September 12, 2024

Jobs’ worth

What I gained, apart from money, from various student jobs.

Bread loser

The worst job I ever had was in a bakery. When I say bakery I mean a bread factory. It was industrial rather than artisanal.

Mass-produced bread came out of the ovens and was automatically sliced and bagged as it passed down several parallel production lines.

I was waiting at the end of one of the lines to put the bagged loaves in crates. I weighed a few loaves to make sure they were within the allowed tolerances. Then I stacked the crates into a pile that was taller than me and pushed them through to the loading bay on a kind of manual fork-lift trolley.

I worked the night shift, from 6pm to 6am. A round trip, there and back, from the end of the production line to the waiting lorries, took about one and a half minutes. I know this because there was a huge clock on the wall at the back of the factory, and it had a second hand. I watched twelve hours elapse in ninety second increments. This was before the Walkman had been invented. No music. No podcasts. There were no distractions from the monotonous, unskilled work. You were alone with your loaves and your thoughts. Time stood still in the worst job I ever had. It was excruciating.

In a pathetic attempt to make things more interesting, I focused on improving my personal best time for a return trip. I’d got it down to about seventy-five seconds by about half way through my first shift, when there was a tap on my shoulder. It was the foreman:

Slow down son, you’re making the others look bad.

This was my first experience of workplace politics. I was crushed. Without a sense of purpose the tedious back and forth work was reduced to a form of water torture.

By student standards, bread money was excellent, but my sanity wasn’t for sale. I lasted less than a week.

I’m grateful to the worst job I have ever had for teaching me the value of interesting work. It’s not for nothing that we describe our wages as ‘compensation’. And no amount of money can compensate for madness.

The theatre of breams

The best student job I ever had was in a supermarket. I worked on the fish counter in Sainsbury’s on Cromwell Road in London. I wore an apron and a clip-on tie, which I didn’t know was a thing until mine was given to me on the first evening.

Cromwell Road is in South Kensington, so the clientele was well-heeled and multi-cultural. This was reflected in the fish counter, which sold an impressively wide variety of exotic and expensive marine creatures alongside the standard-issue cod, haddock, prawns, and flatfish. I once gutted a dozen trout for the actress Nanette Newman. I recognised her from the Fairy Liquid TV commercials and their seductive jingle:

Now hands that do dishes can feel soft as your face, with mild green Fairy Liquid.

Hands that do fishes don’t feel soft as your face. Hands that do fishes get covered in scales. Fish scales weld themselves to your skin. And they’re invisible. No matter how hard you scrub your hands at the end of a shift, unseen scales keep flaking off for days afterward.

Scaly hands were a small price to pay.

Thursday and Friday evenings on the Sainsbury’s fish counter were a riot. I’ve been a member of all sorts of teams but, apart from sailing, this was the first time I felt like part of a crew. It was retail theatre. We put on a performance and we drew a crowd. We turned fish-mongering into a performance art. How so?

• We were an odd bunch but we clicked. There was a boy-band type of chemistry between us. The band leader was an older guy - a bona fide fishmonger - who knew half a dozen recipes for every fish on the counter. As he made a suggestion to one customer, you could see that he was inspiring several others, all of whom subsequently bought the same fish to make the same recipe. There was another student, working part time like me, and a young London lad working full time. The banter and the friendly competition between us for skill and speed were all part of the show.

• Everything was on display. All the skilled work was done in front of the customer; the gutting, the filleting, the cleaning. When you bought fish from us it was like being at the chef’s table in a restaurant.

• We were fast. I could clean a fish with three strokes of a knife. A cut around the gills on each side and a cut along the belly. Hold the guts down with the flat blade and the whole lot would come cleanly out as you pulled upwards from the tail. A dozen trout didn’t take long.

• We made it feel like magic. We did the tricks in front of you but you had no idea how. For example, we were selling in ounces back then. Customers bought prawns or cockles in two, four, or eight ounce cartons. And the scales were sensitive to the nearest one eighth of an ounce. We’d spoon the shellfish into a carton, make a show of judging the weight in our hand, and then place the carton on the scales. I reckon we had an eighty percent strike rate of judging the weight perfectly: not an eighth under, not an eighth over. We got oohs and aahs every time this happened, sometimes applause, which drew even more people to the counter.

• Nothing draws a crowd like a crowd. You could see customers congregating at the counter. You could hear the buzz. And it was infectious.

The best student job I ever had taught me the value of putting on a show. It taught me the importance of a ‘happening’ vibe, which served me well years later when the time came to run an agency.

A happening agency gets invited to pitch more often. A happening agency gets written about in the trade press. A happening agency is a talent magnet. Happening is the toughest and most important trick to running an agency. Happeningness is hard to generate, and almost impossible to sustain. It’s a fragile, ephemeral, but magical thing.

Close shave

I had another job at Sainsbury’s for a while, on the deli counter.

The deli was side by side with the fish counter; the quiet neighbour to the raucous party house next door.

The most skilled job on the deli counter was thin-slicing Parma Ham. With a little instruction and a lot of practice I got to be quite good at it.

There was a nice older lady who’d buy Parma Ham most Friday evenings. It was her favourite starter for Saturday night dinner parties. After a while she’d always insist that I be the one to serve her.

She liked her ham carved very thin. It had to be translucent. Carving so thinly without allowing the ham to tear wasn’t easy. It took care and concentration.

Care is the magic word. I had the same tools, the same resources, and the same training as everyone else on the deli counter. But I cared more about giving customers the experience they wanted and would pay for. I enjoyed being of service.

In the first agency I worked at there was a tendency to (deliberately) conflate service with servility, especially in the creative department. I quickly saw through that. Customer/client service is a noble calling. Care creates demand. Care begets trust. Care sells, whether it’s cured meat or creative ideas, whether it’s carve skills or craft skills.

Being prompt

I worked for a while as a cashier for an independent petrol retailer. Selling fuel is as dull as stacking bread. No one drove off without paying. No one tried to rob the till. No one shoplifted, not to my knowledge anyway. But at least I could read a book when there were no customers.

Technically I wasn’t selling petrol, I was just taking money for it. However, I did sell other stuff (sort of, as I’m about to explain.) I earned a small bonus every time someone bought engine oil or anti-freeze or screen-wash. If I increased a customer’s liquidity, I increased my own in the process.

And it was surprisingly easy. You just had to ask. “Do you need any engine oil?” “Do you need to top up your screen-wash?” I didn’t understand why this worked but it did. Surely something like engine oil would be a considered purchase; a deliberate purchase triggered by a warning light or a routine dipstick check before a long journey. Apparently not. Apparently anything can be an impulse purchase if the impulse comes from you rather than the buyer.

Impulse purchases are always prompted. Most often the prompt is visual; strategically placing Tic-Tacs and chewing gum in your eye-line as you put your shopping on the conveyor belt at the supermarket check-out. But verbal prompts work as well. That’s why they always ask you in Pret if you want something to eat to go with your coffee. It doesn’t work every time but it works often enough to be commercially worthwhile.

I didn’t know it at the time but this was my introduction to nudge theory and behavioural psychology. An advertising career wasn’t even a twinkle in my eye but this was my first experience of putting commercial ideas into people’s heads.

The graduate trainee application form for BBH included a selection of essay titles. You were invited to answer “two or three” in a hundred words or less. It was obviously a test of your ability to convey good thinking concisely. One of the options quoted John Hegarty:

“We don’t sell. We make people want to buy.” Discuss.

I can’t remember what I wrote but I knew this to be true from my experience of not selling but making people want to buy anti-freeze.

Well done

After six months of graduate training at BBH, my first client as a very green account manager was Beefeater Steakhouses. I’m allowing this as a quasi-student job because I still had lots to learn about making advertising, and I had everything to learn about the business context in which advertising is made.

As part of my induction I had to work at a busy Beefeater Steakhouse in Brentford for two weeks. I rotated between every job, working in the kitchen, behind the bar, and as a waiter. I also had regular chats with the manager, a young guy who clearly knew what he was doing. He had a flat above the restaurant and a fancy car. He was making a lot of money for Whitbread and was well rewarded. From memory he was making at least six times what I was and he didn’t seem much older. I remember feeling impatient but also clueless, which is a recipe for frustration.

A well-run Beefeater Steakhouse can please all of the people all of the time.

A business lunch, expensing the biggest and best steaks and red wine, will take place a few feet from a quick pub lunch to break up a long car journey. In the evening some people will have nipped out for a casual midweek treat, while others will have dressed up for a romantic dinner for two.

Steak and chips can be intimate, important, or informal. It can be reserved, refined, or raucous.

What people want - steak and chips - is obvious. But what they need from the occasion varies tremendously. Your job as a waiter is to read the table and respond accordingly. It comes back to care, which is shorthand for proactive empathy. It comes back to service as a noble calling. With hindsight I was lucky to have jobs which taught me the joy, yes joy, of making people feel seen, understood, and looked after.

I don’t know whether an aptitude for service comes from nature or nurture. I do know that some people make it look easy while others seem to go out of their way to make it difficult.

There are good waiters and bad waiters. There are also good and bad customers. Another trick I learned from these service jobs was to find something to like about every customer, no matter how distastefully they behaved towards me. It’s almost impossible to hide your true feelings. Your subconscious is radically candid at best, and downright treacherous at worst. It will betray you. By fixating on something positive you can deal with difficult characters without inflaming the situation with any involuntary, sixth-sense, fuck-you signals.

I’m lucky that I can count the truly nasty clients I’ve had to deal with on the fingers of one hand. But finding something to like about every one of them has undoubtedly made my career more enjoyable and more successful.

Jobs’ worth

It’s just as important to have formative experiences with work as it is to experiment with relationships. You need to get a sense of what works for you and what doesn’t before you commit, whether you’re committing to a person or to a job. There’s just as much chemistry to a career as there is to a marriage or to cohabitation.

So, while the short-term value of student jobs is measured in rent payments or beer money, the long-term value is all about self-awareness and professional survival skills; the workplace equivalent of bush craft.

This kind of learning is the best thing since working with sliced bread.

Anything is better than working with sliced bread.