The Office Part 2

As I said in Part 1 of this story, the office was the funniest place I ever worked. I do think that some of the shenanigans that went on was the cold call salesforce's way of dealing with the occupational stress that was a constant daily, if not hourly, occurrence.

We used to spend three days a week desk bound calling a wide variety of businesses to offer them the opportunity to promote their products and services inside a national chain of supermarkets. The rejection rate on the phone was what you could call somewhat debilitating to say the least. And quite often the form of rejection was very disagreeable. I recall one businessman I called who I guess had had a bellyful of cold sales calls and decided to teach me a lesson.

At first the man was very polite and pretended acute interest in my proposal. To encourage me to continue with my sales spiel he said things like "Oh this sounds like an amazing opportunity, please do go on, tell me more." And go on I did. Eventually near the end of my pitch he intervened saying...."And would this by any chance be an attempt to get me to spend some money with your company?" I replied the affirmative. His response was "well can you please do something for me? FACK OOOOOOOOOFFFF!" He screamed down the line so loud and ugly he almost took my ear off. Time to go have a coffee I decided.

Other salesmen dealt with this type of stress in another way, with more than a smidgin of fun. To my right sat a guy called Albert, who many a time had us all in pleats of laughter. Every telephone had a mute button, and Al used his to highly entertaining effect. Al would call somebody and from the start was having fun by telling the prospect that he was the Managing Director of the national chain and had singled out the prospect as somebody highly worthy of being allowed to promote his business in the whole nationwide chain of stores. On one such an occasion Al had rang a female business owner. Once the conversation had began Al would intersperse his sales pitch with highly offensive insults, being sure to mute the phone as he spoke the insult then un muting it when he continued with his normal pitch. It went something like this;

"So....(mute phone and say "You fat cow" then quickly un mute phone) Miss Collins (Mute, "Lordy, Lordy, you are so ugly.") what we would like to propose to you is that you (mute "go on a diet" un mute) take a look at what we have to offer.

Horrible huh, yup. But one day another salesman decided to teach Al a lesson by disconnecting the mute function on his phone after he had left the office. The next day Al came into the office and set to work making calls. After making two or three normal calls Al decided it was time for some of his idea of fun, totally oblivious to the fact that the prospect would hear every single word. Only this time the prospect was a man.

What followed was absolutely hilarious for all of those of us listening in. The prospect was singularly unimpressed with Al's highly insulting sales pitch and complained to the company we worked for and to give Al a damn good beating. Luckily for Al he just about managed to keep his job. However, he did spend a week or two looking very nervously over his shoulder.

There was never a dull moment in the office, that's for sure. One day the guy I mentioned in Part 1, the guy who was the son of a very famous actress, came into work dressed in a female tank top, female leg and crotch hugging printed leggings which left nothing to the imagination, a beautiful leather jacket with a plush fur collar and a pair of stiletto heel shoes. Apparently his girlfriend had thrown him out of house and home and as a perverse act of revenge he stole and wore her clothes.

The guy made his first call of the day and seemed to be chatting to a prospect called Rupert. Anyway, when the guy got to the end of his pitch he told the prospect he had one last qualifying question. Before he could ask the question Al the mute phone bloke chirruped "Is your weel name Wupert?" in a very camp voice. Fifteen other salesmen erupted into outrageous laughter forcing the poor inappropriately salesman to hang up before he could say another word.

Some new salesmen that came to work in the office were a positive liability to just about everybody. We had one guy whose little party piece was to stride into the centre of the open plan office and pull a tin of lighter fuel out of his pocket to make a makeshift flame thrower. He simply squirted a jet of lighter fuel in front of himself and then lit it. The ensuing flame leapt a good twenty feet across the room and almost set the boss on fire. Ironically enough, the flame thrower guy's surname was 'Burns'. I could not make this up if I tried.

Of course there was a lot of very funny banter all day long. During one lull in the day it was decided to organise another stripper-gram for a colleague who was impotent. As the boss of the team leafed through yellow pages entertainment section another colleague spouted up "You're looking in the wrong part Boss, it's not a sexy stripper-gram girl you need to get him going, it's a freeking magician!"

Another day during an office chat about what food we liked the boss said that he liked kippers. To which a colleague professed to have misunderstood saying what he thought the boss said was not "I like Kippers" but "I'm like a kipper, gutless and two faced."

It is with a great deal of affection that I look back on those happy days, a time when we not only had lots of laughs, but when we all also earned a hell of a lot of money. Happy days indeed.