Archive
on drinking
I am talking here about alcohol, but not just that. It came to mind because the Berkshire Belle was doing a survey on-line and was asked about our family consumption of booze and soft drinks amongst other products and the survey didn’t seem to want to accept an accurate answer.
There was a time, thirty years or more ago when we first were together we used to keep a wine box in the ‘fridge and would have a glass when we got home from the office and top that up when we sat down to eat half an hour or so later. At weekends we would have a bottle of wine on the table on each of Friday, Saturday and Sunday evenings and would often have a gin and tonic on Sunday afternoon. Not a vast intake, but that was how we were.
Now we share a bottle of wine that lasts us for both Friday and Saturday dinners, or possibly Saturday and Sunday if Friday’s meal does not suit wine (a curry for example). On a bank holiday weekend we might splash out and have two bottles, or perhaps a gin and tonic on the day that we don’t have wine. Otherwise through the week we are largely alcohol free.
I do sometimes treat myself to a bottle of beer whilst cooking our meals; cooks privilege, and I do use alcohol in cooking quite often. Our consumption of alcohol has diminished considerably, not that we were boozers to start with.
Neither of us likes to lose control and many of the opportunities that we had for social drinking came through work where we had an almost paranoid desire not to do something that we would regret or, worse still, do something that we did not remember, but that others would. I became a master at making one bottle of beer last all evening to the point that I think more of it evaporated rather than went down my throat. The Berkshire Belle was a mistress of the art of circulating and leaving drinks behind her all around the room having just wet her lips on each.
I first got drunk at a works party when I was about 19. I was told the next day that people had been pouring unwanted spirits into my pint of beer. Hilarious, but on the way home I had lost my beautiful hand made leather wallet. The hangover was something too. The next time that I got drunk was at a do at the Cafe Royale. It was a similar cause, but this time it was the First Lady that I was married to who sabotaged me, swapping her continuously refilled wine glass for my rapidly emptying ones. I should have noticed, but I was in my brief spell as a pompous pratt and was too busy bending the ears of our fellow diners to notice until it was time to go and I had problems standing. A few brain cells had enough function to get my lady and I to a taxi and to our hotel, but I had a stinking headache the next morning.
By that time I was working in London in a very boozy environment. We took it in turns to take one lady director home every afternoon and it was not uncommon to have to put her over your shoulder to carry her in to her home. It was a lunchtime session at that job that put me, if not on the wagon, walking alongside. Our team was breaking up on conclusion of a project and we went off to a wine bar near St Pauls in London a few yards from our office. there were six of us to start with, but all of a sudden there was just Helen and I, both of whom were supposed to be testing software that afternoon. We finished the bottle we had before us and went back to our test room, put the coffee pot on and started work, b both now realising that we had really tied one on that lunchtime. As darkness fell, it was early December, we packed up and, between us, we found enough cash for Helen to get a taxi home to Hackney.
I headed off to Liverpool Street station and a train back to Marks They up in the top right corner of Essex and about an hour away on the train. Asleep before the train left the station the peculiar rhythm of the rails not long before my station awoke me and I got off in the right place for the short walk home. There I found my mother-in-law was visiting and I sat down alone to eat my tea, kept warm in the over. Then I went for a shower, came downstairs and cooked myself another meal. No-one was impressed, and nor was I when I got the credit card bill through as saw what I had spent in the wine bar.
This isn’t just about booze though, because I just like the physical sensation of drinking. I can down a pint of water in one go and frequently do. I like the mouth feel and the sensation of swallowing and a good pull on a glass of something cool is a great pleasure. Fortunately I like the taste of good wines and some spirits. I got into wines fifty years ago whilst working for a wine merchant and can sip a good wine to make it last. I have also developed a taste for single malts, except for the peaty ones and can make a gentleman’s measure last all evening.
On my travels I have always asked to try local brews, alcoholic or otherwise. In Bogota I drank Columbian coffee and Club Columbia beer. In Tripoli I drank coffee Arabic style. Asking for a local drink or dish helps break the ice when travelling and whilst I might not be a great fan of what I get, trying something different always opens the door to finding a new favourite. Working out in China and Thailand I tried various black and green teas all of which I liked to some degree, and it is a mug of tea that I will finish this musing off with.
Many years ago I was a member of the Civil Emergency Corps and on one overnight exercise in the pouring rain we had been searching for casualties. Soaked to the skin and with the night sky beginning to lighten we were told that all casualties had been found and we were standing down. Arriving back at the base we got the news that one casualty was missing after all and in our search area; we had to go back. By the time that we had found our man and returned to base there was no milk left and the tea in the urn was well stewed. Still, it was hot and we were cold. Then one of the team produced a flask of rum and poured a tot into each much. Never have I enjoyed a drink more. It may have been stewed and black and I do not like rum, but it still sticks in my mind some 52 years later.
on ethnicity and nationalism
Perhaps I am straying into dangerous waters here, but it what I am musing on on this morning so here I go. It is on my mind because I have been reading some of the media coverage of the build up to the soccer World Cup competition and the words of one fan have started me off on this topic.
The chap concerned admits that he has concerns about going as a fan because of his sexual leaning, but he feels that he needs to go as an English fan and wants to support his team in the competition, even though homosexuality is against the law where the tournament is being held. Sport does encourage nationalist fervour; it makes money out of it, but it is it worth putting yourself at risk over?
I used to enjoy watching sport and, like music, seeing it live enhances the enjoyment so I can understand, to a degree, a desire to go to a World Cup where the opportunity to afford the time and cost may only come around once in a lifetime. I have seen the England football team play in a World Cup qualifiing game at Wembley and, further back, have watched the England cricket team at Lords in test matches against the West Indies and India, but my interest in these was not so much in support of my country as an opportunity to watch the sport being played at the highest level: I did not care too much who won.
My ethnic background is, for about three generations, English. Beyond that it gets a little murky as I am, like most British people, a bit of a mongrel. My surname is classic Welsh; I am a Son of Owen. However that misleads because many people from Wales moved to Ireland where the surname is also common. Some of my ancestors moved there to get away from invaders, forced West by an influx from mainland Europe, or from Eastern tribes who were also faced with continental immigration: The problems of today are nothing new for, if you think about it, there wasn’t anyone here at the beginning and we are all ancestors of immigrants.
My family background on the ;paternal side can be traced back to Ireland and that trail goes cold with a fire that destroyed parish records back in 16 something or other. So my Welsh ancestors had gone over at some point before that, but here comes a small irony in that one of the biggest moves of that sort came after the Norman conquest when Bill’s mob took Welsh people as serfs (slaves if you prefer) over with them.
Now the ironic thing is that the Norman’s achieved their conquest of the UK with help from, amongst others, mercenaries from the Germanic states, (Germany as we know it did not exist until the latter half of the 1800s). My background on the maternal side can be traced back to those Germanic people so there is a good chance that my Mum’s andcestors either chased my Dad’s lot out of their homes or were part of taking them forcibly to the Emerald Isle.
I do understand the difference between English and British. My passport has me down as a citizen of the United Kingdom and, if asked, will say that I am British. That is an inescapable fact; I was born here. Technically, having be born in Berkshire, I am English and there have been many times when in the company of Scottish, Welsh or Irish (both North and South) people I have allowed my Englishness to come to the fore in banter, but I have never really felt strongly about it. Having a laugh over where I come from is one thing, but I can’t take it seriously.
Something else that I understand is that the European Union and Europe are not the same thing. I am glad that I am no longer a citizen of the former, but have long seen myself as a European. Whilst I have Celtic blood physically I take after my maternal side and am tall, blue eyed and lean towards fair so perhaps there is something in that that colours my judgement. In any case, England is in the United Kingdom and that is, in turn, in the continent of Europe.
I am an ethnic mongrel if you go back down the family tree a bit and that is maybe why I have no strong ethnic feelings nor nationalist ones. I was born here in England, have lived most of my life here and will probably die here. I like my country, but I have liked many of the places that I have visited around the world and would have been quite happy to have moved to some of them. Would I fight for my country? Yes, in the sense of defending it, although I’m not sure what use a seventy yer old would be these days. I suspect that that is just a base instinct about protecting one’s territory.
Perhaps it is that same base instinct that comes to the fore in people like the one that I mentioned early in this musing, that makes you want to support your country’s sporting squads. I can only speak for myself. I came into existence as a result of two people having, I hope, a good time. For me the location happened to be in Southern England and that hangs a label on me. I have some pride left in my country and I am not ashamed to be British, even if I don’t like what has become of the place in many ways. I just cannot get impassioned about my nationality in the way that so many others do.
Nor can I get excited about my ethnic background, although there may be something in my genes that has made me feel so at home in Northern Germany from my first visit to Kiel in the mid-seventies and then working in Hamburg and Hannover in the nineties. It could also have something to do with the way that I have felt so comfortable on the Emerald Isle for it was long after working in these places that I found out about my roots.
I am who I am and I feel no need to get excited about where I came from. It is all in the past and I can’t do anything about it. All I have ever been able to do is to try and work with the cards that I have been dealt. I have spent moire than half of my adult life with the woman of my dreams and am very content in my own little world. Life has been hard at times, but I have been very lucky along the way and am content with my lot. I don’t need to feel that sense of national or ethnic identity that seems so important to others.
on immortality
Someone commenting on my upcoming 70th birthday got us into talking about life coming to an end sooner rather than later. This has been on my mind recently anyway; the Berkshire Belle and I took out funeral plans last year. My demise certainly is not too far off in relative terms for reaching the three score years and ten that was, when I was a lad, reckoned to be one’s expectancy as a man.
I long ago came to terms with death, probably some time in my forties and have no problem with shuffling off. I have loved experiencing life and death will be the last experience I get. I would prefer not to linger or suffer too much pain in my demise, but accept that it is coming.
As an atheist I do not believe in any afterlife. Once my heart stops I will be gone and that’s it. Quite honestly the thought that there might be more appalls me regardless of whether it is upstairs or down (and I have no doubt that I would be going down). Life is hard enough without having to go on forever. This line of thought caused some distress to one of my religious friends who thought that it was a bleak outlook, but I don’t think so. It gives me comfort to know that it will, one day, all be over.
I have enjoyed most of my life so far. There are times that I try to forget and there are things that I have done that I would, with hindsight, prefer not to have done, but all of the steps that I took along the way led me to the Berkshire Belle and the love of my life. There is nothing to regret about prior relationships because they all taught me things that helped when it came to the big one. Likewise I do not regret my first marriage because it produced two children of whom I am proud. I regret the pain that comes when relationships end, but such things are all part of life.
None of us ask to be born, but we turn up, planned or not. What we do with the hand that we are dealt is largely up to us. There are always external factors that we can;’t control, but we can choose how we react to the slings and arrows and that will shape us. I have had a good life, even if I was, at times, bad. I am still reasonably fit, most of me still works pretty well albeit that some bits are well past there prime. I am still working as my eighth decade approaches and am making do with what I have.
Whatever talents I have do not include any that might make me immortal. I can’t paint or make music that will stand after I have gone. I write, but none of that is likely to live on too long after I go and I have not invented anything that might advance to race. I will not care once I am gone whether or not I am remembered and I am happy with that.
I have spent more than half of my adult life, almost half of my life for far, with the woman of my dreams and I am content. Immortality? You can keep it; I don’t want it.
on HM Queen Elizabeth II
I was going to write another humorous post for today. Her Majesty was well known for having a good sense of humour and I felt that a funny story on the day of her funeral would be appropriate. However, the connection between my mind and my fingers has failed to come up with anything that I am happy with and so instead I thought that I would share my only experience of being in her presence.
Belfast is one of those wonderful maritime cities around the UK and I fell in love with the place back in the mid-1980s even though it was tough place to love back then with The Troubles at the height. I was flying back and forth, staying there a few days at a time at most, other times in and out on the same day and, because of security concerns, not seeing much more than the airport at Aldergrove and our offices in Queen Street and Tomb Street. Two of my colleagues were murdered in separate incidents at that time.
Over the tears things got better and I was able to move around the city on my own in perfect safety. By the early 2000s I was again a regular visitor and on one sunny day I had been to a couple of morning meetings, had lunch and was walking out from the city centre to call in at one of the sites that I managed down at Clarendon Dock.
I was enjoying the architecture when I turned a corner and encountered a crowd. Barriers lined the street to keep the crowds on the pavement and there was a heavy police presence. As I squeezed along between the back of the crowd and the railings I became aware that many of the crowd were expecting something to happen at any moment and I paused as a motorcade pulled up outside a building opposite.
A huge cheer went up as the doors of the building were opened and The Queen and Prince Philip emerged, p[asuing on the steps to wave to us all long the street. Then they were into the car and away. It had been a magical moment and completely, for me, out of the blue. It is the only time that I saw my monarch in person and the twenty feet that separated us the closest that I would come. It remains a very special moment for I am an unashamed royalist and have the utmost respect for the way that HM The Queen ruled. I was born between her ascension to the throne and her coronation, so I have lived my live so far as an Elizabethan.
I have said my own goodbye in private and today is for others. I am not that good with funerals (I won’t be going to mine), so today I might look in on some of the event on TV for we British do this stuff so well. Other than that I will be having a quiet day with the Berkshire Belle, the queen of my heart.
Hoping that your day passes well too. Stay safe.
on words
Yesterday, during the tidying up of my blogs, I read something that I had written mentioning Dan Ruth an American columnist and Pulitzer Prize winner who I first encountered when he wrote for the Tampa Tribune. His politics differ from mine perhaps, but he has a way with words that drew me to his column whenever we were over in FLA.
I learned to read early in life, partly because I was a sickly child and was confined to bed fairly frequently. We were a poor family, but working for larger country estates all of which had library rooms and a willingness to lend books to the children of their servants. Armed with a cheap atlas and a Webster’s dictionary, both bought cheaply at jumble sales, I taught myself to read and to work out where in the world the action that I was reading about was; even fictional works have some factual basis for their locations.
And so began a love of words and language. I have never been much of a linguist, although I used to have sufficient command of French to have negotiated commercial contracts en Francais, and could get by with some factory German when I used to be over there on business, but there is a beauty in some languages that I could appreciate even if I could not understand it. I used to frequent Speaker’s Corner in Hyde Park as a teenager just to listen to those on the soapbox for some of them were very good indeed.
Words, written or spoken well, are a joy and it was one of the lessons I learned when the time came for me to get up in front of people and talk. The performance is one element, and an important one, but the choice and order of the words that you use is crucial to get across your message. My experience goes back way beyond PowerPoint and similar packages to the days of flip charts and overhead slides and I was lucky enough to have some professional training to help me. I am not sure that I would have had the confidence to talk for 30-40 minutes without note otherwise.
As I began to write for business the skills of crafting a letter came to me through experience and the support of a long lost business resource, the typing pool: Word processor packages were both boon and curse. The I began to get paid for writing, and the discipline of banging out 1600-1800 words per month for a feature article taught me more about using words to best effect as did the influence of a good editor and the way that the judicious change of a word or two here and there could turn a respectable piece into a good one was a skill that I admired, even if I have not, as yet, grasped it myself.
Another big learning curve was when I began to speak and have my words simultaneously translated. I had already come to understand that I needed to prune out the fillers and padding that permeate our normal speech for people whose first language was not English, but working with translators took that to another level. I used to wear a headset so that I could listen to them, not to check their work, but to pace my speech so that we could match each other’s delivery.
It is a great sadness to me these days to see so many people completely disinterested in their language. Communication is a great social skill. We brag that it is what separates us from the animals and yet it is a skill in decline. Political correctness has robbed us of the great orators. I was so disappointed when I heard Obama give a speech once at a military base. I was watching on television with considerable anticipation because I had heard that he was good, but he went on, and on, and on, and on. His delivery was awful too; speak a few words looking right, pause, look left and say a bit more, pause, look right and speak again. I know that the right, left stuff was to read off the two autocues, but it was too long, way too long. And he was just boring.
The power of spoken words to inspire is perhaps best illustrated by the bad examples; the rabble rousers. I can’t understand most of what Hitler was banging on about, but 5 minutes of listening to one of his speeches and the urge to pack up and head for Poland becomes strong. Bad guys who can talk well will always inspire a following, so why have we allowed the PC brigade to neuter the good guys and gals?
I am not one of the grammar police (if you’ve read this far it should be self evident), I just like to see the language used well and I find myself reading older books more often than recent stuff because they are better written. I prefer older films because the dialogue is better written and delivered.
Yes, I am an old git and will not be around much longer, but I do care about the future for those that I will leave behind and the ability to communicate is as important to us as any of the other crises the planet faces. It is a cornerstone of civilisation, so nurture and protect it as much as any other part of our environment. All words matter.
on blogging
A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away I began blogging. This was my first blog and it was in tended to work around my business identity as ThatConsultantBloke and so it kept to topics that were relevant to the sort of people that I wanted to work with. There were other things that I wanted to talk about though, mostly on topics that I was interested in and so other blogs appeared.
Then I got to another junction in the road where one of my other blogs became an arm of another business venture that I had and so there was another split so that I could balance work and pleasure there too. This blog refined into something of a weekly ritual for me and it has been the one that gets more of my attention, but it was, at one point, one of eleven blogs that I was writing on. And most of those blogs had their own Twitter and Facebook feeds too.
Towards the end of the last decade I slimmed my operations down and closed several of the blogs, but this one and the other business blog still needed upkeep, but my capacity to keep the blogging levels up still fell short of the resource I had available and so content suffered. Then lockdown came and I started doing something different with this blog, but that too has tailed off this year as times move on.
I am going to be 70 very soon now and I think that I need to look at my remaining blogs. The last big revision saw me merge my personal websites into these blogs and it strikes me now that keeping them all going is simply an act of vanity. I have run down both of my businesses and have no need for promotion of them anymore so what to do next?
A lot of the content of the blogs has some value and so I don’t want to let it go so the likelihood is that I will merge this blog with The Voice of the Bloke at the Back and merge my two motoring and transport related blogs into one. That will leave me with three blogs (there is a music related one too). I need to read up on how I do that and also to understand the consequences of doing it so I have some research to do.
So you may see some changes in the coming weeks. The days are drawing in and I will be spending less time in the garden so I can focus a bit on sorting these blogs out. That will probably see a significant change to the way that they look, but it all good stuff for keeping the brain cells active.
Thanks for stopping by.
PS: I have just realised that a large number of posts have vanished from my blogs. It appears that when I thinned things out earlier in the year, and gave up one of the author identities that I was using, anything that I had written under that ID is lost. C’est la vie.
on talent, or the lack thereof
As I trawl around cyberspace I am often offered the chance to buy a t-shirt with the legend “I play guitar because I like it, not because I am good at it”. I also get the ukulele equivalent. I am tempted, but I doubt that I would wear one too often and they probably are not worth the money anyway, regardless of how true the sentiment is.
So far in my life I have not yet mastered playing a musical instrument. I had some piano lessons as a teenager, but no-one seemed to want to teach me how to play like Jerry Lee Lewis. A move of house saw the piano sold and I next found myself playing drums, not because I could, but because I had the van to transport the drums and one night when the drummer failed to appear I took over. My career as a stickman didn’t last too long anyway: Glaring furiously at the bass player when you reverse the beat coming off a fill doesn’t make you right.
Then my little sister and her fiancé bought me a Spanish guitar for my 21st birthday. I tried to teach myself and then turned to friends, but it doesn’t help when they take the thing off you and rip off something immediately recognisable with no apparent effort. Now I have four guitars and four ukuleles on which I make noises, some of which I can recognise, and, one one occasion, so did a fellow shopper in a Florida guitar shop when he joined in with me. It is the only time, so far, that I have played guitar in a duo.
There was a time in my driving career when I made the observation that there are a lot of people who can get a tune out of a musical instrument, but comparatively few have the genuine talent to really play one. I was making the comparison with driving, in that loads of people can operate the controls of a car adequately enough to get from A to B, but very few of them can really drive. I could, and have been a very adequate wheelman in my time in a wide variety of vehicles, but playing an instrument? No. I just do not have the feel, let alone the talent.
I play my various instruments because I love them all. I enjoy the look, smell and feel and the effort of trying to make recognisable noises helps to keep my grey matter active. Yes there is an element of “all the gear and no idea”, but I can live with that. It is probably getting a bit too late for me to get to the point of being able to play with others. Covid arrived on the day that I got a telephone number for a local ukulele group and so I did not make the call. Maybe at some point I will.
Maybe at some point I will also make that breakthrough and become sort of competent, maybe not. One thing is sure: I will not be buying one of those t-shirts.
If you are interested, my musical alter ego blog can be found here.
on humour
I wrote a few months back about personal preferences and touched on humour. I got a bit carried away with my thoughts and wrote so much that I decided to cut it out and give it a post to itself, so here we go.
Humour is very personal and I recognised the generation changes as a teenager. With my parents I had enjoyed radio shows like Hancock’s Half Hour, The Navy Lark, Round the Horne and Beyond My Ken. But then shows like I’m Sorry I’ll Read That Again (ISIRTA) came along that I loved, but just bewildered my Mum and Dad. Perhaps that Is why I find very little funny in contemporary humour.
Personal preferences are here again though, and the Wokingham Wonder and I have different tastes.Fortunately we also have a large overlap and, for me, one of the joys in our relationship is that she is tuned into my tendency to go off at tangents from conversations. I have a love of aural humour, possibly from having had so much exposure to radio comedy (we did not have a TV at home on a regular basis until the second half of the Sixties).
That is also probably why I was so disappointed with Monty Python and The Goodies where my heroes from ISIRTA moved on to form part of the former and all of the latter. Visually the humour just did not work for me. I do enjoy visual humour though and two of my favourite films are comedies, (although I did not know that when I went into the cinema to see them). I went to see Blazing Saddles because the lady I was with at the time loved Westerns and I loved it (she didn’t). Mostly it is visual humour, but the dialogue is superb and there are plenty of aural gags in there too. Some years later the lady that I was first married to loved disaster movies and so we went to see Airplane!, me reluctant, her keen and, once again I loved it and she hated it. Airplane! has aural and visual gags aplenty and I was still finding new ones as late as the fifth or sixth time of seeing it.
I love words and playing with them. Spoonerisms and malapropisms litter my conversations at home. English is full of opportunities with things like words ending in ough; plough, cough and so on. Fortunately the Berkshire Belle is sharp enough, and knows me well enough, to pick up on my playing with words and she rarely misses a beat. Often when I go off on one tangent she will pick it up and change direction again.
Written humour I enjoy too, but again some of the modern humour misses for me. Oddly I got into Douglas Adams from the TV adaptation of Hitchhikers Guide and then read the books, enjoying the ingongruity and juxtaposition of ideas. A fello enthusiast for these books amongst my colleagues suggested the Discworld books of Terry Pratchett and lent me several, but these let me down somewhat. There would begin a thread that I thought was going to be brilliant, but they all petered out. It was like watching football or rugby from high in the stand as what could be a great play develops from the back. Just as you get excited with where things are going the wrong pass is made and all is lost. Load of people love the book though and good luck to them.
I enjoy humour with style and wit and much of that seems to be lacking nowadays where crudity and personal attacks seem so often to be what gets the laughs. If that floats your boat then so be it; I am all for people enjoying themselves and having a laugh is a daily necessity for me. If I find different things funny to you then so what? After all, it’s a funny old world.
on inventory counts
At work we have just had one of our periodic stock counts and this triggered a memory from just over thirty years ago. It was the beginning of April and I had just taken over my first significant operational command; three warehouses on one site plus part of the office block alongside. I had just over 350 people working for me and, just to add some spice, the computerisation of the operation went live on the morning that I took over.
It was not a great start because the computer system had been poorly specified and it ground to a halt halfway through the first morning, partly because the results of the stock count over the weekend were still being input. By the afternoon we had the first results back from the data input and whilst two of the three product categories we about right the third was showing us a little more than £30M over the expected figure.
One of the problems when you count stock is that the unit that you are counting may not be obvious. For example take a item that comes in boxes of 200 and where 56 such boxes constitute a full pallet. What does that full pallet get recoded as? 1, 56 or 11,200? My own team would have known the answer, but the annual stock count was always done by a professional team of valuers to ensure probity and so errors were always possible. The discrepancy of £30M was going to be down to either an error in the count unit, how that had been interpreted for data input or just an input error.
We set up a report to run on overnight processing (that’s how it worked in those days) and called it a day. The next morning we found that our friends in IT had not checked the paper level on the computer room printer and it had run out about 20% of the way through the report (these were the days of the piano lined paper reports). My colleague the Finance Director had assigned his Chief Accountant to assist and my head of the product category was leading from our side as we searched for the discrepancy, but with so little of the stock report available they were a little hampered.
After lunch things improved when we found one error and got the discrepancy down to £22M. The IT team told us that processing the report that we had asked for and printing it would take 10 hours and so we shut the computer system down again and set it running the report in mid-afternoon, this time with a new box of paper. Then I got the call to go and see the MD…
My colleague the Finance Director, I’ll call him Dick, had decided to duck any blame and dump it on my team, so when I walked into the office there he was looking smug and there were a few of the other senior managers around the table to watch the new boy get shafted. The MD was apoplectic and wanted someone fired. He was a bully, but iike many such people he was also a coward and he was frightened that, if this was a genuine overstock, his neck was on the block. I was the new kid in town, but I needed to fight my team’s corner and to show that whilst I was a new arrival, I hadn’t just come in on the turnip cart.
Looking around the assembled faces I could have suggested that the Purchasing Director might like to see which of his team had bought all of the excess stock, if it did exist, but there was no point in starting a new fight as they all knew who had convened the meeting and why and so I decided that as “Dick” had tried to drop my team in the smelly stuff I would have to take him on.
Smiling, I asked if Dick was happy that the previous year’s count had been accurate. He was so I proposed that, if we did have all of the extra stock, the additional purchases must have been made since then. He agreed again, but slightly hesitantly. I asked if had he not noticed any unusually large invoices, for his team would have been invoice matching against deliveries before paying the bills and the sort of value we were talking about must have stood out, surely? After all, such invoices would have been at his level of authority to sign off. Was it not also the case that we would have gone over budget and would he not have picked up on that at the time? Perhaps if he could remember any such event it would help us to narrow down where the problem was. Blood drained from Dick’s face as the MD switched his ire from me to him.
All of a sudden Dick was backing away from blaming my people and agreeing that the problem was either a stock unit error or one of data input after all. I could have gone on to suggest that, in the latter case, that was his fault too as the data input had been done by his team, but the initial crisis was over and it was agreed that we would review the situation the next afternoon. I had made my point.
The next morning we had the full report that we needed and found the main error in minutes. By the end of the day we had found a few more and were within 0.02% of where we expected to be, and all of the errors were due to data input bar one where the wrong stock unit had been used. No-one got fired and I went on to enjoy three good years in that job.
We got the computer system working too, I later married the lady that the MD was threatening to fire and, all these years later, we are still together.
I like happy endings.
on performance reporting (again)
My loathing of KPIs is well documented amongst previous scribbling here, but recently I felt the bile rising again when I was asked to provide some comments on the Crown Commercial Service framework for Facilities Management.
I know well the old adage that if you can’t measure then you can’t manage, but almost everyone that I have heard trotting that line out couldn’t manage anyway, at least by my book. Of course you need some metrics to manage by, but which ones? The best data is that which comes when recorded from the act of performing the work because it is free. In many situations you can look at almost any aspect of your operation and see what you are doing, where, when and how often. This is great as long as you don’t spend too much time looking at it.
But all too often there is a contractual requirement to report on things that you need to collate and compile information of and doing that takes time, and therefore money. Now I don’t mind spending money if I am investing it wisely, but I don’t like wasting it and all too often I have had to throw cash away on producing KPIs that have been little more than an excuse to waste more time talking about.
In the brief on the new CCS framework there is a reference to holding monthly meeting to report on, amongst other things, a raft of Social Justice activities. In other words people are going to be asked to demonstrate that they are obeying the law and other regulations. This is a principle that I first remember coming across in the bribery and corruption regulations a few years back and basically this requires you to prove that you are innocent. That is wrong on every level, but it seems that our civil servants don’t think so.
It is a fundamental part of due diligence during the vetting of contractors during the tender phase to ensure that they have appropriate compliance processes in place and, once the contract is placed there is no reason why the client should not seek to check these processes. But to have the contractor report on how they are applying them monthly is just ludicrous.
We should be cutting red tape, not adding to it and I think that this sort of thing is a national scandal. This year I reach my three score years and ten. So far the Grim Reaper has had his hands around my throat three or four times and yet I have wriggled free each time. If the above is the way that the world genuinely wants things then if the bloke with the scythe was to knock on the door now I would rush out screaming “Take me, Take me now.”
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