After many years of faithful service my beloved Bell & Ross BR 03 – 92 timepiece has gone wrong. It’s decided to choose random moments of the day to display meaningless times, which for someone as punctual as me is a nuisance. I guess I’ll have to buy a new one or just succumb to the Fitbit Ace 3 active tracker thingy-majig that everyone wears now, to tell them you’re not a bit fit.
Part of me wants to get it mended, but the last time this was done it was traumatic to say the least. Not having the provenance and receipts from twenty years ago, I was questioned, interrogated and challenged by the smug jewellery shop owner to prove it was genuine. Only after pleading ‘one owner from new’ did he begrudgingly accept, with a warning that if it arrived at the Bell & Ross Service Department in Paris and was fake, there would be severe repercussions and they’d retain it. Thankfully it was the real deal and for the privilege of getting it going again, I received a bill for £500, holy moly!
The month my faithful watch was enjoying the wonders of Paris, was frightful, for punctual old me. I only had the moon to tell the time and this was like going out with no trousers.
Of course I did have a backup. A rather charming vintage Longines as it happens that I received for my eighteenth birthday. But sadly my eyes are so old and weary that I can’t read the face properly. Fashions have also changed and it sadly looks very small and feminine in-situ. You know that old man watch look, with a tiny slim dial, fat wrist and blood clot inducing strap, tighter than the Scottish. This ultimately led to me turning up late to meet friends and that for me is worse than vomiting in a taxi.
This also brings me on to the biggest problem in my quest to find a new timepiece. There’s a world of choice out there but everything is unbelievably expensive and fitted with a whole host of features no one could possibly ever need.
I’ve flown all over the world but at no point did I think ‘Damn, I wish my watch had an altimeter because then I could see how far off the ground I am’ particularly as the inflight TV system displays this from take-off to landing. Similarly, when I was diving off the Great Barrier Reef I didn’t at any time think: ‘Ooh I must check how far below the surface I’ve gone’. Thoughtfully God fitted my head with sinuses that do the job very well and quite honestly remind us of why we should never be under the water in the first place!
I JUST WANT SOMETHING THAT TELLS THE TIME.
You might think then, my demands are simpler. I don’t want my watch to open bottles, diagnose my car or track my body and I don’t want it to double up as a laser, Bond style. I just want something that tells the time, not in Bangkok or Los Angeles, but, here, now, clearly and robustly with no fuss. The end.
But it isn’t the end, you see someone in Adland (that’s me guiltily) has decided that the watch says something about the man. Having the right timepiece is just as important as having the right hair, car, or the right names for your children. I remember at a dinner party once, an acquaintance leaning over to a perfect stranger on the other side of the table and proclaiming ‘Ooh is that a Monte Carlo?’ It was, apparently, and soon enough everyone was cooing and nodding appreciatively. Except me, I had no idea what a Monte Carlo was and I’ve even been there too, huh?
Where does one start to buy a new watch with so much societal pressure it seems to get it right at dinner parties? Do I want to be Breitling Bentley Bend it Like Beckham or Buff Brad Pitt Tag Heuer ‘what are you made of?’ – talk about purchase intent insecurities.
INTERESTING FACT (To use at dinner parties if your timepiece doesn’t measure up).
Did you know that nearly all watch advertising has the hands at ten past ten and has done for years? This apparently is the optimum position to showcase the analogue aesthetics and any of those gadgets you really don’t need. Grab a magazine and check it out, if you don’t believe me, and David below is no exception.
YES A COLLECTION, CAN YOU BELIEVE?
A colleague of mine also had a large collection of watches he coveted too. So large in fact it needed a dressing table contraption to keep them all wound up and ticking, analogue agitation I guess its called. But despite all this he still had the need to spend thousands of pounds on just one more, a new Bremont. Now I know roughly what he earns and therefore I know what percentage of his income he’s just blown on this watch and medically speaking he must be completely potty. It is however rather nice and comfortingly hand assembled, just up the road from me and again is a brand enriched with the legacy of Biggles and vintage aviation.
It turns out though his Bremont, in the big scheme of things, is actually quite cheap. There are watches out there that cost tens of thousands of pounds. And I just can’t see why?
Except of course, I can. Timex can sell you a reliable watch that has a backlight for the visually impaired, a compass, a stopwatch and a tool for restarting stricken nuclear submarines, all for an Argos best of £39.99. And that’s because the badge says Timex, which is another way of saying you have no cool, no style and you probably drive a Kia Sportage.
To justify the exorbitant prices watchmakers charge today they all have to carry absurd names like Audemars Piguet or Girard Perregaux and they all claim to make timepieces for fighter pilots and space-shuttle commanders and people who parachute from outer space into waiting power boats for a living. What’s more, all of them claim to have been doing this, in sheds in remote Swiss villages, for the last six thousand years. I don’t know about you but I also find the more you pay for a watch the harder it is to even just read the time on the face.
How many craftsman in the Swiss mountains are there, millions perhaps? This is why the trains all run exactly to time and let’s be honest the Moser-Baer railway clock face designed in 1944 by Hans Hilfiker, a worker on the Swiss railways is a masterpiece in design and to date never been beaten. Breitling even bangs on about how it made the instruments for historically important old planes. So what? The Swiss also stored a lot of historically important gold teeth and famous artworks. It means nothing when I’m lying in bed trying to work out if it’s the middle of the night or time to get up.
Shameless Adland and watch companies still serve up all this active lifestyle guff and show you pictures of Swiss pensioners in brown ‘Open All Hours’ store coats, painstakingly assembling the inner workings with tweezers and then try to flog you something that is more complicated than the engine management system of a Bugatti Veyron. Or which is bigger and heavier than Fort Knox and would even look stupid on the wrist of Puff Diddly. It’s ironic really that every watchmaker it seems, is also visually impaired, as they always have WW2 style focal contraptions strapped to their eyes.
TIME HAS A WONDERFUL WAY OF SHOWING US WHAT REALLY MATTERS.
Perhaps I should follow the path of a dear friend who went to find his inner self in Bali for six months. He returned so humbled and liberated, he kicked the can of conspicuous consumption so far down the road, he wrote a wonderful book on compassion and empathy in life and business. He was happy now to just to wear a hipster rubber wristband thingy. From that day on he relied on his garden sundial to keep him in sync with meetings for the day. His collection of expensive watches never saw the light again.
On reflection then, I think I’ll just get the Bell & Ross repaired, with a feel good eco-warrier hint of repair, refurbish, and reuse, assuming I can convince them its genuine. The bright and breezy blurb that goes with my watch claims it’s made in Switzerland by pensioners (craftsman) using German parts, by a company that supplies the American military. It also shamelessly alludes (just like Breitling mentioned above) to the innovation and inspiration in and around Spitfire cockpit dials. Who cares if it doesn’t get any worthy recognition at dinner parties, the Battle of Britain sure does. My watch is analogue all the way (just like me), it’s very simple, has big numbers, and looks like it belongs on the hairy arms of someone in the mining industry, who blows up mountainsides (not Swiss) with dynamite.
Anything that’s linked to the Spitfire, the best fighter plane ever made, is more than enough for humble old me. Now where did I put my trousers, it’s time to scramble, chocks away and for once be on time again.
As we creep into Autumn trying to decipher the news of topsy-turvy exam result algorithm’s, that throw the already questionable academic inflation and future of A.I into question, it’s time to simplify our lives surely?
With unprecedented (article word of the year) and gloomy unemployment data, broadcast with an almost ubiquitous frequency, (as I write 7000 Marks and Sparks loyal employees are the next wave to go) – now is the time, whilst sitting at home with many posturing increased productivity, through the worlds new connectivity window of Zoom, to think smart and think small.
I thought just for fun it might be a good time to experiment with some lifestyle writing (let’s face it AA Gill started at 38 and he was dyslexic), so there’s hope for all of us and if you’ve got this far it bodes well. I also feel morally obliged to disrupt LinkedIn content a little, to help break up the monotony and repetition of the posts, centered around the ‘look at our training day, its bigger than yours’ company updates, or almost ad nauseam, the often rather awkward photographs promoting the ‘certificate of recognition’ awards, to keep the Learning and Development Departments engaged in these troubled times.
So where is this all leading, well, let’s start with a just-for-fun simplification strategy that centres around ditching something in your everyday life, like your coffee machine, because if its anything like mine it drives you mad doesn’t it? Every time you ask it to do what it was designed to do, it says that it needs water, or beans, or some form of complex decalcifying procedure, which means you have to spend the next half hour shouting at your family or partner because the instruction book is not in the drawer, where all the instruction manuals are supposed to be kept. If you do then find it, it’s full of complex annotated drawings that make no sense.
Of course, you may have a much simpler Nespresso machine, which produces coffee without much palaver at all. Yes, but is there anything on God’s green Earth that generates so much waste? One day we’ll all drown in a sea of Clooney capsules. Talking of capsules have you ever tried to buy them? I visited a store the other day and they asked if you have an account with Nespresso, by which it means a facility to sell your data to more luxury suppliers after obtaining your inside leg measurement, biometrics and a retinal scan. If you do have an account and put your purchases on it, it takes exactly ten minutes longer than by just paying with your credit card.
So if like me you wish to pursue a simpler, happy, and stress-free life, put your machine in the bin and crack open the Nescafe jar, remember that?
While you’re at it you could turn off the TV and listen to more records. Cut yourself off from the world, it’s so liberating. I do this more and more and find myself enjoying and slipping into an almost blissful ignorance around Trump re-election shenanigans, Covid-19, and the gloom and doom of recessionary woes and enjoying an almost utopia of a trouble-free world. In fact, I was so ignorant from my frequent unplugging from the grid, I thought the Michael Jackson tour was passing through, judging by all the face masks in town and he’d renamed his pet monkey Wuhan.
Next, you should throw away everything that needs a charger. Just imagine actually travelling with a suitcase full of clothes and your favourite book and not cables, adapters, plugs and wires.
It’s the same thing with your complicated driverless lawnmower and your octopus pool cleaner or motorised pepper grinder. You imagined such things would make your life easier, but instead you have to spend every spare moment shouting at them because they’ve gone wrong.
So what’s happening? Well, it only dawned on me recently how really important we actually all are. Our years of mass consumption, and consumerism for all these gadgets, devices and aspirational luxuries that you just don’t need, is what kept it all sticky, greased and turning. I’d fallen into a space that the brands I was loyally purchasing from were doing me a favour, when in fact its vice-versa, food for thought here and a big shift in consumer behaviour and beliefs is already unfolding. Rolex and Hermes perplexed at the disappearance of luxury consumers can you believe for the first time have stopped production, only this week. Mass consumerism grinding to a halt perhaps is actually bigger than Covid-19, hard to believe but truth well told perhaps. There’s no vaccine for consumer spending reticence/resistance, just high-street closures and more unemployment. Governments stretched to the limits with burgeoning deficits have already splashed the cash in stimulus packages, that as predicted fell short and was a flash in the pan offering only a brief respite.
The solution perhaps, ‘live light, love local’. I’ve found myself in this simpler, less noisy, brave new world and it’s currently working for me. I was forced to adopt a very Coke Light approach and existence to my life a year before the pandemic. This re-centering was well-timed, giving me more flexibility and freedom to reboot, retool and evaluate what really matters in life including a much-needed speedy departure to leafy Gloucestershire before an intense and strict lockdown in Dubai. I can assure you the latest car and tech gadget is no longer relevant for so many now, which is already wobbling the world of many super brands. This gloomy retail index type news is for all to see, assuming your TV News is still on and you’re not listening to records.
With the national debacle of the GCSE and A-Level results fading in the news, albeit still with a flurry of newsworthy revolts, mass school appeals and pitchforks at dawn, I’m sad to confirm an even bigger academia blow, with the sad passing of one of my personal heroes – the educationist Sir Ken Robinson. Sir Ken was the proponent of the encouragement of creativity and the arts among children. The engaging world of TedTalks that launched his brilliance will just never be the same.
He was the protagonist that literacy and numeracy should not predominate a flawed educational system, born only in legislative centralised government buildings, which are far from the classrooms. He struck a real chord with me from the get-go and challenged the institution of educational standardisation and mind-boggling academic inflation, that quite often overlooked the arts and creativity pursuits, which he believed convincingly schools were killing. His wry and witty extempore style, honed in Liverpool, was characteristically engaging. Subsequently posted on YouTube, the TedTalk ‘Are Schools Killing Creativity?’ has been viewed by 380 million people in 160 countries and has influenced schools around the world.
His contribution to understanding the dynamics of the education system and the negative effects it has on some learners should never be undervalued. He conveyed it with great wit and charm, but also with an enormous amount of empathy for those of us, like me, who remained a square peg in a round hole academically. When I first saw his TedTalk I felt relieved and valued at last. I discovered I was a right-brained creative thinker and he helped me rise above the narrow, often-standardised, view of aptitude in schools.
Talking of schools I was lucky in many ways and avoided being packed off to boarding school at a tender teddy bear holding age like my poor brother. Deftly this was sheer luck or skill on my part flunking the entrance exam in hindsight; I’m not too sure. The cold capacious character of the stone buildings located in deepest darkest Wales did little to welcome you. I knew how unhappy he was as a boarder at the time, but I didn’t realise how unhappy, how alien it all was and how cruel. His saviour eventually was an MOD funded military school in Germany, where we were stationed, that was exempt from the league tables, didn’t speak in Latin and just let us get on with it and truly celebrated creativity, Sir Ken would have been proud.
Even now as I write this with the wildly inflated or deflated exam results and criminality of the applied algorithm, the UK will have thousands of children leaving school for good, confident they’ve learned all they need to know and are ready for whatever the world may throw their way. But as my brother rightly points out when he escaped the clutches of a Welsh public school, he still had no idea about the difference between a credit card and a debit card, and while he was pretty well versed in the periodic table, he had no clue how to secure a mortgage or even what council tax was.
I’ve long held the belief that schools exist now solely to maintain their position in the league tables. Children are like meat. They’re taught how to pass exams in the easiest possible subjects so that, when they do well, other parents will send their young fresh meat to that school, rather than a rival establishment.
To maintain the illusion that its all for the benefit of the children and not just about the league tables, kids are told they have no time for frivolous pastimes such as reading newspapers, enjoying live concerts in muddy fields, stealing bicycles, or socialising (outside of their dark web smartphone world) because they must get to University, for which they will need four straight A*s and no less than Gold in the Duke of Edinburgh Awards.
University is held aloft as the be all and end all, which you must pass through to avoid a front-of-house career in fast food – “you want fries with that”?
But in my experience this simply isn’t true. Take me for example (albeit many years ago), I was offered a role in a Saatchi Agency straight out of school and I jumped at it and have never looked back. Why did I get it, because I had bluster, confidence, the required eighties bow tie look and of course a motorbike pre emails, to courier the agency’s parcels all over town (in all weathers I hasten to add, at my cost) simple as that? It does sadly rather sound like the model of internships even today, something’s never change, but thankfully in fairness I was well remunerated all things considered. My counterparts all chose the University path and, unanimously, they delved in drugs and guaranteed their membership to Alcoholics Anonymous, while duly attending the token one lecture per week, to hear a professor transmit standardisation checklists. Ironically they all struggled to find work for several years thereafter and amounted huge student loan debts owed to the government, who ironically recommended this path in the first instance.
Now, it seems, my eagerness and entrepreneurial spirit to commence gainful employment to really learn the ropes in the real world and not in the classroom, bites me in the rear view mirror all too often. Today’s online application forms, employers and recruiters dedicate almost 70% of the interview process or online data fields chasing this piece of degree paper from twenty years ago, proving I could hold my drink and attend one lecture a week in a designated building. My twenty years sweat blood and beers industry experience honed in brand marketing is of inconsequence.
I’ve interviewed and employed many a young person in the agency and corporate world (I’ve also turned that many away with degrees who can’t spall, punctueight or even kraft an interesting attention grabber intro paragraph). Their interview experience often only amounts to no more than a trial of the intimidating boardroom chairs, a free glass of water and the gesture of the bus fare home. Lets be brutal and honest, an upper second from Warwick didn’t get close to a spot of cronyism. If you looked the part, (shameful I know but advertising is in the image business, take it or leave it), or I knew your Mum or Dad, or even better you were the just left school offspring of a potential new client, you stand a pretty good chance. If you weren’t, you’re just another name on a mile-high stack of CVs.
It may well be you were studious, completed all your coursework and you maintained a neat daddy’s haircut. But what do you think an employer wants, a kid who knows about Newton’s Third Law, or a young gun who can monetise Zoom and use pay-by-phone parking without calling his mum for help?
I’ve been staggered how inept and naive some school leavers are. Common sense and understanding around day-to-day things like average speed cameras, social distancing directives in public places, knowledge of where troubled Lebanon actually is and civil rights revolutions around why black lives matter ‘too’. – the use of too is important here.
They mock the Gen Xers like me for not having a thousand followers on Tik Tok or being able to fathom out the in-car infotainment centre. But conversely they can’t boil an egg, use a saw or change a fuse in the car and have a baffling indifference to the term patience. When I grew up we had Dukes of Hazzard on a Sunday (my favourite) then had to wait until the following Sunday to watch the next episode. Today, television or streaming I think its called is immediate, hence the term I guess. As a result of this ‘I want it now’ mentality, they can’t understand why after only a day in the agency, they are still account executive? ‘Why am I not Group Account Director?’ they protest after they’ve only been in the job a week and barely made it past reception!
Schools could rectify this by teaching patience instead of maths. I would also encourage kids to gamble, so they can see how easy it is to lose, and take out a loan so they grasp the problems of paying it back (unlike their student loan) and the difference between APR (annual percentage rate) over Interest Rate. Or how about learning the art of massage, that would be more potent in the fickle modern dating game than a Tinder in app purchase of a ‘super like’ ensuring your prey is notified of your desires, not that I’d know, I just researched this.
Could they be tested in any of this stuff? No, not really, which is why I would abolish all exams past the age of eleven. Exams ruin childhood and exist only as a yardstick for universities, to maintain their pursuit of academic inflation.
The end result then could be a country full of young people who have no idea about subglacial erosion, ox-bow lakes and algebra, but who are worldly-wise to get to a party without Google Maps, date a girl for real and not on WhatsApp only, make a Pot Noodle without scalding themselves and the realisation Donald Trump is as dangerous, stupid and foolish as rocket man Kim Jong Un.
I WANT WORDS WITH YOU.
Words that were banded around abundantly in and around the bike sheds at my school during breaks are extinct and banished these days. Spastic, Queer, Gimp, Poof, Gyppo, Wuhanker (sorry couldn’t resist the last one) as we find ourselves standing at the precipice of viral extinction. This laddish 2-cool-for-skool vocabulary back then, would be ground for being expelled today or instant dismissal from work and in many ways rightly so, I guess. It’s a little derogatory in this new PC world where even the words to Rule Britannia, dating back to 1740, are now under scrutiny it seems?
You can’t use these words anymore, just like you wouldn’t name your child Adolf. And yet, strangely, it is perfectly acceptable for those of us in travel and hospitality to pepper our conversations, websites and social media posts with the word ‘beverage’.
There are several twee and unnecessary words in the English language. Tasty. Meal. Cuisine. Nourishing. All should be erased. But, without a shadow of doubt the worst word, the worst noise, the screech of fingernails down the biggest blackboard in the country, the squeak of polystyrene on polystyrene, the cry of a baby on an aircraft when your hung-over, is the word ‘beverage’, surely?
PUNCH DRUNCH.
In Dubai it gets even worse. The mandated use of the term ‘grape beverage’ abounds, in a bid to soften and ward off the associated evil spirits (not the revenues) around alcohol. And, don’t get me started on ‘flavour’, the new secret squirrel code name everyone knows for Shisha, which the Health Ministry is instructing in a hopeless bid to try and eradicate this wheezy age-old social pastime, which is the last bastion of cultural traditions on the glistening streets of modernity.
Talking traditions the expat ‘BRUNCH’ is so last year I’ve heard. The fickle crowd, all now head to the new weekend pilgrimage ‘DRUNCH’. Clearly eating is officially cheating. Why waste precious time consuming food when you can just ‘drink-as-much-as you-can’ on grape beverages all day at the drinky drunky lunch?
As an ex-hotelier, I never knew where to hide my embarrassment during Brunch. For the new guests checking in from a long flight, who had to witness the unceremonious stretchering out from the hotel lobby, of intoxicated and scantily clad Brunch girls to the waiting ambulances was not exactly the warm Arabian welcome they were expecting. I would try in vain to avert the guests bewildered gaze at check in, to ensure they also avoided witnessing the customary, fully-clothed, freestyle swim in the hotel lobby fountains as the DRUNCH crowds parting gesture.
Apparently, they used to have ‘bever’ days at Eton when extra beers were brought in for the toffs. This almost certainly comes from some obscure Latin expression that only Boris Johnson would understand.
Therein lies the problem. People who work on planes and in hospitality (myself included) have got it into our heads that the word beverage, with its Eton and Latin overtones, is somehow posh and therefore the right word to use when addressing business class passengers and luxury hotel guests. The trouble is these customers in question are almost certainly (Mr Businessman – see my last post). They take flights all over the world and stay in business hotels and remain fairly average in the pecking order. The hospitality industry doesn’t need to treat them like they’re on the set of Downton Abbey. They don’t cut off their crusts on cucumber sandwiches Dorchester style, or say grace before dinner. They’re called Steve and Dave from Swindon. You know what they were doing in the departure lounge? Organising a merger with Heinz and Kraft? Fraid not, they’re looking at some Hooters swimsuit pageant pictures from the Internet, assuming they could even get airport Wi-Fi!
I’m middle class; I went to a military school most people would call relatively posh (it was certainly well-funded, thanks in part to the MOD). But if I came home to my wife and said I fancied a cold beverage and could she pass the condiments, or would she like help washing the accoutrements later, she’d punch me in the face!
DON’T SAY IT WITH FLOWERS.
As hoteliers grapple with new PPE ‘keep calm and covid on’ protocols, the glossy hospitality language we’re used to has been disrupted and is now punctuated with almost medical side-effects style leaflet copy, found with your antibiotics prescription. This new language is designed to rescue room nights and promote our new found, overnight, medical advisor acumen. Back in the old world though, we do still need to understand that guests don’t want to be treated like Mr Darcy. We need to embrace that they will understand there’s a kettle in your room. We don’t need to say there are ‘tea- and-coffee-making facilities’. Whilst we’re at it we should probably abolish ‘at all’ too, after every question. Can I take your coat at all? Would you care for a hotel car to the airport at all? Care for another complimentary welcome beverage at all? What’s wrong with saying ‘A free drink?’
Perhaps as hoteliers we feel that using more words than strictly necessary is somehow polite or helps justify the extortionate room rates? That’s why in a high-end restaurant last week I was offered some ‘bread items’. Maybe the change should start with the illustrious ‘food and beverage’ department, whom should be educated that the haughty, shizzle of embellished, vernacular-spectacular, mumbo-jumbo, foodie dialogue with restaurants and cuisine today, needs a serious, keep-it-simple-stupid rethink? When was the last time you even understood a menu?
Having written copious amounts of copy for luxury hospitality brands in my time, I’m guilty of all of the above too. My father used to read many of my extracts whilst holidaying and jokingly requested from room service a sick bucket, to relieve himself from this swamp of superlatives. He used to say, why couldn’t you just write simple English everyone understands, cut the flowery crap? – he has a point bless him. My brother also busted me during his stay, where he stumbled across a resort-wide food and drink (sorry beverage) guide I’d crafted. Page six; I remember it vividly introduced a new hotel bar concept, which exuded a nautical theme in its proposition and interiors. From memory the descriptor was something like, ‘Nakhuda Bar is the captain of comfort and the admiral of ambience’. How did we get away with it, I’ll never know? I guess very few guests on holiday read anymore, except my family, who tease me still to this day and treated it like a sport and pastime to find the most cringe worthy flowery crap as my father used to say!
A NEWSPAPER FOR YOU, AT ALL?
Finally, to almost validate today’s musings, I remember just before returning to the U.K from Dubai earlier in the year, I had a coffee in the hotel lobby next to my apartment and there was the familiar friend, the rack of newspapers. You know the ones that are wrapped around a long wooden pole and remain almost impossible to read without injuring yourself or taking out a passer by. The accompanying notice said ‘Newspapers for your reading pleasure’. All they had was the Gulf News and Khaleej Times, so it wasn’t even technically correct.
Before the COVID cloud descended, I was fortunate in my chosen career to travel and see the world from a business class seat, but like so many now, not anymore. This does however give me the opportunity to share, just for fun really, some peculiar observations I’ve made over the years with the corporate traveller; regarded as the life support of airport retail and a dying breed now, no thanks to the pandemic.
Clearly the Zoom platform is the new normal of 1-2-1 human business interactions across the globe and the unimaginable cemetery of airlines. I guess inadvertently, we’ve found something Sir David Attenborough can for once be chipper about, with the dramatic reduction in ozone depleting, cancerous, aircraft contrails, so that’s a little good news from all this bad and who knows even Greta Thunberg might relax a tad.
In retrospect though this unplanned sabbatical from corporate travel for me is quite a blessing, as I no longer have to endure ‘Mr Corporate’ on the move, which is baffling at the best of times.
I consider myself a relatively humble traveller, who knows what to wear, what to take, where to sit on the silver bird (with no fuss), for the all-important swift strategic exit, to beat the immigration queue debacle on arrival. I know my gate and don’t rely on airport staff lazily for anything, and i’m always conscious of what time to leave the business lounge leaving plenty of time for the marathon to the gate. My personal KPI to aviation etiquette success, 35,000 feet up, is when I believe the crew almost don’t know I’m there. A far cry from many passengers I have witnessed, who believe they deserve the attentive service of a five star hotel guest relations manager, at all times.
My fine-tuned departure diligence and commitment to my fellow passengers thankfully never made me the subject of the Captain’s weary announcement, that we’re just finishing up the paperwork, which in reality, translates to, we’re still waiting for some selfish bastard traveller, who believes it’s OK to still be sipping champagne in the lounge. Shamelessly, and almost like he’s been inconvenienced, he eventually saunters on-board the aircraft for the inevitable walk of shame down the aisle, his air of nonchalance that 500 fellow passengers including the crew are now delayed, knowing full well we should have already pushed back and we’ve now missed our slot, beggars belief.
I’M COOLER ONLINE
What I could never get to grips with on these frequent trips is the regularity of corporate travellers who believe ‘my laptop is in front of me, which mandates its use’ behaviour. Personally I think laptops should be banned from airports. They hold up security checks, they break if the person in front of you reclines without warning (in cattle class) and it seems the world’s businessmen are incapable of sitting down at an airport for a moment, without flicking open the computer and pulling a serious face, while pretending that the machine is actually doing something. It isn’t.
The alpha males fortunate enough to locate an electrical socket, which is coveted, strictly guarded and comes at a premium in the business lounge, usually flex a muddle of about five different cables and devices as invariably none will have any charge, and settle in to assimilate productivity with short-lived red-eye eagerness. They then spend the first five minutes waiting for it to stop making chiming noises on start up and the next twenty discovering it won’t connect to the lounge Wi-Fi, something to this day I have never succeeded with in any airport. I would put money on what I call the existence of the airport Wi-Fi hogger, who lurks in dark café corners, downloading the Star Wars trilogy in glorious HD for free, effectively blocking the bitstreamy pipe thingy for everyone else. The alternative then is to login through your hotspot, but frustratingly this requires you to dig deep for a password you can never remember and by the time its emailed to an account you don’t have access to either, they have called your flight and its time to go.
I think instead of pretending to be international mover and shakers, who cannot be out of touch for a moment, leave the damn thing at home, speed up security checks and spend more time thinking about stuff or reading The Economist. This will make you a better, cleverer person and more people will want to do business with you, not a dinner party bore who believes his MacBook Air with high resolution, 14 inch retina display and four million pixels makes him look svelte and important.
IT’S A COVER UP
The other phenomena of the businessman on the move in airports, is the mobile phone. I started to notice several corporate types holding the handset with one hand and using the other hand to shield their mouths, huh? This is absurd; I mean how many people do you know that can actually lip-read? You really can have a normal conversation you know, because hate to say it, the reality is we’re genuinely not interested in what your saying. You might think you look like an arms dealer who’s negotiating with Kim Jong-un about the next consignment of solid state rocket-man fuel or the market price for plutonium rods, but we know you aren’t because your called Steve from Swindon and your crumpled egg stained suit is from Zara.
MEN IN BLACK
Which brings me to the next travel savvy recommendation. Don’t wear suits when you travel, it only means you have to carry a suit carrier. I did this once (never again), when I was shallow and stupid, worrying more about the creases in my Paul Smith trousers than what I had to sell. The carrier was the size of a house, with so many pockets, it created what I call ‘pocket-paranoia’, similar to what you experience with ski-suits, and almost cost me an extra airline ticket based on volumetric mass alone. My advice, adopt the ‘in the know’ travel convenience of a timeless polo shirt and chino’s, but never, ever, tuck your polo shirt in, as this will make you look like an American and if that isn’t bad enough, it might then find you in the concourse retail area perusing and contemplating fanny packs, the beginning of the end for most of us.
Furthermore when you are in the business lounge at 6 a.m. do not drink vast quantities of alcohol and pile your plate up high and mix croissants, curry and fruit like an apostle at The Last Supper, because it’s free. I witnessed this show of gluttony all the time, often while in the queue for the Clooney capsule coffee machine. Interestingly Dubai Airport business lounge was the worst, its like a Calcutta railway station in rush hour. Every man and his dog is in there and the capacious concourse a floor below almost looks empty because of it. This free dining for all concept and generosity from Emirates (not known for their freebies) creates an almost supermarket style, free shopping, trolley dash atmosphere around the various buffet stations, that one must skilfully now navigate or get trampled on. Lets also be honest here, your about to be served an hour into your flight with reconstituted eggs anyway so this poor eatery etiquette just reaffirms everyone’s suspicion, that you’re a business lounge virgin and only here as a ‘poverty guest’, on the back of your colleagues platinum airline loyalty card.
WORK IT OUT AND GET OUT
Finally, if you’re staying in an international hotel try not to go to the gym. I’ve stayed in fabulous cities all over the world rammed with art, culture, bars and many quirky restaurants with the option to truly eat and mix like a local. And yet my hotel’s gym was crammed with Anthony’s lifting things up and putting them down in the same place again. What an earth are you all doing? Get out of your shorts and immerse in some culture. You are blessed with a job that lets you travel, so don’t waste your time in the gym locker room, talking credit swaps, putting your suit in a silly trouser press that never works and lifting up stuff that’s just too heavy.
It seems ever since the 1990’s a bizarre code of conduct for businessmen exists often resulting in a decimated stock market and the prospect of many years of economic austerity and doldrums to right the wrongs. I put this down to the people that should have been oiling the wheels of commerce being in the gym or trying to impress colleagues with their MacBook Air, that never ever connects to airport Wi-Fi, as its probably too thin to even pick up a signal.
My ‘Mr Businessman’ travel tip conclusion then with all these observations is, wear a polo shirt and chinos, read The Economist, talk normally on the phone and make stuff people actually want to buy. Alternatively you could just Zoominar and make the world a cleaner better place.
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