20 years is a hell of a long time to spend doing anything.
Especially if that ‘anything’ is an anything that you swore you’d never end up doing.
Yes, as usual for my style of writing, I’m starting with a cryptic statement, and then throwing you, dear reader, in at the proverbial deep end. So without much more ado, let me explain what I mean by starting at the very beginning..
As I may have touched briefly on before in a previous blog, My father was a shop manager, and by all accounts a rather good one. This meant that he also expected me to follow suit and be a shop/store manager – a job I really didn’t want to do. By the time I had left college, I still had no real idea of what it was that I wanted to do, except that it definitely was NOT retail.
So with that in mind, I wandered vaguely from job to job, trying to see what fitted. As a work placement I had worked at a travel agents, but did nothing other than fall in love – again as mentioned in a prior blog – and decide that being a travel agent was not for me. Then I went to work for a famous holiday camp. I started off as a dish-washer and then drifted around the camp from job to job, ending up entertaining children and the adults – and having a really great time…although, if I was honest, never really fitting in with my colleagues, and slowly changing from the shy, sober young boy, into what a colleague described as an ‘extroverted introvert’, a person slowly learning to develop and use different masks to hide behind.
Then my mum wrote to me towards the end of the season, telling me that she had got a job at the BBB, and that she had arranged an interview for me when I got back, to which I dutifully agreed to – although at the time I had mistakenly confused the acronym for the BBB with BNFL, and saw it as something that could be interesting.
It was on returning home after the season ended that I discovered my mistake, and that my mum had got me an interview for a job in retail. Oh, Joy.
However, I went to the interview as I’d promised (after spending the prior evening bent over the sink, reluctantly having my recently bleached Billy Idol white hair dyed back to brown by an irate mother) and if I told you I tried my very best to get the job, I’d be lying. Unfortunately, my 2ndbest interview technique worked anyway, and I was pretty much immediately offered the job. In the dishroom. I could barely control my enthusiasm.
However, I told myself that I’d stick the job for the 6 months until the next summer season at the holiday camp started, let my temporary contract at the BBB end, and go back to entertaining drunken holidaymakers.
I clearly remember my first day at the BBB – it was utter mayhem. This was the first BBB in the country ever, and the population of the UK had gone completely BBB crazy. The queues to get in the store were 5 or 6 deep, and trailed right around the store and down the road leading to the store, even needing the police to control the crowds. The queues to get in the restaurant were equally as bad. Once inside the restaurant, it was a quick spin around to show me where everything was by a shell-shocked looking restaurant manager, handing me my blue overcoat and apron, and then a very fast guide to the dishwasher and an evil machine named the viptop. I grew to hate that machine. It was a pan and tray washer, that you stacked the pans and trays in, closed and turned on. it would fire scalding hot water and tiny plastic pellets at the pans, cleaning them. At least, that was the theory. The reality was each pan needed at least 2 10 minute runs through the Viptop, a scrub and then another run, each time getting a face of hot steam, and perhaps a leg full of near boiling water and hot plastic pellets whenever you opened the damned machine. All the time the chefs were looking at their dwindling supply of pans and cursing you for being so slow….although to be totally fair, they only ever did it once before seeing the horror of the Viptop, the redness of your hands and the increasing amount of full trolleys being wheeled into the dishroom for me and the dishroom team to deal with, before rolling up their sleeves and helping us out.
The first restaurant team in the BBB was the first team that I ever felt I belonged to. There simply was no heirachy at all, and everybody helped everybody else out when they were snowed under. In life as well as work. The head chef and restaurant manager thought nothing of walking into the dishroom, rolling their sleeves up and helping us out when we got stuck and they had a slack moment, and the dishroom team likewise scrubbed up and helped out in the kitchen when we had a free moment. We worked very hard, played just as hard, and dropped everything to help each other out. This was where I first learned the importance of team work.
The temporary contract came to an end, and I was finished by the BBB, with a few months to spare before the season re-started at the holiday camp – which was fine by me. However, six weeks passed, and the P45 that I knew I’d need for my return to the camp had not arrived, so I called the BBB HR department (Something I’ve always found to be a misnomer – The HR department in any company tend to be neither Human, nor Resourceful, the only time you ever see them is either when they’re welcoming you to, or kicking you out of, the company that they work for) to ask where it was…to which I was answered “Why? have you left??” I replied that I’d left a month previously, and was immediately invited back for an interview.
The only satisfying part of that was the morning when my mum was telling me that I needed to look for a job, as one was not going to suddenly drop through the letterbox – The moment the words had left her mouth, the postman arrived, and delivered the letter inviting me back to the BBB for an interview.
For this interview I tried my level best not to get the job – doing all the cardinal sins of interviews, turning up in t-shirt and dirty jeans, battered trainers, and answering every question with ‘uh-huh’ or ‘nah’, gazing out of the window, the door, my shoes – in fact trying to give off a “look, I really don’t want you to employ me” vibe.
I failed again.
The interview lasted all of ten minutes, which was long enough for the restaurant manager to get free, come to the interview room, look at me and say “Where’ve you been? the restaurant’s absolutely filled to capacity, and suchaperson has called in sick – stop wasting this nice HR lady’s time and get back to work!” As much as I inwardly grumbled, I was happy to be back with the one team where I felt I belonged.
In fact, thinking back, all of the teams that I worked with in the BBB were incredible, always more of a family than just people you worked with. From the restaurant team I moved to the Full-serve desk after 3 years, where I met one of the very few people I ever truly made a connection with – a short ditzy blonde named Carolyn. From the very first time I ever met her, I knew we were going to be the very best of friends. I was stood at the desk, vaguely wondering what I was doing, when she walked up to me grinned and said “Hey, you’re Gabe, aren’t ya? I’m Cazza – know of any good hang-over cures?”
I remember laughing and advising a fry-up with several cups of sweet tea. A few weeks later, and we were as close as two friends could get. Between us, we ruled the full-serve desk, and nothing happened there without our joint say-so. We were often referred to as the First couple of Full serve, or Mr & Mrs Ravensgate, but we never had a man/woman style relationship, although we spent practically every free hour together in works as well as out of it. Thinking about it, it wasn’t until much later that I realised how attractive Caz was, but by then, she was my best and closest friend, and any other kind of relationship was unthinkable.
I can count the amount of people who really know me, and I have let past the masks I wear, on the fingers of one hand. Of which 1 is dead – to me, if not reality – I’ve practically adopted another as my little sister, and the other 3 are the only people who are not family (Adoptive, or blood) that I trust implicitly. The fact that they’re all female has already been commented on, but is irrelevant, and for another blog, and another time.
But I digress. From full serve, I moved to the warehouse and to another team I felt part of…mostly. Though with that team, it was predominantly male, and all of my previous teams were predominantly female. I had to adjust to ‘locker room’ conversations, and endless discussions about football – both subjects I could give less of a wet rats ass about. However, other than that, we spent most of the time working insanely hard, but having such a laugh, that it never actually seemed that hard.
There is a saying in my family – ‘cut one of us, and we all bleed’, basically indicating that the family is that close we act as one unit – such was the case with all of the teams I either worked with, or managed. We worked together, played together, and if an ‘outsider’ – be it customer, boy/girlfriend, or member of staff from another team – crossed any of us, they had all of us to deal with. It was quickly common knowledge that nobody messed with the full/self serve teams. Not even when the staff left, leaving just 3 people to run 4 different departments, each approximately the size of a football field.
Stressful? Yes – but it’s a testament to the strength of character of each of us, and especially our then manager, Martyn, that we managed it – and made it look easy. I owe a lot to Martyn, as it was he who decided that I was being wasted in the warehouse, and felt that I should be ‘one of the elite’, working in the showroom, and so pushed both me, and the powers that be in upper management, for me to be ‘promoted’ And so I joined the showroom team.
Shortly after that I met the woman who was to take a big chance on me…and end up becoming my surrogate little sister – Rachel MacKenzie.
I’d noticed Rachel when she first joined the BBB, as she was probably the only manager there with such an air of joie de vivre, and positivity that it practically oozed from every pore. Add the fact that she was (and still is) an extremely attractive woman didn’t harm matters either. I was bored stupid on the department I was currently working on, having already mastered office planning and was already looking for a bigger and better challenge after less than 6 months on that department. Judging by the mile-long queues stood at the bedrooms department, I beleive that I had found it.
A position of key-co-worker (a BBB way of saying supervisor) had arose on bedrooms, and I wanted to put in for it. My current managers (Hysterical that the BBB Business department had 3 managers and 4 staff…) took a dim view of me putting in for the job, as they felt that I didn’t have what it took…but one false accusation of theft later, and my conclusively proving how inept the management of that department were, and being cleared of the trumped-up charges that they had laid against me, they couldn’t put me forward for the position fast enough.
My interview for the position was probably one of the best interviews I ever had, with Rachel conclusively proving that she was going to be the best manager I had ever worked for. Every BBB internal interview previously had consisted of the interviewer and interviewee (me) sitting staring at each other for protracted periods of time, asking questions that had stuff all to do with the job, or ‘pat’ ‘I haven’t a frikken clue what I’m doing’ questions – (You know the kind – “what do you feel you can bring to the job?” More imagination that you, clearly chump…”Why should I give you the job?” Cos with questions like that, you’re going to need someone who is even half willing to work with a half-wit like yourself?…”Where do you see yourself in 4 years time?” Stood over your corpse with a smile on my face?…etc) But with Rachel, it was different, and when I walked out of the interview, I felt like I’d ran a marathon.
My time on the bedrooms department was the happiest I’d ever been in the BBB, and Rachel trained me very well. She was tough, completely demanding, and watched me like a hawk, tearing me a new one when I screwed up – which was quite often – and publicly congratulating me when I succeeded or excelled at something. Naturally this made me more driven than ever to succeed and to please her, as I finally felt that I was working for a manager who knew what I wanted and where I wanted to be, without me having to tell them a dozen times.
It’s small wonder that I in the future, when I was running my own department, I often pictured what Rachel would do, when I had a tough decision to make. Nowadays, post-BBB, we are practically brother and sister, and I see her as my mentor, best friend, and little sister.
After bedrooms came under new management, and I had a major clash with the new manager – who to this day I maintain couldn’t manage a pub-crawl with a bunch of alcoholics – I moved back to the BBB Business department….this time returning as specialist (A BBB equivalent of erm…not sure, really – above a supervisor, not quite a manager, but carries out all management tasks…but not an assistant manager either – ‘cos the BBB don’t do them…wink, wink) I quickly set about creating a new team from the ashes of the old team.
Time moved on, and I quickly realised that I was getting sick of the whole BBB situation, as the upper management were getting more and more inept (see prior ‘the madness of King Fanboy’ blog) and coming to work was becoming something I was dreading. I decided it was time to move on. Meanwhile, unbeknownst to me, plans were being made to get me out of the situation that I, and a lot more like me, were in.
Cue the 15th July, 1 day after my 39th birthday, and the BBB made the announcement that it was having a management reshuffle (Naturally not including the upper management in the re-shuffle – The mentally deficient Store Manager and his utterly incompetant lackeys jobs were safe, as were the jobs of those above him…it’s funny how people who shout ‘needs of the business’ and ‘streamlining the company’ always tend to ensure that the ‘needs’ they’re protecting are their own, and the streamlining doesn’t include the fat pay-rise they’ll give themselves when the dust settles…but I digress…) I discovered that my department was about to be streamlined….from sod-all staff, to much less than that.
At first I was irked when I found out that my job didn’t exist anymore, after all, my department was the only one consistently in the black, I had helped to turn it from £500k down to over £1 million profit and we had worked damned hard at getting there. Some thanks. Then I worked out what 20 years worth of working there made as a redundancy package….and I almost snatched their hands off.
All in all, over 200 years of BBB experience walked out of the door when the time came, something that I suspect the upper management did not forsee when they made the decision to ‘streamline’. My guess is that the idea was to shed the hangers on – the managers, specialists and supervisors who came in and locked themselves in the office for the day, telling their staff that they’re ‘too busy’ to help on the shop floor or see an angry customer. Sure, a few ‘veterans’ might leave, but 99% of people over the 5 – 10 year mark would be dyed-in-the-wool BBB staff, and accept the cut in wages and soldier on with less staff….right?
Nuh-Uh.
As I said, almost 90% of the experienced long term and long service staff – over 200 years worth of experience – took the money and laughed all the way to the bank, leaving all the Hangers on, well, hanging on.
The final days were truly amusing, as the growing realisation of the situation they were in hit the store manager, slowly they realised that the only people capable of running the shop floor were going, leaving mostly a team of managers, etc. who didn’t see dealing with customers, and selling furniture, as their job. I, and many others like me, were asked to stay, and offered higher pay-grades, and almost considered accepting them…but all in all, we stuck to our guns.
So at the end of August, 2007, my 20 year reign at the BBB ended.
Now, over one year on, and I look back at my time I spent at the BBB with mixed feelings – Do I feel it was wasted time? No, not really…..well, not exactly wasted – Ok, the job I have now is ten thousand times better than anything I did there, but I feel that had I not had the experience of dealing with everything a BBB customer throws at you, or the experience of the continual indoctrination and conditioning that the BBB does to its staff, I would probably have sank without trace within weeks of getting my new job.
The BBB may have prepared me for my future, but it’s the wonderful people like Rachel, Cazza Mozza, Anne (Mother) Barnes and (Auntie) Pearl Cartwright that I worked, laughed, cried and bled with, and who either took me under their wing, or took a chance on me that who helped and shaped me into becoming the person that I am today.
God bless (and have mercy!!) on them all.
Gabriel Ravensgate's Weblog 