The road to nowhere …

I can’t help thinking that I’ve been here before. Sticking a set of different coloured VW Beetles on the starting line to represent my team. I had a flash back to when I was back in at the old place … sticking the heads of Big Brother contestants on cars … Nadia … oh my … I’m stuck on a roundabout with no left hand turn.

I mentioned this to the team, "A couple of years ago we had big brother wacky races."

They stared at me blankly.

All afternoon they did Pete impressions.

There’s only so much “Whistle. Pop. Wanker!” you can take

Something Stupid

Give a team of sales managers a task like selling car kits and it is a queue for something stupid.

“Let’s make it visual! We’ll run a motorway along the side of the office with cars representing each of our advisers!” Fag Ash Lil, who loves these kinds of things couldn’t help herself. “We can have prizes for people who hit different mile stones – the first to fifty could have a free valet, the first to a hundred could have a furry dice.”

“Yes! Yes! YES!” screamed Brenda who was practically sticking to the seat with excitement.

Everyone was ‘tasked’ on finding cars to represent their team members from the internet. Elaborate plans were made for the art work. I offered to order the brown paper and felt tips, but I’ve been banned from the stationery catalogue (again) following an over enthusastic ‘post it’ request a few weeks ago.

Car kits sold … Nil (Early days)

Our friends electric

Refreshed and renewed – we have been set the task of ‘blowing Bolton out of the water’ in our sales performance.

No body blows quite like Brenda blows when she’s had a tuna and onion sandwich. Her mentor and former boss, Bernard, has been winning the monthly sales competition for the past 6 months. They even managed to sell a job lot of St George’s flag dressing gowns (from Euro 2004 – with the label cut out) and the Cupid Love Handles went out in droves.

Brenda has seen the light and she’s insisting that every call includes the sale of a heritage car kit, which includes a Victorian style squeegy.

During her presentation she talked about the need to create a “Blueprint that follows the road map to a sales timeline.”

Its times like this when you need a regency style sat nav.

Flog it!

I felt really empowered being ‘a leader’ rather than a ‘manager’, unitl I had to take my shoes off to enter Brenda’s office. She’s got a new carpet, a new lap top, a screen and one of those pointers that people shine in the eyes of pop stars.

We sat in a semi-circle, looking each other down in our new ill-fitting uniform. The collective rustle of the nylon body-warmers, combined with the new carpet, was generating enough static to power a small town in Wales. Forget nuclear power Mr Blair, I've found the answer.

“We are reaching a new era of freshness and renewal …” she said.

Here we go again.

“Renewed, refreshed energy …”

She really is Bernard in a pencil-line skirt.

Wiginagain agin again and again

Brenda has created a new world order in Wigan. She has given the Team Managers a new title. From next week, we are to be known as Team Leaders. She thinks that if we change our names we will become like Winston Churchill in an Asda suit over night.

The Asda suits are going too. The campaign for ‘togs’ has finally been given the green light and we will be decked out in yellow t-shirts and beige slacks with the company logo embroidered on the purple tie. To finish off, we have a beige gillet, which sounds like a sea bird, but it’s a quilted body warmer that makes us look like we are FBI agents without a nightstick.

Brenda doesn’t wear it. It doesn’t suit her ‘line’ apparently.

I give it a month. I’ll keep my ASDA suit on standby until then.