Diary Of An ADI

Becoming a driving instructor is the best thing I ever did!

I no longer have to answer to complete morons masquerading as managers in a large company – people who have no skills of their own, so cannot even begin to value skills in others. I now spend my days teaching other people a basic skill that will make a huge difference to their lives, and they actually want to learn. But I would never have done it if the right push hadn’t come along…

I’d always been attracted to the teaching profession, and the only thing that stopped me was the fact that I don’t think I could have handled today’s kids (plus, the bureaucracy teachers have to put up with is not far removed from the crap I’d just managed to get away from). It was a shame – I’m a chemist and I’d worked in industry in many roles, and this is what schools were crying out for.

But in my existing job I was getting more and more frustrated by a game they called ’Teamworking’, which had been going on since the late 80s/early 90s. This is where the employee is valued more highly than the customer, and 90% of everything you do has nothing to do with the customer, and everything to do with satisfying management bureaucrats who’d have nothing to do all day if they didn’t make life hell for you.

That capital ‘T’ in ‘Teamworking’ is important. In real-life people work together naturally (if you really must label everything – yes, they work as ‘a team’), but for large companies this is not enough. They have to have everyone working together as “a Team” (with a capital ‘T’), and the only way they can do that is if they have been liberally treated with the commercial product called “Teamworking”. You can buy it at huge cost from highly-paid consultants, and your employees need to be re-treated with it periodically. To keep it simple, lets call it Teamworking®.

As an aside, look at the state of the country (and the world) in the middle of 2009. High Street stores are going to the wall daily. Walk down any commercial road and try to keep count of the ‘To Let’ signs and boarded up shops. Look at how many people are losing their jobs. But bearing in mind we have had 20 years of Good Times, why do you think so many companies have collapsed after just a few months of recession? What has happened to all the money most of them must have made to stay in business for as long as they did? I can promise you that a large chunk of those profits were frittered away on Teamworking®-style initiatives: off-site meetings, teambuilding events, rebranding, consultants, ‘certificates’ and ‘awards’ for things that have absolutely no value, ‘in-house training’ for people who can already do their job, meetings for the sake of having them, etc. (I know for a fact that some managers where I worked were appraised annually on how many meetings they held, and this was the main reason we had to have weekly Team® meetings that you were not allowed to miss – if you did, your annual appraisal took a nosedive).

One episode I’ll never forget was how my department sold its soul in order to get a particular contract from client. The senior manager whose baby it was cut the tender price so much to get the contract we were literally doing the work at a loss. His argument was that it would attract more work which we could charge premium prices for! But he’d overlooked some small details…

• It was by far the largest job the department had. When we made it the department was on it, and it alone, for 2-3 weeks at a time, and we had to make it at least once every quarter.
• It was sticky. This had knock-on effects for every other job, and it meant that equipment broke down even when the sticky product was not being made because of the residues and extra wear caused by it (and the atrocious in-house maintenance).
• We couldn’t take on any new work as the knock-on effects amounted to a further 2-3 weeks every quarter – the sticky product actually tied up the department for around 20-25 weeks a year, instead of the theoretical 10-15 it should have done.
• We went into massive arrears with everyone. In some cases we were a year behind on orders!

The Official Company Font

To cut a long story short, I negotiated all the arrears away and resolved all the problems involved in making the product. A month or so later the very same senior manager who had bludgeoned the client into giving us the contract in the first place had now decided we didn’t want it. We just told the customer we weren’t making it any more. Just like that, we dumped them! They went ballistic. And after all the effort I’d put into sorting the problems out, so did I.

Open-plan Offices and People

If managerial incompetence is annoying, the people you work with can be more annoying still.

As Teamworking® got a firm hold, no one below senior manager level was allowed to have an office. Enter: the Open-plan Office. We wasted a fortune ‘relocating’ people into centralised cow-sheds, where scientists, sales people, legal, and so on were mixed together. Our open-plan cubicles initially started with 5′ (1.5m) high walls – but this wasn’t ‘teamworky’ enough for middle-management, so they were dropped to 3′ 6″ (1m). Even the higher walls allowed enough office noise to get through so that  a typical working day was often a living hell, but line-of-sight contact with loud people was a million times worse.

I was unfortunate enough to work alongside someone who was extremely clumsy – one of those people who can’t put a pen down without knocking something over. She was as thick as two short planks – but her husband was an in-favour middle-manager, and she was one of the Chosen Ones. Her favourite pastime was slamming cupboards and drawers

Close by in another ‘department’, another woman – one of that breed which Teamworking® elevates from the bottom to the lower middle just to prove that Teamworking® works – conducted every phone call via speakerphone. She listened to every voicemail via speakerphone. She dialled and redialled numbers which were clearly not going to be answered via speakerphone. And she would move around her cubicle area rummaging loudly in cupboards, thus having to shout at the speakerphone during calls. She sat about 20′ away from me, and her other endearing feature was the obscene amount of cheap deodorant (like ‘Impulse’ – the stuff you can taste) she coated herself in each time she went out to or came back from a meeting. It would get into the air-handling (not ‘air-conditioning’ – not with this company) units and was recirculated every 10 minutes or so.

Another colleague was a serial hummer. It took me ages to figure out where the noise was coming from, but it turned out he had a nervous habit of humming all the time. My manager was disgusting – he used to lick his coffee cup out to save washing it.

But those two were nothing compared to another colleague who sat directly opposite me. He used to make sandwiches at his desk – bread, butter, fillings. The lot. His desk was covered with crumbs and butter (you can imagine what it is like leaning on a surface with stale crumbs and greasy patches on it). His keyboard and mouse were black, because he never washed his hands, and all the grease got transferred: I was the ‘local IT expert’ – another way they had of saving money and shitting on people at the same time - and one time his mouse wouldn’t move. When I opened it I swear I managed to get about one cubic centimetre of grease out of it. He used to eat whole fruit and vegetables, so his PC screen was covered in sticky spots of juice. He used to clear his throat constantly (another nervous habit) as though he were dislodging a lugie, and I think he used TCP as aftershave. He was in a carpool, and one of his car sharers told me he once got carrying an opened tin of pilchards (that’s sardines in tomato sauce) he was intending to use to make sandwiches with that day. Another time he’d used tinned fish roe to make a sandwich and there were loose eggs the size of small ball bearings all over his desk. He seemed to favour anything fishy.

Policies

Pervading all this you had ‘policies’. The company started issuing little laminated cards (I remember one titled ‘RESPECT’, which was themed at respecting everyone else in the company). Every 18 months or so there’d be a major new policy which meant treks across to one of the corporate meeting rooms for a mind-numbingly boring two hours of statements of the obvious, even more laminated cards, and speeches by people of your own level who were on the way up the corporate ladder due to reasons of favouritism or spousal influence. It’s worth pointing out that these little laminated cards were always accompanied by veiled threats of dismissal - if my manager’s briefings were anything to go by.

Two particularly idiotic policies that stick in mind were:

• the choice of Company font (see picture – they went for Comic Sans, because it showed we were a Teamworking® company with a sense of fun). Some of the huge multi-national companies we did work for weren’t at all happy about that.
• the Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) for using the stairs! Yes, that’s right: there was a written procedure for going up and down stairs. Once, during fire alarm drill, one particular harridan (the secretary/PA to a senior senior manager, who’d typed this SOP) was screeching loudly to everyone going down the stairs ‘KEEP TO THE LEFT. KEEP TO THE LEFT. REMEMBER THE SOP’.

So Anyway…

As a direct result of my opinion over all this utter crap I lost my job. I vowed never to work for anyone again. I saw an advertisement offering training to become an approved driving instructor (ADI) and after careful consideration I went for it.

I became self-employed immediately (whilst I was training to be an ADI). I was consultant to various pharmaceutical companies (profitable, but not what I wanted), and I was a director of a new pharmaceutical company formed by a previous contact I’d made. As a temporary measure later I took a job in an IT technical support department (admittedly, this was working for someone, but it was a stop-gap measure I could terminate at any time. Ironically, it was potentially a job made in heaven for me, but it wasn’t one you could make a living from). During this time I became a fully-qualified ADI.

Is it a good job being an ADI? For me, yes. Like I said above, it’s a joy to teach people who want to learn, and it’s even better when they pass – for some, passing their test is a gateway to the rest of their lives. For example, I’ve had pupils for whom passing resulted in major promotions at work.

Is it an easy job? Again, for me, yes – but I’m sure the kind of people who are attracted to those “earn £30,000, no skills needed” adverts would be wholly unsuited to it. You need to be able to stand on your own two feet both during and after training. Failing the three tests is far more likely than passing them - less than 10% of those who start training become instructors.

Can you make a living out of it? Well, I can (I have more disposable income now than I did when I was ‘earning’ £32,000 in the rat race). I suppose anyone could if they were prepared to be available anywhere from 8am until 10pm every day of the week. By keeping the diary as open as that I can work around 30-40 hours a week (sometimes more). I guess that if I kept my diary fairly closed and only did 9 ’til 5 Monday-Friday I’d be lucky to work 8-10 hours some weeks. It took a while to build up the pupil base, but then that’s the risk you take, especially if you go it alone. Anyone starting out these days – with the so-called credit crunch, and all – ought to consider starting off with a franchise instead. It is probably safer.

This blog is just a collection of things and thoughts which either happen to me or which occur to me while I’m out each day. The world is full of idiots, and much of what I put on here deals with those idiots and their antics.