Behaving Like Adolescents At The Home of Cricket

I was watching the England vs West Indies test match at Lords over the last two afternoons (no surprise there) and every now and again the executive boxes flashed into view. I imagined what would be going on in them and felt jealous. The vast majority of the boxes, of course, would be used for client entertaining. Turn up at the ground a couple of hours before the game starts, have a sumptuous lunch with plenty of ‘refreshments’ and then watch the game whilst being waited on hand and foot and supplied with copious amounts of booze.

More likely than not, when bad light stopped play, as it often does in these early season games, the people in the boxes would then indulge in silly, adolescent behaviour whilst they waited for play to resume, or was that just me when I used to ‘entertain’ clients to Lords?

It’s all part of the deal. Clients expect the best. They expect great food, loads of booze and great entertainment and if the atmosphere is right, they are not averse to letting their hair down. If only their underlings at the office could see what they get up to when let loose on someone else’s expense account. And these people generally are at the top of the tree – you don’t invite the office junior to an event when the cost is likely to be several hundreds of pounds per person.

At IBM, we were lucky enough to have an executive box at Lords, the ‘home’ of cricket. The box was in a great position and was only a couple of doors away from Getty’s box – you know – the famous reclusive Getty. We never saw him – funny that!

Anyway, it was a terrific perk and my sales team and customers loved going there for a good day out even though the early season games were punctuated by bouts of rain, bad light and, I’m sure, snow on some occasions.

Picking the clients to attend on a particular day was a major exercise in planning and diplomacy – there was no point in having a couple of outrageous clients attending with a staid old banker and his wife. That would have been no good at all and would probably have resulted in fewer sales rather than more, which, after all, was the basis of the exercise!

So – we’ve had lunch and masses of champagne. The game has been stopped for bad light. The clients are drinking everything in sight whilst the sales guys are trying to flog them even more IBM stuff. The IBM ladies (wives, girlfriends and fleusies) are entertaining the wives, girlfriends and fleusies of the clients and there’s nothing much to do and then somebody suggests some betting games to liven up proceedings. The ladies have their own games and the men have theirs – usually involving food or drink.

The ladies first – they are allocated a player each and then, eventually when the game restarts there is a vote on which player has the best bum. Yes – really. That’s what they bet on. The lady allocated the player with the ‘winning bum’ won the sweepstake. Very sexist and very silly.

The guys on the other hand were much more cerebral in their choice of games and bets.

Seven guys and seven bottles of beer. One of the ladies places an anchovy in one of the bottles and the guys have to work out which one it’s in – by drinking some out of each bottle. The guy who unfortunately has his Bud ruined by an oily anchovy gets the cash. Very clever eh?

Or there was the sandwich bet. Each guy picks a sandwich (dainty little triangle type) and peels one side of the bread off and then sticks the resulting half to the wall. The guy whose sandwich sticks the longest won the cash in the sweepstake. I found that cheddar cheese and pickle was a good bet!

So we used to have a great time when the play was stopped and once the game had ended we’d all troop into London for dinner and start all over again! Great days – great fun.

For those who don’t understand the game of cricket – here are the rules.

 You have two sides.

One side is out in the field and one is in.

Each man that's in the side that goes in goes out and when he's out he come in and the next man goes in until he's out.

When they are all out the side that's out comes in and the side that's been in goes out and tries to get those coming in out.

When both sides have been in and out including not outs, that's the end of the game.

 

The Mayors of Crime and Corruption

Now I’m not terribly aux-fait with local politics but I have learned over the years that local mayors in French towns and villages have a significant amount of power. They obviously have influence, but it’s the absolute power which causes the problems. It’s the ability they seem to have to make major financial and commercial decisions without any recourse to committees, or if they do hold meetings, the committees are generally made up of their cronies, family members and owners of commercial premises in the area who owe their existence to the mayor in the first place.

A fellow blogger recently wrote a couple of postings about the mayoral shenanigans in his village where a library assistant was drafted into the mayor’s office to cover for the normal secretary who was off ill on a long-term basis. She discovered a few financial irregularities with the cash which comes in from a ‘professional tax’ which is levied on local businesses and goes into the mayor’s coffers, for him to fund local projects as he/she sees fit. As you can imagine, mayors up and down the length of France must be tempted to do all sorts of weird and wonderful things with this cash, but sticking it in their own bank accounts is not one which the locals approve of. His guy was caught out and has just resigned but it’s not just Hicksville mayors who are a bit dodgy.  

 In the second half of the 20th century, Nice bore the influence of mayor Jean  Medicin (mayor for 33 years from 1928 to 1943 and 1947 to 1965) and his son Jacques (mayor for 24 years from 1966 to 1990). Jacques had been out of office for about 10 years when I arrived down here but he was still being investigated for suspicious dealings on large, public works contracts which were awarded to companies, who were, in return, quite kind, in a financial sense to the guy who awarded them their multi-million euro contracts. Jacqes Médecin fled France in 1990 and was arrested in Uruguay in 1993, leading to his extradition in 1994. He was then convicted of several counts of corruption and associated crimes and sentenced to prison.

Now don’t get the impression that this is an isolated case. This is happening all over France. Mayors up and down the country are being investigated, are being tried or are in the clink over financial irregularities. A simple ‘French Mayor Corruption’ typed into Google returns 892,000 results!

And it goes all the way to the top. Jacques Chirac, the last French President is being investigated for embezzlement when he was Mayor of Paris. He, allegedly, paid hundreds of council workers who were on the payroll. Thing was – none of them existed and you can, I’m sure, work out where the money went!  

So far our mayor, Mr Bertaina seems to have behaved himself, although he summarily closed down the building of our house for nearly a year because he was not happy with it and then summoned J and I to his office for a ‘dressing down’, not one word of which I understood but I had been warned not to argue and just take the verbal punishment otherwise he could stop the building permanently. And all of this happened without a single other member of the council being involved.

As I say, local mayors have enormous power. The power to allow certain types of establishment to open in their village, whilst other similar ones are refused. The power to use their ‘professional tax’ money to fund pet projects, which in most villages seems to be carried out by companies owned and run by friends and family members.

So for Tourrettes, it's so-far-so good. Let's just hope it stays that way. I'd just hate to see my hard earned cash improving the road down to the mayor's palatial villa! 

PS - the picture is of the Hotel de Ville (Town Hall) in Vence, our local town where I'm sorry to report that the mayor has just been jailed for 9 years for abusing his grandson.

Chrysler Goes Bust

Well not quite – it’s gone into that strange American process called Chapter 11 or restructuring, where basically, as far as I can see, the company basically stops paying all those to whom it owes money and starts again with a clean sheet.

I could go on and on ad nauseum about the number of times I’ve had to try and get a deal when my American competitors were able to undercut me because their company had been through Chapter 11 but that’s not the subject of this blog – it’s about dear old Chrysler – my first employer.

I was about to leave school. University wasn’t an option, even remotely so, and I remember going for in-school ‘careers advice’. The Careers Officer gave me all of about 10 seconds of his time. ‘What is your favourite hobby’, he asked. ‘Fishing’, I said and was then given a booklet on trawler fishing. This was the sum total of my career advice! Pathetic!

Sometime over the next few weeks I noticed an advert in the main Glasgow newspaper. ‘Become a PET’, it said in large, blue bold lettering. It was advertising engineering apprenticeships with the Rootes car company, then one of the largest employers in Scotland.

I attended some interviews and then went on an outward bound selection weekend and ended up one of twenty bright-eyed and bushy-tailed apprentices at the huge car plant at Linwood, just outside Glasgow. I was a PET – a Production Engineering Technician – whatever that was!

Within weeks, Chrysler had bought out Rootes and, in one fell swoop, we all started working for our new American owners. It was all quite exciting and to some extent, glamorous. In those days (1968), there were few, if any, American employers in Scotland and the takeover promised fabulous new cars to be designed and built, and a new approach to labour relations – the plant usually worked maybe two weeks in four with the other time being devoted to that most British of pastimes – striking!  

But, and I’m sure this is not a surprise to you, it all ended in tears.

Chrysler built crap cars. They actually took over just as a Hillman Hunter had won the world rally and they never capitalised on that amazing success. They introduced an American looking ‘thing’ called the Chrysler 180 (see picture - it was so bad they didin't even give it a name!) which was huge by UK standards and just never sold. They never invested in the Hillman Imp which was almost as revolutionary as the Mini and that wonderful little car just drifted into history.

They weren’t much better at labour relations either. Ok, they introduced many innovative American management techniques but when faced with thousands of militant Scottish workers with a problem, they failed miserably. On quite a few occasions when the factory car park filled up with thousands of unsold cars and they didn’t want to make any more, they would instruct me to do something which would cause a strike, and I have to say I was pretty good at it. Speeding up the production line which (under union agreements) produced 60 cars per hour, to 61 or 62 cars per hour, would have the workers downing tools and heading off to the pubs. Similarly, removing all the little huts the workers would build beside the production line to rest in whilst they waited for the next car to arrive, caused an immediate walkout. So did removing all their nudie posters which adorned their lockers and cutting off the electricity to their ad-hoc kitchens. The result was always the same. ‘Right boys – everybody out’, was the cry and off they went.

It was an exciting place to work for seven years but eventually after completing my apprenticeship and getting a great job in the Industrial Engineering department, I was made redundant. As I left on the final day and walked the long walk down the production line to the HR department to pick up my final pay, I’m sure I heard quite a few of the workers cheering.

But despite the constant conflict with both management and unions, the disappointment at seeing the thousands of unsold cars every day and the final indignity of being told my services were no longer wanted, I have always had a soft spot for good old Chrysler.

Just a footnote that when we were in the US last year, our hire car was upgraded (long horrible story) and we were given a Chrysler Sebring convertible. On returning to the UK, I learnt that several motoring journalists had voted it the ‘worst car ever’!! Some things don't change!

     

I'm Trying Not To Fall Into The Trap.....

...of not doing a weekday blog posting. Normally, the weekend is fertile blog writing time. I'm usually up early and write for a couple of hours but the bank holiday weekend was quite socially busy and I've written nothing at all - at all!'

I was full of good intentions this morning but of course we're back on school run duty and then J and I had to go and sort out our dishwasher issues. Returning after lunch I thought I'd be able to write something interesting or witty (I never seem to get both in the same posting!) but then decided to give my nicely warmed up Alfa an oil and filter change and then just as I was sitting down to fire up the PC some friends came over and that was that.  

So - I apologise. I'll try and get back to normal tomorrow - I promise!   

Have A Great Bank Holiday

No blog posting today - it's a holiday in the UK so I'm having a day off. If you've got a Bank Holiday enjoy it.