Some of the more ‘aloof’ members of the Illuminati have been
contacting me wondering how on earth one can convert time invested in committee
work into smartie points for promotion.
Well; read on dear heart and I shall lay bare the duplicity and
skulduggery required for success. These methods
will still be valid today and could most probably be translated into civilianese. Remember what the Warrant Officer from
Shawbury said to me when I asked him how I could get promoted. He asked me to try and imagine my boss
preparing the annual assessments. In his
head he would line us all up and then compare one against the other. What I had to do was, when he was looking at
us all in the line, was to be the one jumping up and down the most. With legs like mine, I ask you!
Don’t think that just by volunteering to be on any committee
is enough, once there, you have to perform.
I have come across many who had joined committees to get their promotion
smartie points and found themselves completely out of their depths. It helps if you are competent and boy was I. In fact I didn’t really like myself for I had
no time for committees, and any time I found myself chairing any committee meeting
it was a nightmare having to listen to other people’s ideas and
suggestions. I mean now and again
someone would dream up a gem of an idea but it wasn’t that often. Whatever you were involved in had to work, in
fact it had to succeed.
More importantly you had to make sure that people knew about
your success. This was not so much ‘blowing
your own trumpet’ but just making sure that your name was put before the
correct people time and time again, so any occasion that they thought of you,
you were jumping up and down. Every
committee meeting had to produce detailed minutes of the meeting and this is
where you could really score smartie points.
First of all you had to volunteer to record and produce the minutes. Remember, as a famous Irishman with lovely
legs once said, “It’s not who makes history that succeeds but who writes
history.” This had to be done efficiently and in double quick
time. You couldn’t steal anyone else’s
idea, but you could make it appear that you were one of the more important cogs. So every topic or motion had to have a
proposer and a seconder and nominated people would be responsible for seeing
certain actions through.
Take for example the local civilian drama group. There is no direct link between that and
Wattisham, so I have to create one. The
drama group met in a local person’s house once a week and read through
lines. So when the Families Club committee
meet I propose that in order to strengthen bonds between our little community
and the civilian community we allow the drama group to use the club to rehearse
their next production, it has to go in the minutes. Now, no one in the drama group has asked for
such a thing, but when I suggest that perhaps there could be an insurance issue
or a security issue perhaps this proposal should go to the Station
Commander. Of course everyone thinks that
this is a great idea. So do I, for every month the station commander was being
told what a great guy I was and how involved I was in the local community. In fact, on paper, I was real asset in
promoting the good name and nature of the air force.
I was now involved in the local amateur dramatic group. I thought I could help sweeping up, or
opening and closing the stage curtains, however being the sort of fellow that I
am, I found myself centre stage so to speak and it didn’t matter how I felt about
it, I was going to have to go through with it and probably have the chairman of
the local amateur dramatic committee invite the station commander to their next
performance as a thank you for allowing them to use the Families Club, which
they had never got around to but it’s the thought that counts. And the Station Commander would probably be
too busy to attend but at least he would know who their star performer was. So I hope you can see that you just didn’t join
committees and get promoted, there was a certain amount of deception and shenanigans
involved and let’s not forget a lot of hard work too.
And I suppose you think that it stops there, well; no it doesn’t. For what you now need is for your boss and
the Station Commander to come visit, you need them to pop along and see what
you are doing, let them hear from everyone else just how good you really
are. In the forces we called this a ‘Bring
your boss night.’ As well as making sure
your name featured with the correct projects you could make sure that you name didn’t
appear for certain things, like suggesting there should be a bring your boss
event. Don’t want to appear pushy, now
do we? And of course the ‘bring your
boss’ concept was a little loose. Most
of us would have three, what I suppose we call today line managers. There would be your immediate boss, then your
section boss and then your squadron boss.
I invited my immediate boss and my squadron boss. My section boss was the SATCO and he was a
total arse so if someone else wanted to invite him they could. The evening would be split in to two
sections. First section would be the
meet and greet and pleasant and polite conversation. About nine o clock in the evening the senior
guys would leave and we would then launch in to an evening of madness. I had enough experience of these types of
evenings to know that it was pretty easy to allow yourself to be carried along
and end up in a gutter somewhere, for this evening I decided to be in
control. I made sure that an American
service man John Lanzafame was on the bar.
Everyone arrived and we stood around chatting and pointing
out what we had done to the building and of course made sure that the Station Commander
and O C Operations knew who the driving force was behind the Familes Club. We
then waved them away and settled in to the more down to earth section of the evening. What my poor immediate boss didn’t know is
that I had planned to get him off his trolley.
He though he was simply standing at the bar with me, a pleasant Irish fellow
with the nicest legs in Ireland and Vic Storey, the chief cook and bottle
washer from Wattisham. One of the reasons
we had invited everyone down was that we had rebuilt the bar and extended the
lounge, we had to show all this off.
The bar looked quite nice, quite professional actually, all
the bottles lined up and glasses laid out.
On the word of command Vic, totally out of the blue, as we had planned, asks
my boss if he has ever tasted a certain blend of tequila. Of course he hasn’t, because it was something
special that John Lanzafame bought on the American air base. Vic was a wonderful story teller and makes it
appear that this tequila is one of the best brands in the world. My boss is now a little drunk and I suggest
that he should buy a round of drinks. I
bet you’ll never guess what he bought.
Correct, three tequilas. Well Vic
was now becoming his best friend ever, along with me. There was a mass of whiskey glasses laid out,
upside down, which were being used to serve drinks. John Lanzafame had to turn his back to us,
open the tequila bottle and pour the three drinks. What my boss couldn’t see is that John only
poured one drink.
The rear row of glasses were sitting the correct way up and
each contained a shot of tap water. Vic
and I were drinking water while my poor boss was hoofing down tequila. Of course we thank him for being so gracious
for buying us such a fantastic drink, but now it was our turn to buy him a
drink and the game continued. It wasn’t
long before his legs stopped working and he started to do the old fall down
dance that is so popular amongst drunks.
We were only having a bit of fun and didn’t want to harm, or kill him,
so we poured him in to a mini bus and told the driver to take him home. He
lived somewhere on the outskirts of Ipswich so it would only take about twenty minutes
to get him home.
So at the end of the evening I felt that I had accomplished
something. All those who needed to know,
had been told how good I was. My immediate
boss wasn’t going to remember much about the evening so could only assume that
he had had a good night and boy when he came to write my assessments would I be
jumping up and down. We tidied up a bit
and then all relaxed and sat back to enjoy a beer when the minibus driver came
in looking very unhappy indeed. He was
sporting a bit of a bruised eye and began shouting at me for having such fantastic
ideas. Seems that the driver forgot the
address that he was to take my immediate boss to and had stopped outside
Ipswich train station, where there was plenty of light. He had started to go through my bosses pockets
hoping to find an address when my boss regained consciousness, thought he was
being robbed, so fought back. I thought
it might have been the only glitch in my perfect evening however I was soon to
discover that my boss couldn’t remember a thing about his journey home. It all sounded good to me as I told him what
a great night he had had and we should do it again sometime. All I would have to do now was sit back and
wait to get promoted.
No comments:
Post a Comment