Mrs B reaches breaking point

I felt so sorry for a friend of mine when she told me the following tale of woe : “I’ve got terrible earache but I can’t get an appointment with the doctor. They told me he was booked up for the next fortnight so I just gave in and came home.”

She was really suffering with her ears,  but was boiling with anger inside at being fobbed off yet again. Mrs B is a kind-hearted woman, who has had a few knocks in life. Her coping mechanism is to be pleasant and polite to people, in the hope that they will be nice back. The problem is that it doesn’t always work.

The pattern usually goes like this. By the way, these incidents didn’t all happen in the same day:

·         Mrs B goes to surgery, tries to make appointment, is told the doctor is too busy to see her, gives in and comes home.

·         Mrs B goes to a shop to return an item of clothing. Even though she has the receipt and is entitled to a full refund, she grudgingly accepts a credit note which she has to spend in the same shop.

·         Mrs B asks a shop assistant to scan an item for her as the shelf ticket has fallen off. The assistant, who has a hand-held scanner on her trolley, looks straight through Mrs B and tells her to go and ask at the customer services desk... where there is a long queue. Mrs B joins the queue.

·         Mrs B, who by now has had enough, goes to Tesco to buy a few groceries. As she is leaving the store, she is temporarily blinded by the sun. In front of her is a well-built youth with a shaven head. She walks past him towards the car park then, suddenly, out of the corner of her eye, she sees him running towards her. Mrs B screams and makes a dash for it, shouting “Help, he’s after me,” and throws a trolley in his path. She reaches her car in hysterics. Everyone has stopped to look at her. Well-built youth limps over to Mrs B, accompanied by the store manager. It turns out he is the security guard. He had given chase after the alarm was set off by a youth stealing an expensive mobile phone. They’d been watching him on the security camera but, thanks to Mrs B’s intervention, he got clean away.

·         Mrs B is banned from Tesco.

This is a perfect example of the straw that broke the camel’s back. By the time we get to the Tesco incident Mrs B is feeling well and truly downtrodden, persecuted, ignored – no wonder she thought someone was out to get her.

So, this is what I keep in mind if I need to complain, or make an appointment, or exchange an item, or generally have any dealings that require a request from me to another human being:

·         Know exactly what you want the outcome to be and how to put that into words, for example: “I would like to make an appointment to see a doctor today, or tomorrow at the latest.”

·         Be certain that you are entitled to have what you are asking for: “I have a thumping earache which is giving me pain and keeping me awake at night.”

·         Don’t be fobbed off, keep repeating what you want, clearly and calmly until you get it. If you have  to,  use different words or phrases to convey the same meaning. This stops you sounding like a parrot. So, “I have a terrible earache, please make me an appointment to see a doctor, preferably today.” Or, “I understand the surgery is very busy, which is why I will accept an appointment tomorrow, but I’m in too much pain to wait any longer than that.” ... and so on.

·         Don’t get angry or emotional. Bursting into tears will make you look pathetic and even more of a pushover, whereas shouting: “I pay my bloody taxes, give me an appointment now!” will get you nowhere.

·         Don’t get personal: “I’m telling you that I need an appointment today, you stupid cow.”

·         Don’t be sarcastic: “Perhaps you can have another look to see when the doctor is free, if it’s not too much trouble.”

Stay calm and stick to those bullet points, and you’ll get what you want almost all of the time.

Here’s a case in point. This week, I took on Tesco and won. Customer services went from point blank refusal to exchange an item, to full refund, apology and admission that they’d got it wrong. All because I stuck to my guns and kept my nerve. You try it.

Never give up

My favourite quote of all time is Persistence, by Calvin Coolidge. In just 62 inspirational words, the 30^th President of the United States lays down the ground rules for a fulfilling and successful life. “Nothing in the world can take the place of Persistence...” he begins.

Churchill said much the same thing, only this time in just five memorable words: “Never, never, never give up.”

Overnight success is rare, so rare that when it happens, we gobble up all the fascinating details, believing that one day it could happen to us. Look at Twiggy, little Leslie Hornby  from Neasden, who was discovered after hairdresser Leonard tried out his new style on the 16-year-old waif.  A photo of little Miss Hornby sporting Leonard’s new crop cut was spotted on the wall of his salon by a fashion journalist, and within weeks she was hailed in the national press as “The Face of ‘66”.

She was short by modelling standards, just 5ft 6ins, and her androgynous figure was worlds away from the elegant silhouette of the 1960s’ graduates of Lucie Clayton’s Modelling Academy. Yet Twiggy rose to become an icon of the modelling industry.

Another twist to this story is that Twiggy gave up modelling in 1970, aged just 20, at the height of her fame. She took a gamble and turned to acting and singing... and it paid off – two years later she won two Golden Globe awards for her role in The Boy Friend.

Twiggy is still very much in the public eye, she models alongside Myleene Klass for M&S, even though she’s 62 – and has recently released a CD of her favourite songs. She may have been an overnight success, but her persistence has helped her carve out a lifelong career.

Two decades after Twiggy’s discovery, Kate Moss was spotted in the departure lounge at JFK airport by a Storm model agency scout. She too was deemed  far too short to cut it, and was dubbed “the anti-supermodel of the 1990s”, but look at her now – an overnight success who, at 38, is still a fashion icon.

Now I’m not saying that Twiggy and Kate did it all by themselves – they obviously had people with great connections helping their rise to fame. However, the interesting thing about their stories is that they bucked the trend, seized the fame and used it to get what they wanted out of life.

For those not so lucky to get that helping hand at the start of their careers, persistence is even more important. Identify what it is you want to achieve and make sure everything you do – no matter how small – contributes towards that goal. Visualise your dreams then  start making them come true. Goals, after all, are simply dreams with legs on.

Persistence paid off for 2010 X-Factor winner Matt Cardle. His success may have seemed to have come from nowhere, after all he was working as a painter, postman, milkman, bricklayer, you name it, when he auditioned for X-Factor. Yet, behind the scenes, he was putting legs on those dreams by playing in venues all over the Eastern Counties, starting some five years before his X-Factor triumph.

I remember seeing him in 2006 with his band Darwyn, playing at Banham Cider Shed. It was obvious that he had talent, but then so do a lot of young musicians. He persisted though, kept writing his own material, kept believing in himself, and now, his debut album Letters has gone platinum.

A little luck goes a long way – but persistence is the secret ingredient that makes dreams come true. And now for that quote in full:

“Nothing in the world can take the place of Persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan ‘Press On’  has solved, and always will solve, the problems of the human race.”
- Calvin Coolidge

Can I borrow you for a second?

Some expressions, innocent enough in themselves, can make your hackles rise, set your teeth on edge and start the heart pounding. For me, those words: “Can I borrow you for a second?”, particularly when uttered by a certain individual, can only mean one thing – “Come here while I patiently explain to you why, yet again, you’ve failed at your job.”

Worst of all, you never hear those words when there’s plenty of time to make amends. No, it only happens on deadline or a few minutes past, just after you’ve released the last page to the printers, breathed a sigh of relief and fetched a tray to make everyone a  tea or coffee.

“Can I borrow you for a second?” is the last thing you want to hear. It means phoning the printers and asking them to wait because you have to send the front page again. It means rewriting a perfectly acceptable headline in less than a minute, and ending up with something far sloppier than the original because it’s been done under duress.

“Can I borrow you for a second?” is far more than the sum of its parts. It says “I’m the boss and I can make you do whatever I want.  Don’t argue with me because you will never win, and don’t think for one second that you can relax while I’m in charge.”

Bosses like this are exhausting. They sap your mental strength because you lie awake at night worrying about going to work, and they sap your physical strength because you inevitably end up working longer hours in the vain hope of pleasing them.

The main problem is that they don’t actually have enough work to do themselves. Obviously, they can’t admit this, so, to justify their inflated salary, they have to micro-manage the department, make you redo perfectly acceptable work, sneer at your efforts and set you up to fail.

This has to stop right now. Picture in your mind’s eye the last time you were hauled over the coals by this bully. Remember how it felt, see yourself vividly in that situation, experience the emotions. Now pull out a little, so you are watching the scene  more as an observer. Play the whole thing again and notice how you start to feel more detached from the action.

Now, here comes the best bit. Pull out still further, put a frame around the whole scene – you decide what that looks like – stick a cowboy hat on your bullying boss and make him wear Alan Partridge-style hot pants. You know, the kind he was wearing while gyrating under that disco-ball. Next, you’ll need a soundtrack – my favourite is the Benny Hill theme – so play that throughout the whole scene and make your boss do a silly dance to it every now and again.

After a few goes at this, I promise their ability to strike fear in your heart will diminish considerably. Next time they  ask you to change a headline (or the equivalent) right on deadline, take your time and don’t be rushed. They’ll soon stop doing it when the bosses upstairs start questioning why the paper keeps coming out late.

I’m setting the scene in a newspaper office, but the principle applies in any line of work. Get off the treadmill, stop that futile exercise of trying to please and appease this bully, look after your health  – and don’t let the bosses grind you down.