An Introduction…..Part 2

So, it’s 1975 and I got married. My wife was a teacher and I was working as a Section Manager in a Department Store (“Miss Brahms – are you free?”. We can laugh at “Are You Being Served?” now but believe me it was a lot closer to real life than most people realised). We were both earning reasonable salaries and we were able to buy a small house. One of the great benefits of working in a Department Store was that we were able to buy almost everything we needed to furnish our little house at a generous staff discount – and much of it at interest-free credit too. Driven by an interest in computers I had joined the Open University and had started on a degree course in Information Technology. In 1978 our son was born and life was generally pretty good.

But I still hankered after a Representative’s job and in 1980 one came my way. Not quite what I had hoped for as it was selling safety products to industry rather than selling to retail, but it seemed like a good place to start. They gave me a company car (red base-model Ford Cortina), £70 to buy a new suit in the Company-approved colour, and a car full of samples and paper-work. My territory was South-East Wales – Gwent and the Glamorgans, with nowhere more than a 90-minute drive from home. I would be able to get home every night.

And for 18 months or so, everything was good. My wife took a career break to bring up our son so she had no income coming in, my salary was largely commission-based but I was a good salesman, and we prospered. But the winter of 81/82 was the start of the global recession, and nowhere was it felt more keenly than by the manufacturing industries in the Welsh Valleys – my main customers. About that time the company I worked for took on a new National Sales Manager. As sales continued to decline throughout the recession, the company’s strategy for maintaining profitability was:

1. Call each salesman in to the factory in turn and give him a good b*ll*cking and

2. As each disillusioned salesman resigned, split his territory among the remaining ones.

In 1981 the company employed 42 salesmen and my “patch” was Gwent and the Glamorgans, by October 1984 there were just 17 salesmen and my patch was the whole of Wales, Gloucestershire, Avon, Somerset, Dorset, Devon and Cornwall, and I was away 2 or 3 nights every week. So I too became disillusioned. And armed with my degree in IT from the Open University, I handed back my car and joined the Civil Service as an Executive Officer Computer Programmer.

More in Part 3.