Life’s rich tapestry - Part 1 - the early years

Please bear with me through this small series of articles. It may see irrelevant to you but if you are an owner of a SME, there is gold in here for you.

Some kids are not cut out for school. Sometimes it’s because they are just plain dim, or they may have some learning difficulties or they’re too smart for the curriculum. For me in the late 70"‘s it didn’t matter. All I know was that I had to get out before my entire life was wasted.

So, on my fifteeth birthday I marched confidently out the gates with much boisterous fanfare to begin my glittering future. Sadly for me, the very next day I was dragged by the ear back to school since the law stated that parents have the final say on kids being at school or not until they are 16. Bugger.

I sulked my way through what was then called School Certificate and extraordinarily passed, albeit with nothing approaching either excellence or my latent ability.

Flash forward to the next year at the same time. September 13th I turned 16 and this time I knew there was nobody to stop me from strutting out.

I did just that and my Mum and Dad expressed their sorrow/rage/shame etc. At 16, these things weren’t my priority.

Even then in the late seventies, jobs were not that easy to come by, especially for boys with a bit of an attitude, but I managed to score a premiere position as barman/wine waiter and minibus driver for The Mandalay in Newmarket Auckland.

My main role was to serve behind the bar, which was generous of the lovely old proprietor who took the risk of having an underage character doing a job he wasn’t legally allowed to do.

But I did ok. I was charming and witty at the bar and out on the floor with my selection of Cold Duck, Mateus Rose and Corbans Hock. For the discerning we had a Muller Thurgau.

Bear in mind this was before the days of Tinder and Bumble and Grindr. If people wanted to get jiggy with each other they had to pop their best gear on and get out amongst it. Old School.

These events we lovingly referred to as “The Dance of the Desperates” as men and women of vastly different age groups came together to get toasted on terrible wine and dance to terrible music and hopefully find someone to take home for the night.

As awful as this may sound, it was pure analogue Tinder.

My job at the end of the night, my job was to hoover up the obviously incapacitated and pile them into the back of the ten seater and get them home.

Trust me, there is nothing quite like the mating calls of the deeply intoxicated and the unusual couplings that were created.

For me, the greatest danger was being left alone in the van with the last lady who hadn’t managed to cop off. All I can say is that I learned al lot about negotiation skills. When to say no and when to say yes to maintain civility and harmony.

After a year of what I will refer to as “accelerated life learning”, I left The Mandalay to pursue a career as a chef. Now, let’s get real about what I did. I fried tomatoes, chips, mushrooms, eggs, bacon and any other things that could be produced quickly on a hot plate. The pinnacle for me was producing shrimp cocktails to order. An aluminium wide rimmed bowl, a good dollop of shredded iceberg lettuce, a couple of cherry tomatoes cut in wedges and a frightening lathering of sauce on a few barely defrosted shrimps and a withered quarter of lemon. This was the pinnacle of my chef-ing career.

Naively I believed that life couldn’t get grimmer or more soul destroying. Think again, my young friend.

Somehow I became a salesman for the Consolidated Assurance Company of America. Provided with training that could have been presented on the back of a cigarette packet, my desperate looking colleagues and I were delivered to provincial NZ to “save” the futures of the population with our life insurance policies of $1,500.00 and $2,500.00 for the flash version. Now bear in mind that these sums were the payout value, not the premium.

We were to convince people that “for only a few cents a week” their beneficiaries would be delivered on their unfortunate demise the princely sum of less than $3k to live out their lives in an unspecified level of comfort and luxury.

I was assigned to towns in the Central Plateau, so Taumarunui and Taihape and even Ohura and Matiere were graced with a spotty little twerp in an ill fitting nylon purple suit and offered this ludicrous nonsense.

Let it suffice to say that a combination of conscience and sales inability led to zero sales and to this day I am relieved that no-one bought into what I have subsequently grown to understand as preying on the vulnerable. Not proud, but happy I didn’t injure anyone.

If there is one thing you can always count on, it is that there is always something more awful down the road if that is the direction you are heading in and in the next episode, I’ll pick up on this bit of glory.

One last thing. My story isn’t representative of everyone else’s, but it tells a story that will have elements that every entrepreneur and business owner can relate to.

I’m writing this as a narrative rather than a short and punchy “learning experience” for two reasons. First is that I have learned that the experiences that make up your life are rich and should be examined and second because bullet points bore me witless most of the time.

There is a time for short, sharp pithy messages and there is a time to ponder. This is one of those. One might even say ponderous.

Stay with me please. This is a story of one man’s life and how it ended up. I hope it’s interesting and I’d love to get some feedback from other people. Your story won’t be the same, but the telling of it will change you.

Join me for Part 2.