succesful, conducting longer versions of the daily execs and having one-on-one mentoring, which I suppose amounted to individual brainwashing according to necessity.
Looking back, I'm shocked I didn't walk out during Sales School (actually an obscure memory is telling me now that I did threaten to resign, if I was placed in the field with strangers rather than best friend Zack). The brief research I've undertaken to put together these memories in some semblence of order has identified a number of sites which accuse Southwestern of being a cult. While I think this is putting it a bit strongly, by the end of the Sales School training week I did definitely feel like the only one not to have been brainwashed. Everyone was wholly sold on the idea of sales and on the inante goodness of the company, and no one - not even Zack - would tolerate questions asked about its methods. I have always preferred my own company to that or organised groups, and I have always resisted authority. Those days in Sales School made me realise what it must have been like to be a lone voice of sanity speaking out against the worst excesses of the Nazis in Germany. Another cause of my inability to feel kinship to my fellow salesmen from Cambridge was the name they had assigned themselves: The Dog's Bollocks. Chosen, it seemed, on the mistaken assumption American people didn't know what bollocks were.
There were some fun times in Sales School - most of them spent making the most of a bad situation. I remember I'd stolen a bottle of wine at Trinity May Ball and taken it with us to Nashville, so Zack and I had fun drinking that one evening, although we felt less good about it at six the following morning. We also went to a Waffle House which was an extraorindary introduction to a dreadful American institution, and of course we mocked the people we were training with. In particular, a Chinese girl called Wee-Wee (when she told Zack her name his response was a laugh, and then ask "But seriously, what is your name?") who was serious beyond all measure; a boy and his girlfriend who were opposite ends of the body size spectrum (of whom Zack commented - after hearing them have sex in the bed next to his - "it's like a pencil having sex with an orange"); and a serious and incredibly motivated girl whose eyelashes we imagined to be the size of palm fronds, blowing us down the street as she batted her self-important eyes at us.
At the end of our five days of sales school, we met with our regional leader who assigned The Dogs Bollocks to Pennsylvania, which was subdivided and Zack and I were given our own territory in Carlise. We boarded another Greyhound bus, waved Nashville goodbye for eight weeks and set off north on our summer of adventure.
I didn't really expect to sell anything. I absolutely knew I couldn't keep to the official schedule. I'm not built like that. But, hey, that's a story for another time.
Skip to Part II
[Time: Summer 1997]
The four of us had travelled down together on a Greyhound bus from New York city, a hideous journey which had taken a full 24 hours. It was the middle of summer, the Greyhound's aircon had broken and its toilet was blocked up, all of which had fermented into a very unpleasant combination. I'd had one book to pass the time - a rather dry guide to writing screenplays - and we'd had just three stops en route for milling around. The bus stations had all looked identical: grey concrete affairs filled with the dregs of American society. Through these halls wandered us four young Cambridge graduates out to make their fortune (or, in my case, out to get drunk and have an adventure).
Heading to Nashvile had felt like the biggest mistake ever. This was my first time in the US and I'd only got to spend a day in New York. Unlike Nashville, Manhattan was beautiful, and full of people who seemed to have their fingers on the pulse. We'd eaten frozen yoghurt and gone to the top of the Empire State Building - a breathtaking view which gave the start of our adventure a magical quality, and which hasn't lost its impact on repeated viewings - and slept in a dorm at Columbia University, less magically in four beds to a room as though we were immigrants fresh off the boat. Two days before that I'd had my graduation ceremony back in Cambridge. My parents smiling in the rain, drinking beers, and crouched in the darkness blasting at my friends' parents with laser guns.
So, we stood in the dust in the middle of nowhere, Tennessee. We'd been booked by the Company into the Residence Inn, on the farside of the freeway, and so our Great American Adventure began with us dodging cars across six lanes of traffic, climbing over a fence, rolling through gorse bushes down a grassy embankment and then walking (or hobbling, in the case of the obeser member of our group, who'd we'd picked up at the airport and couldn't seem to shake off) through a remote car park in search of our motel. It turned out we'd been booked eight to a room: two to each of the double beds, and four on the floor. As we'd arrived late we were on the floor by default, so I found a quiet corner beside the fridge and staked out my territory with the single blanket left for my enjoyment. The hotel was very basic, with free lemon squash and popcorn, which comprised my main diet over the week.
I had planned to have a shower, maybe a cocktail and then check out the Waffle House up the road. Jeremy, our leader, had different ideas however. He caught us in the lobby and marched us off to sales camp, the filth of three days' travel still smeared across our faces. We crossed the turnpike and headed up a long, long road to Landers Plaza, the home of the Southwestern Sales School.
There were perhaps 300 other students at sales school, crammed in a rather drab glass and concrete building. We were each handed our bookbag for the season - a cheap turquoise satchel containing five book samples, a credit card machine and various bits of paperwork. The lot weighed an absolute tonne. As we left the room we were also handed a piece of paper, which proved to be our first company invoice. We were charged omething like $250 for the bag and contents, which was indicative of the mindset that made Southwestern their money. In this case, they charged their sales team retail prices on all samples. It was also why I was losing money before I'd even started selling, which made me slightly uneasy.
We were then led into a meeting room where our fellow pupils were being lectured by The Great Mort Utley ... from beyond the grave. Apparently, this motivational speaker was so great he could build just as much rapport when dead (in video form) as he could when alive. I am not a fan of motivational speaking. It is at best drab bullshit, and at worse a manipulative confidence trick. I feel that people taken in by a witty and uplifting story could really be made to believe anything. Alas, this was to be our life for the full five days of sales camp.
The routine was mind-numbing: we woke up at the motel absurdly early, dragged our impossibly expensive and heavy book bags up Atrium Way to Landers Plaza, were lectured for five hours by motivational speakers (some living, some dead), and spent the remaining time practising our sales pitch on each other. Over and over again ("Hi, Mrs Jones, you've probably heard about me. I'm the guy who's going round town spouting out bullshit...") We were taught about opening lines, building rapport, dealing with objections (the first objection, ignore. The second, use a standard line. The third, use a standard line. The fourth, get the hell out of there ... I now always deal with unwanted salesmen by barking four clear objections right at the beginning). All of this was learned off a script which had apparently been written by Charlie Brown in the 1950s. Scripted sayings like "Aw gee whiz, Mrs Jones ..." hardly rolled off my English tongue.
Lunch was served in the expensive canteen, which was again clearly intended to wring every last penny from the student sales force. There was no where else to eat and certainly no time to go to a supermarket in the evenings, and while most other places in the US Iwould feed you like a king for $2, here I could barely afford one slice of cheese and tomato pizza consumed from a plastic plate in the unlit canteen.
In the evenings we had our "execs" - short, I think, for "executive exercises" - which were intended to bond us and build confidence and enthusiasm, but which only left me drained, aloof and miserable. We were also supposed to do these with our team every single morning once we were selling in the field. I couldn't recall the execs in full, but this website thankfully jogged my memory.
Execs were to be conducted every day, first thing in the morning after breakfast and ideally in front of members of the public (say, in the parking lot of a diner or in front of a shopping mall. This was fine at sales school, but in the field it was just Zack and me and we kinda losed enthusiasm). First, someone would spontaneously hold their hand in the air and run around ina circle bellowing "Ohhhhhh!" at the top of their voice. The other salesmen would then join in until the circle is complete, whereupon you can put your arm down and start singing the following song:
It's a great day to be a bookman.
It's a great day I know.
It's a great day to be a bookman everywhere I go.
Goodbye no-nevers, goodbye doubts and fears
It's a great day to be a bookman. Be of good cheer.
I feel happy.
I feel terrific.
I feel GREAT!
Make no mistake - we had to sing this at least four times while clapping our hands and shouting beastly noises inbetween. Someone - presumably sick of this asinine song - would then leap into the centre of the circle and scream, "Now let me see that funky chicken!" Pretending deafness, we would ask him to repeat himself three times. It wouldn't always be a funky chicken, but that one was inexplicably popular. You could ask for anything. After three repeats, the cirle is broken and everyone is left screaming and jumping around pretending to be a funky chicken, or whatever else had been requested.
I hated this. More than that, I hated the people who took inspiration from this.
We were also one time divided up by gender. It later transpired the women were having their 'How Not To Be Raped' talk indoors, while the men were taken outside into the baking heat of the carpark and told to strip to their underpants. We did this without question, knowing that putting up resistance was futile in Sales Camp. We also did it despite the fact the car park was overlooked by residential housing. We were again made to form a circle, and started with a lifetime's worth of Maori war chants. We then had to turn to out right and put our hands around the waist of the person in front of us, and run in a circle chanting that stupid fucking bookman song again.
Ritual and the deferral of pleasure was also central to their lectures to us. We were told of the need to avoid enjoyment and instead do what would make us succesful. Some found this inspirational and declared themselves devotees to the deferral of pleasure, but I found it a disappointment. Who wants to be a success if it means having a rotten time? This may explain why I was not quick to take up the daily routine we were instructed to follow while selling in the field: we were required to get up at one minute to six in the morning, to take a cold shower precisely one minute long, and to leave the house and start selling in the field all day long until nine o'clock in the evening. We were then to phone in our performance figures to Jerry - number of doors knocked on, number of demonstrations performed and number of sales generated in dollars - and retire to bed. This was to be our routine every day except Sundays, which was officially our day off but which in fact we had to spend at a team meeting with our managers, discussing relative progress, awarding the most succesful, conducting longer versions of the daily execs and having one-on-one mentoring, which I suppose amounted to individual brainwashing according to necessity.
Looking back, I'm shocked I didn't walk out during Sales School (actually an obscure memory is telling me now that I did threaten to resign, if I was placed in the field with strangers rather than best friend Zack). The brief research I've undertaken to put together these memories in some semblence of order has identified a number of sites which accuse Southwestern of being a cult. While I think this is putting it a bit strongly, by the end of the Sales School training week I did definitely feel like the only one not to have been brainwashed. Everyone was wholly sold on the idea of sales and on the inante goodness of the company, and no one - not even Zack - would tolerate questions asked about its methods. I have always preferred my own company to that or organised groups, and I have always resisted authority. Those days in Sales School made me realise what it must have been like to be a lone voice of sanity speaking out against the worst excesses of the Nazis in Germany. Another cause of my inability to feel kinship to my fellow salesmen from Cambridge was the name they had assigned themselves: The Dog's Bollocks. Chosen, it seemed, on the mistaken assumption American people didn't know what bollocks were.
There were some fun times in Sales School - most of them spent making the most of a bad situation. I remember I'd stolen a bottle of wine at Trinity May Ball and taken it with us to Nashville, so Zack and I had fun drinking that one evening, although we felt less good about it at six the following morning. We also went to a Waffle House which was an extraorindary introduction to a dreadful American institution, and of course we mocked the people we were training with. In particular, a Chinese girl called Wee-Wee (when she told Zack her name his response was a laugh, and then ask "But seriously, what is your name?") who was serious beyond all measure; a boy and his girlfriend who were opposite ends of the body size spectrum (of whom Zack commented - after hearing them have sex in the bed next to his - "it's like a pencil having sex with an orange"); and a serious and incredibly motivated girl whose eyelashes we imagined to be the size of palm fronds, blowing us down the street as she batted her self-important eyes at us.
At the end of our five days of sales school, we met with our regional leader who assigned The Dogs Bollocks to Pennsylvania, which was subdivided and Zack and I were given our own territory in Carlise. We boarded another Greyhound bus, waved Nashville goodbye for eight weeks and set off north on our summer of adventure.
I didn't really expect to sell anything. I absolutely knew I couldn't keep to the official schedule. I'm not built like that. But, hey, that's a story for another time.
Skip to Part II
[Time: Summer 1997]
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