Prelude:

Recently I’ve been reassessing the worth of promoting my photography and one of the conclusions I’ve made is I really need to be supplementing my income, attempting to make money elsewhere. I’ve never been anything more than an adequate wordsmith, however in realising my photographic work will never furnish me with even the smallest smattering of a living, and being ‘old’ nobody will give more than a cursory thought to employing me … I’ve decided to write a novel.

As practise for this, I shall be relating ideas, stories and opinions on my website that have very little (or indeed) no relation to photography. I do not care if this irks you 😋

Birch Tor in the mist

I’m a photographer after all … buy a print, share my work or bugger off 🤣

I Used To Work For A Bank

People are usually shocked to learn my first proper full time job was with a well known high street bank (I shan’t name them, but I will happily tell you to your face who they are and why I have detested banks since).

Anyway, way back when I was still a spotty teenager I managed to somehow land myself a job as a Grade 2 Clerk.

Now, this is where it gets interesting (it doesn’t, I’m merely attempting to click bait you). Although (as I’ve mentioned) this was a high street bank, I was actually working for the Investment Department and consequently a few things were different.

We only really worked for customers who had enough money, or had been left enough money, to have investment portfolios. I forget exactly what the minimum investment was, but this was the 80’s and I feel it might have been £100K. It’s irrelevant anyway, what you need to know is we dealt with wealthy folk.

Black Monday

I hadn’t planned on mentioning this today, but I was working for the bank during the 1987 Black Monday crash - it was hilarious 😂

Lot’s of rich idiots ringing up panicking, until we were told to unplugged the phones. As I said, that’s probably a story for another day.

What I thought was worth mentioning was how our little group of (I want to say) a dozen branches spread around the country were managed.

Above Sticklepath

Shot on a Pentax 110 24mm lens with a fixed aperture - yes, that didn’t break the flow at all did it?

Apart for the usual slightly odd characters you find in any office based scenario, I actually enjoyed the company of the vast majority of my co-workers and to this day feel no animosity towards those who trained me and helped me realise working for a bank wasn’t really for me.

Now, I joined the same time as another young fellow (this is important to my story, just not at this point).

Archaic Technology

You can imagine that as it was the 80’s there weren’t such things as office computers! I know! How did we do anything?

Well; there was this thing called a Data Centre; a vast, half mythical, steam driven abacus hidden away somewhere in an unnamed state of the art concrete box, could have been in Mordor for all I cared at the time, but my jaded memory pops ‘Crawley’ into my head for some bizarre reason … don’t quote me on that!

So, in order to ‘access’ data on our clients portfolios we had to fill in small sheets of paper (each had a specific purpose) and then post these to the great calculator overlord. We would then sit around twiddling our thumbs for several days before receiving a dot matrix print out of our success (or failure).

Again, this isn’t clearly relevant to the title of this piece, but I am slowly stretching my storytelling muscles and nobody will read this anyway, so I can do as I please 🤣

Stone age computer systems aside, it was only a few months into working there that I discovered a fascinating truth about businesses, which has continued to amuse and bewilder me in equal measure over the years.

Staple Tor in the mist

My novel will be about Dartmoor … did I mention that?

Rewarding Mediocrity

We would regularly receive instruction on how to go about the day to day running of our services with memos from ‘Chief Office’ .

As a new, keen employee (still brainwashed by the mantra that hard work was rewarded) I diligently read these and always did my best to implement some new instruction as soon as it was possible.

Now, it couldn’t have been more than three month’s into my tenure with the Institute of Making Rich People Richer, that I first noticed that a memo we had received, and which I had studied with my usual conscientiousness, made no bloody sense whatsoever 😂

Obviously, by now, I had become fully familiar with the day to day administration of our tasks and the minutia of how our incredibly modern accounting system worked (sarcasm is inherent in this last part). At the weekly meeting I raised the issue of the inconsistency between what Chief Office wanted and what was actually possible.

All of my superiors agreed I probably had a point and the matter was left. Maybe a month later we received another memo stating we were to return to the original process.

After the meeting I discovered what I believe to be a universal truth of capitalism.

My direct superior and my manager at the time (both splendid fellows I very much wish I had stayed in touch with) informed me that this happened a lot because Chief Office was filled with ‘fucking idiots’ 🤣

Now, my immature mind had not expected this. Surely people got to their positions because they were smart, hard working, team players?

Nope.

They were promoted as they possessed one of these very promotion worthy assets;

stupidity,

the delusion they were way smarter than they really were,

generally annoying,

back stabbing,

sycophantic brown noser or a combination of these;

whilst somehow remaining just good enough at their jobs not to be sacked. (I fear this last bit might just be a case of most British people not wanting to actually tell somebody they are rubbish - hence the move to so many zero hour contracts, way easier to bin the staff).

I was informed that it had taken roughly a decade, but now Chief Office was now exclusively manned by all the rejects from the branches throughout the country.

This, dear reader, is exactly why we now find ourselves in such a political mess.

I was going to elaborate here, but I’m sure you can fill in the gaps yourself.

Hawthorn on Gidleigh Common

Any feedback on my literary style?

If you can’t, perhaps you would be so kind as to share my drivel and I will write a little piece about how if we don’t actually start rewarding people on merit rather than because they tow the line we’ll be in a terrible state … whoops … too late 🙄

An Aside - The Return of a Previously Mentioned Character

Did you see what I did there?

I’m really working this ‘novel’ stuff 🤣

I digress, however, as a way to once more flex my descriptive skills I will endeavour to flesh out something I alluded to in earlier paragraph 😆

I joined the bank at the same time as another fellow.

Age fails me and I forget how long it was before we were allowed to apply for the ‘Management Development Scheme’ … let’s say it was twelve months (seems like a reasonable amount of time to wait).

I aced the first part where Human Resources had obviously paid a psychology department somewhere to help them identify money centric conservative sycophants 😂

Yes, I lied on nearly all the multiple choice questions!

Unfortunately, still believing that honesty and actually caring about employees as assets within a business, I failed miserably to get through the interview stage where we were asked to respond to various scenario’s.

I was told that I was “thinking too much” 🤣

Now, I really am not a bitter person and if that had been an end of it, so be it.

However, my colleague passed and was given a promotion and a pay rise.

You only have my word for it, but I was infinitely better at the job, and bright enough to find solutions to problems as and when they arose. He was a dullard.

I left the bank very soon afterwards.

Now, obviously, if I had a time machine I would go back and tell young, angry Paul to shut up and play the long game.

I might be broke, but I suppose I have also had a lot of fun 😍

Why the Country Is a Mess