Blaikie’s Guide to Modern Manners

Drugs should not be taken, unless actually provided by the boss.

Leave it as you found it and Would you do that at home?

At school, teachers always say to the litter bug, ‘Would you do that at home?’ Usually the answer’s, ‘Yes, there’s somebody to pick up litter.’ They mean their mothers. In the workplace the attitude is similar. ‘I’m too grand to tidy/ clear away/remove rubbish. The “cleaners” will do it.’

But watch out – perhaps it isn’t the cleaners who are doing it. Zoe turned the meeting room at her PR agency upside down. She was overexcited. She was leading a little strategy meeting for the first time. She wanted a nonhierarchical arrangement of furniture. But did she put it back how it should have been when she had finished? Guess who was in there next? And who had to put it all back again? That’s right. The managing director. Who snagged her Nicole Farhi skirt in the process.

In Matt’s office, the bugbear is the coffee area. It’s a horrible sight: ring marks everywhere, drips and splashes, coffee powder scattered, unattractive brown lumps in the sugar. Not even cats could get it into this state. ‘Every day someone puts the jug back on the hotplate with just a little bit of coffee left. After a while it evaporates, leaving a sticky mess which is hard to clean. Once or twice the jug’s got stuck to the hotplate and we’ve had to buy a new machine.’

Just because you’re in the office, it doesn’t mean you haven’t got to:

Tidy as you go.

Leave it as you found it.

Is that your mug?

Once again, the workplace wields its mysterious power. Normally upright citizens turn into serial petty criminals at work. ‘I get through one mug a month minimum,’ says Matt. Luckily he’s not one of those office workers who get attached to their mug. But where do they go? Only rarely is there an explanation. A newly arrived boss I know of once threw away a whole cupboard of old, cracked mugs only to find that they were the jealously guarded personal mugs of his new staff. The thief is rarely caught in full possession. In the mug racket they’re shifted on sharpish. In offices where newspapers or magazines are provided, these can be guaranteed to have evaporated by midday. Otherwise it’s pens. ‘You’ve got a lot of pens,’ somebody said to Zoe one day. She had indeed and most of them weren’t hers. Everyone in an office either has so many pens they don’t know what to do or none at all.

If it’s not yours, don’t take it.

Taking advantage

Zoe, still rather green in the PR world, got a call the other day from an out-of-town journalist on a trade paper of some kind. He was coming up to London. Could she recommend a restaurant, perhaps one near her office? Her answer was simple: no, she couldn’t. Other times she has had calls asking about hotels or enquiring if it’s possible to ‘buy’ any of the T-shirts her agency were giving away last summer. It was no again to the hotel and as for the T-shirts, they were £15 each. Her managing director, when she got to hear about this, was at first annoyed but eventually rather admiring. ‘Good for you,’ she said.

Zoe hadn’t really got it. These people were looking for freebies. Matt can tell of similar grasping ways. ‘We’ve had suppliers demanding to be taken to particular restaurants, then, when they get there, commandeering the wine list and ordering expensive wine. Sometimes they cancel at the last minute or take calls all the way through lunch.’

It’s not just clients who behave like this. Junior employees, when taken out by their head of department or equivalent for a welcoming lunch, are often astonishingly quick to order. This is because it doesn’t take very long to find the most expensive thing on the menu, that being the only object. Ideally, it should be twice as expensive as anything else. Senior managers are helpless to stop this practice, but they do call perpetrators ‘lobsters’ after the item they’re most likely to choose. Luckily, Zoe behaved well at her lunch with the managing director. She doesn’t like lobster or really even know what it is.

Customers are at it too. ‘You’ve miscalculated my phone bill by 12p. I want twenty minutes of free calls and a sequined draught excluder.’ Or, in the supermarket, ‘My trolley’s wonky. I want a year’s supply of frozen peas.’ They call it compensation but actually it’s something for nothing.

Stand up to vulgar grasping clients and customers. They know they’re just trying it on. They won’t dare to protest if you refuse to give in to their outrageous demands. They’ll crawl away, utterly crushed.

Don’t be a lobster.

Overdoing it in various ways

Who is loathed in the office beyond endurance? Is it the hellish monster of ambition, the insatiable nosy parker or the self-important, full-time martyr?

Stories of unbelievable behaviour abound. A senior colleague of Matt’s was sacked. His deputy visited the fallen man at home at eleven o’clock at night, apparently to commiserate but really to discuss a strategy for getting the now vacant post. A similar thing happened in publishing when a redoubtable editor (the job was her life) was made redundant. A colleague was so sorry, how appalling, how unfair etc. and what about so-and-so, the famous crime writer, I really think I’m very well placed to take him on now, don’t you?

This kind of thing is the equivalent of turning up at your gran’s the minute she’s dead, the corpse not cold, and taking possession of the electric blanket from under her.

Others strut about the workplace, saying, ‘My most outstanding quality is my raw intelligence,’ ‘I feel I make a huge contribution with my sense of humour,’ ‘I’m definitely ready to take on this challenge.’ Zoe tends in this direction at times but can be forgiven on account of her youth. Once she announced that in ten years’ time she saw herself ‘heading up’ her own company. Conspicuous use of jargon is another feature of the ambitious, and this can often be happily combined with putting down colleagues: ‘He needs to focus on his presentation strategy if he wants to be taken seriously,’ ‘She’s just not tuned in to the synergistic approach,’ ‘He’s going nowhere while his Powerpoint skills are stuck at that level.’

These types spend most of their time plotting and scheming on their own behalf. They leave actual work to others, which is where the martyr, who might also be ambitious, comes in. ‘Yes, I was working,’ bellowed Mrs Thatcher at three in the morning as she emerged from the Brighton Grand after the bomb. Martyrs are always talking about weekends, about how they don’t have them, they’re too busy working. They sit in corners in offices with their heads down, a massive force field of disapproval slamming out at anyone who might be talking about what they’re going to have for lunch or whether they might buy a new pair of shoes. ‘You can’t be in a fit state for work if you’ve been out until three in the morning,’ they say if they get the chance. Martyrs dislike competition.

‘I had 368 e-mails when I got back from holiday.’

‘You were lucky to get a holiday. I only managed to snatch a weekend on the Isle of Wight and when I got back from that I had 873 e-mails.’

‘It took me the whole day to deal with them.’

‘I know. I was up all night with mine.’

Unambitious martyrs are always ill and always telling their colleagues that they look ill. ‘The way they work us in this place it isn’t surprising. We’re all falling to pieces. I’ve had this cold for six weeks…’

Finally, a disturbing office trait that might be displayed by martyrs, the hellishly ambitious or the insufferably smug. The director of finance for whom Matt works can be relied upon to say, at least twice a day, ‘As director of finance, I do feel that…’ ‘As director of finance, I was surprised that the auditor didn’t speak to me first…’ ‘As director of finance, I feel I should be sitting next to the group chairman…’ ‘I’m telling you, as director of finance, this is how I want it done…’ It’s called Pulling Rank.

If you’re ambitious you should keep quiet about it.

Boasting of all kinds provokes nothing but ridicule and contempt.

Martyrs are black holes; they get everybody down.

Martyrs spoil the fun.

Don’t pull rank. We live in a democracy.

Mobile phones at work

Recently, Matt suffered an embarrassment. ‘I was getting a fair number of calls in a meeting. First of all, the boss asked me to switch my phone off and everybody cheered. Then afterwards he said he wanted a quiet word: “I don’t know why you even have it out on the table. We all know you’ve got one.” He said I looked like a wanker.’

Maybe this was not quite the way to put it. But the boss was right.

The mobile phones of really senior professionals (not quite Matt, yet at least) are never seen or heard. Tim Hely Hutchinson, who is in charge of a gigantic publishing conglomerate, possesses a mobile phone but as his secretary will tell you, ‘it won’t be switched on.’

Which is just as it should be. People like that can’t be at everybody’s beck and call.

Lesser employees in open-plan offices drive their colleagues round the bend if they take personal calls on their mobiles every ten minutes, especially if, like Zoe, you have the cicada ring tone.

So, it’s perfectly simply really:

Only allow mobile calls to interrupt other business (i.e. meetings, discussions, however informal) if you want to appear desperate and disorganised as well as rude.

Remember the old-fashioned virtue: one thing at a time.

If you know that you will have to take an urgent call in a meeting (even a meeting with only one other person), issue a prior warning and ask to be excused. If that isn’t possible, say, ‘Excuse me, would you mind if I take this call.’ Then disappear.

Keep apologising.

If your mobile is for personal use, it should be switched to silent mode in an open-plan office.

Office e-mail

Big groan from Matt. ‘I get hundreds and hundreds of e-mails a day. Half of them go, “I’ve mislaid my copy of The Rough Guide to Romania.