As soon as I saw him I immediately knew who he was

A small crisis this week as petrol reached £1 per litre, and reports of blockades by protest groups (protesting at the huge taxes levied on petrol and diesel) led to panic buying at petrol stations on Monday and Tuesday. As my car was almost empty of petrol I had no choice but to join the queues on Tuesday morning, waiting about twenty minutes to get to the pumps. In the queue to pay, the person in front of me said “I nearly got stranded at Birmingham yesterday. I was out of fuel, and the garage I stopped at turned me away, saying they were only serving their regular customers.” On the Today Programme an environmentalist spokesperson tried to portray the destruction of New Orleans as a kind of divine retribution for American over-consumption of fossil fuels. The interviewer (I think it was James Naughty) laughed scornfully at the environmentalist’s crude anti-Americanism.

This week I finally met Frank Hunter, Manager of the Stevenage branch and formerly in charge of all the company’s sales personnel (until the appointment of Mitch Holmes effectively demoted him). I was a little apprehensive about meeting Frank Hunter as he is someone I am going to have to work closely with over implementation of the Marketing Plan. I resolved to try and get him on my side.

In preparation for the meeting I asked IT manager Eric Morgan (aged about fifty-five, plump, grey-haired) for print-outs of statistics that I wanted. He was deliberately obstructive about giving me this information, and I had to make the request several times before, late on Wednesday, I finally got the figures. There was a sort of compliment from Eric Morgan as he handed the print-outs over, telling me: “You are the only person who has ever asked these questions.”

As well as internal data, I also managed to get some TGI research so at least my Marketing Plan will have some credible research to back it up. TGI stands for the Target Group Index, a survey carried out by the British Market Research Bureau every year, asking 24,000 people about their purchase of over 700 types of products, cross referenced with social classifications, lifestyles, and the types of media they consume. The research is then published in a series of volumes, each one of which is incredibly expensive (between £3,000 and £6,000) but if you ask enough people you can usually find someone who will surreptitiously photocopy the pages you want (my copies came from Jon Theobald at the Bleeding Heart Partnership who got them from a contact in the Display Advertising department of the Daily Telegraph).

Early in the week I talked to Frank Hunter by telephone, arranged to meet him on Thursday, and e-mailed across an outline synopsis of the Marketing Plan (I later found out that the arrival of this synopsis caused him a great deal of consternation since he didn’t understand a word of it).

When Thursday arrived I spent the morning on the Operations floor, talking to the staff on the European desk. Clare Vyse is the supervisor of the European desk (at first sight a slim mousey women in her mid-twenties, when I sat in front of her discussing the sales process I became conscious of how big her eyes were, and how dilated the pupils, so that I had the impression of falling into them - it was a disturbing sensation). Her assistant is Scott Jura, a very loud Business Studies student from Keele University, doing a one-year work placement as part of his degree (short curly hair, black suit, mostly darting about the office laughing and joking, but occasionally displaying a slouching moodiness whenever someone has upset him).

Frank Hunter arrived while I was talking to Clare Vyse, and as soon as I saw him I immediately knew who he was (so well had other people described him). Tall, muscular build, aged late-thirties, shortish brown hair with a central parting, dark suit with a faint pin-stripe, bright mauve tie, white shirt (button undone at the collar as if the strong neck had burst it open), designer stubble on his face, tawny coloured eyes looking around the room. He strutted rather than walked, moving between the rows of desks talking to the staff with a mixture of arrogance and disrespect that obviously irritated people (as if he were revelling in his reputation for being unpopular and disliked).

Eventually Frank Hunter arrived at the European desk, and I stood up as Clare Vyse introduced us. As we shook hands and exchanged conventional greetings Scott Jura larked about behind Frank Hunter’s back, making mock applause motions in the style of Wayne Rooney (professional football player sent off the pitch earlier in the week for making mock applause motions at the referee). Frank Hunter and I went into one of the glass offices around the edge of the floor, he took his jacket off (big ostentatious cuff-links) and as we faced each other over a table I thought how he seemed to be the personification of the Brother in Tennysons’s poem “Maud”: That jewell’d mass of millinery; That oiled and curled Assyrian Bull; Smelling of musk and insolence…

We talked for about an hour, and although I tried to establish a rapport I could tell he didn’t trust me. He was very animated when talking about sales, and obviously very intelligent, but when we discussed aspects of marketing he seemed to flounder. Until my arrival he had been in charge of marketing for the company (as well as his sales role - I think he was given the marketing as compensation for being demoted by Mitch Holmes). Even a casual review of past marketing activity indicates that he has wasted huge amounts of money on pointless projects. He showed me a £9,000 design quote for a new brochure, and was shocked when I said I could get it done for less than a thousand. He said he was talking to an agency about poster advertising, and became quite aggressive when I told him that posters were essentially reminder advertising, inappropriate for product launches.

The arrival of the tea trolley (an arcane ritual that seems to have survived the recent cuts and redundancies) allowed us to relax a little. He asked me where I had gone to school (a question I refused to answer since I knew it would label me) and told me that he had gone to Bretton Woods comprehensive in Peterborough. When we talked about sports he told me he was a good squash player.

After our meeting I went back upstairs to my desk. Almost immediately Marco Bottoni, Managing Director, came through the side door and asked me questions about Frank Hunter (what I thought about him, what Frank Hunter was saying about the sales team, whether his marketing projects were any good). I was non-committal in my answers, not wanting to become Marco Bottoni’s spy.