One small step

One crisp fall morning my childhood friend, we’ll call him Jez, set off for work, worried. As the door to the flat share slammed behind him, Jez concentrated on the patterned paving slabs under his tread, the leaves spattered across them. He then thought how ‘leaf textured’ would have been more autumnal, more “seasons of mist and mellow fruitfulness” than “spattered”, which sounded like a fatality in a video game. As Jez loved video games however, his mind offered “spattered”, which brought him back to worrying. 

Passing over irregular cobbles where the street met the main road, Jez thought of us all outside the pub a few short years before. The bulls eyed windows, their small ledges underneath for our glasses in a post-exam summer. A summer partly spent thrashing us all gaming Jez thought, which then reminded him of “spattered” and made the cobbles suddenly sinister, like the uniquely awful stumbles they could inflict where your ankle bends sideways and your splayed form patterns the pavement. Jez stepped clear of the cobbles and joined the stiffly speeding throng to work on featureless tarmac. 

My friend was anxious because he was 21 and starting his first job since graduating. He was anxious also because he’d moved to London only days prior and adjusting to a major international city is hard when you’re from a rural backwater. Where we’d both grown up, you’d greet and thank your bus driver and the bus would be numbered 1 or perhaps 1a. Now my friend was headed to the 430 stop before he’d change to the Piccadilly Line and grate toward the City underground with millions of other people. Only then would he arrive at his new employer's office, an office unlike any of the places we’d secured work. 

Jez had a hallowed graduate position within the tech department of a finance firm. The firm was in essence a bank but a bank so hyper-professional, so intimidating, so ruthlessly effective, they’d seemingly evolved past this definition, possibly out of sheer contempt. Banks sat on a high street and welcomed you with a collectable porcelain piggy bank and hopes of a prudent future. The name of Jez’s new employer alone sounded like the word ‘hope’ being fed into a shredder. Our cohort weren’t naive but we weren’t mean either, and the employer we’ll call Shredders sounded like it valued meanness quite a bit. Pondering this, Jez glumly felt an era of gaming and consoles pixelating from his mind and joyless office appliances rematerializing in their place. 

On the Tube, crammed tightly between silent commuters, Jez closed his eyes against a sense of inadequacy. He wanted to vanish. But also he wanted to be paid. Vanish from the possibility of being shredded professionally if not literally but not vanish so much that he couldn’t claim a wage. Jez opened his eyes. People around him, everyone it seemed, looked indifferent to the vulnerability he was feeling. Immediately in front of him, a smartly dressed woman only a few years older, radiated confidence from the coolness of her gaze to the venomous heel of her stiletto. Pulling into Earl’s Court my friend prayed madly that he could live as this unperturbable corporate ideal for the duration of his first day.

Jez remained on board as, like stock released, other commuters shouldered and stamped their way off the Tube carriage. The woman was among them, headed to the District Line and an alternate route toward The City Jez imagined. He was watching the back of her head retreat from him in the steady pack of shuffling and shoving, when suddenly there was a break in rhythm. Without any apparent cause, the woman seemed to stagger. Out of sight the stiletto of her right high heel had landed, with incredible accidental marksmanship, square in the narrow gutter for the carriage’s sliding doors. The stiletto stuck fast but the pack of commuters kept moving and the woman with them, taking a clean step out of her wedged shoe and being carried away from it onto the platform.

Back on the carriage, even if anyone had noticed any of this, they didn’t react. Shocked out of his reverie though, Jez leapt forward to help like the well brought up country lad he was. Pulling hard on the heel while its owner tried to move back through the crowd toward him, Jez freed the shoe but with an effort that carried him back a pace. This was unfortunate as it was the exact distance he needed to stop the doors slamming shut, which with unusual alacrity for the Piccadilly Line at Earl’s Court, they now did. In the awful silence of the mostly empty carriage, the remaining  passengers stared at my friend as he conspicuously pinched a delicate high heel between his thumb and forefinger.

Jez looked through the slammed Tube door. The half shod woman looked back at him. Between their gaze was plexiglass and the shoe, which Jez continued to hold aloft in an absurd ‘did you drop this?’ gesture. Everyone on the Tube continued to look at my friend, who tried to work out what he should do. He felt both blameless for the predicament and entirely responsible at the same time. He also felt he had limited options and again, that this wasn’t his fault but also again, that everyone expected him to do something. Instead the Tube began to move out of the station, the muffled sounds of the platform receding. With a pained expression, my friend locked eyes with the woman one last time. Her own eyes no longer cool, were instead hardening into the unmistakable beginnings of hostility. 

None of us know what happened to the woman on the platform. Or even to the shoe. My friend never saw the one again and can’t remember the other. We do know that he arrived at his new job in a less than relaxed state. We also know that he worked there in a state of lightly compliant terror for a while, before breaking into the video game industry he’s now a leader in. His first studio was owned by Disney. If the shoe fits.

Tek a look around thee

The bulk of my first real job was cold calling. When I told friends, typical responses included “I couldn’t do that”, “I can’t stand the phone” and “I’d rather die”. Despite this I still feel calling is the best way to establish a direct connection with someone you want to do business with. To do it with serenity you just need a genuine purpose and genuine curiosity. It’s hard to be both curious and agitated and I write that as a regular reader of the guardian.

My favorite example is the Check Back, which would be part of my procedure for calling a client a second time. Despite coming after an initial conversation, it also set up the first. I was trained in its specifics, under a different name, after I’d graduated and started work in London but I’d already learned the principle in an entirely different industry and setting.

Entering the kitchen, we were met with “Alright yer slags?”, which was half yelled with clear delight over Limp Bizkit’s “Take a Look Around”. It was 2000, I was 19, in my second year of university and working to help pay for that at a large pub outside Leeds. 

Ignoring the obscene greeting, John, our licensee, continued what he’d been saying.

“...you’ve put the order in front of Jodi…”, without turning, John jerked his head backward toward our cheerily abusive chef who’d resumed stirring a vat of soup with one hand while idly reaching for the kitchen’s radio volume with his non be-ladeled hand “...Whoever’s sous that day…

“Keeeeeeetchen BEEEEEETCH!” corrected Jodi in an affected and Yorkshire accented Spanish trill

“...puts the order on this board after food’s under hot lamp, you hear bell, you tek food t’table”. As Jodi had turned up the radio, John’s own volume had risen also, while his accent became more pronounced. A tone of battling coarseness filled the tiled kitchen, like Sean Bean rap battling Fred Durst through a reverb pedal. 

I looked at the white numbered black board and its half banged in nails. It was just after a lunch service and only a few orders were still open, their square stubs of paper speared below a corresponding table number. The rest of the board was half full of stubs that had been folded in two and then run through. I asked what these meant.

“Check Backs. If you see one that’s not folded, go check everything’s ok with the food, the table ‘just want to check back with you that food’s all right’ you can say or ‘did you get all the food?’. If it is, if they did, come back and fold the order on the board here. Now we know they’re taken care of” John said in a lull before Jodi leapt through the air, neck of his ladle held like a guitar in one hand, while his other thrust the scoop provocatively - and almost certainly on purpose - into his crotch, landing between us at the exact moment the chorus crashed back to life. 

Five years after that pub, when I was training new salespeople in London, I would ask if they’d ever worked in hospitality and if they remembered a version of the black chalkboard. Usually they would. I’d remind them that any initial call was an opportunity to set up a Check Back. You’re offering to send (and at no cost!) an example of something relevant to a fellow professional in your industry. You then automatically have a purpose in catching up at a later date and can be curious about the response. What did they think of the copy? Had it even turned up? Was it different from what was promised? Maybe they preferred it? Almost anything was a sincere reason to Check Back short of asking if they wanted more sauces but even then, better Ketchup than an aimless catch up.

What An Eccentric Slovenian Dialectical Materialist With An Interest in Lacanian Psychoanalysis Taught Me About Brevity

Our publisher looked tense. The audience felt eager. The speaker was disheveled, as if someone had tousled his hair and somehow continued the action throughout his entire head and torso.

In the short time our magazine’s book store had been open, several lessons had been learned. One concerned managing the staff from the nearby British Library at parties (it’s always the quiet ones). Another was certain events would always sell out. Alan Bennett was one. Slavoj Žižek, permanent nemesis of spell check, was another.

As our publisher, a model of Oxford formal first confidence on regular outings, stressed the need to keep questions to a reasonable length (a stipulation more often directed at an audience) his unease bordered on the queasy. Žižek sold out our venue and most others because his intellectual originality was matched only by the zeal with which he expressed it. A zeal that struggled to observe hard stop times, or most patience, or nearby licensing laws.

Our publisher took his seat, conspicuously within grappling distance of Žižek, the first hints of condensation gathered in the corners of the shop’s windows and we began to hear ideas from “The Puppet and the Dwarf”.

The exact details of what followed are for another time but more than one audience member left, another screamed and the windows clouded over entirely as Žižek perspired through his multiple layers in a state of feverish evangelism that bordered on the incontinent.

I was 24 at the time and had adored Žižek from my MA course. At the end of the event I queued up for the book signing, digesting a earlier Žižek remark that “the book I wrote BEFORE: Raaaabish! I was completely wrong” and waited for him to sign it.

When I reached the front of the queue Žižek seized my copy and demanded my name like I might be a lost nephew. I gave it only for him to fix me with a wide eyed stare.

“Comrade!” he bellowed, before continuing “You have THE perfect international name!”

I hadn’t expected this. I liked my name but mostly thought about it as an ultimate diminutive, the one that crossed Dickens’s mind perhaps before he reached “Pip”. I grinned and leaned toward my academic hero, hoping to hear more about my singular name.

“It is perfect because, EVEN AN IMBECILE can pronounce it” Žižek clarified with delight.

“And also spell it” he added, with a flourish of the pen.