Good Days and Bad Days - You can Never Tell

[Liz 101]

Steve's tale reminded me of my first week in my first job post college. I'd been taken on by a, then, large hotel company as a Management Trainee. I had been allocated to the Reception of one of their central London hotels. By Friday, my trainer had sufficient confidence in my ability that she left me in charge whilst she took her lunch break.

A short while later, a very scuffily dressed old chap shuffled in through the front door, came to reception & without a word, leant over & picked up what was regarded as the most confidential document, which listed, in room no order, all the hotel residents & the rates they were paying for their rooms. I reached across to take it back, saying that if he was looking for the room no of a friend, I had an alpha listing & could find it easier that way for him.

He looked straight at me & asked for the General Manager, by name. I asked the chap for his name, as we were not allowed to call the GM without this info. The chap answered Edwards, Henry Edwards. I gulped & saw my career disappearing down the pan, Henry Edwards was the CEO of the hotel group.

Fortunately, Henry realised that my intention was solely to protect the confidentiality of the document & a year on, when I was due to take up my first Junior Asst Manager's role, Henry told a real mysoginist of a General Manager that he was getting me regardless of his views on women in management roles.

[Scunner]

My "Rolls Royce" story.

When I was first in sales I sold coatings mainly for floors in factories and warehouses. I used to go to see contractors when they were painting floors. There's a proper pecking order in coating contracting. Manager, supervisor, applicators and at the bottom, a guy to mix all those tins of paint for them. One contractor from Northampton, had a shy lad called Joe who was from Ireland to get the lids off and mix the paint. I remember sitting outside with him having a fag and a chat, not something even his colleagues bothered to do.

I moved from coatings for concrete to coatings for steel and didn't deal with the company anymore. Then years later they launched a range of coatings for concrete and I was told to go find my old customers and introduce the range.

In Northampton I called in to see Jim, the MD. No, Jim retired several years ago. Really? So who's MD these days...

Ok you got it.

[Hamlet]

Slightly off track, but following on from Steve.

In the mid eighties I changed careers and started working for a small Estate Agency chain. The person I was about to replace would tell me about some of the local characters and two spring to mind.

Firstly there was George, who seemed a little eccentric, talked out loud to himself, stood outside looking at our window display most mornings and on wet days would come in and look at the displays inside, chatting to the staff who would give him a cup of tea and listen to his war stories, he would ask about new properties that had come available.
We never really knew exactly where George lived until about 5 months later, a certain terraced house came on the market at £29,950 and he came in to announce that he lived next door to it and wanted to buy it.

That's fine George, you can if you can afford it we said, 2 days later in comes George with a carrier bag containing £29,950 in cash. Can I buy the house now?

We had all assumed that George rented his home but it later turned out that he owned a total of 14 houses in the same road.

Then there was Nellie, she was a neighbour of our office cleaner Mrs Jones, both in their late 70's and lived in small terraced houses just around the corner from the office.

Having no family in the area, twice a week Nellie would come to meet Mrs Jones at the office, have a cup of tea, then they would toddle off to the local market.

Nellie was by all accounts a spendthrift and this was reflected in her bedraggled appearance and her shopping habits.

What we subsequently found out after she died several years later was that she owned nearly 20% of the buildings in the High Street, including the one we rented.

You can never tell !

[Lotty]

Well you can't judge a book by its cover eh? Still waters run deep and all that. Great, thought provoking stories.