Compressed hours

 I had the conversation about “generations” again last week. Quite frankly I’m tired of having it and I really must stop getting drawn into it. I even went to the trouble of having a related conversation with my new best friend, well, we are all doing it. Chat GPT told me how to be tactful and diplomatic in putting forward my views and the like. Unlike the young people of today, I forget which generation they are supposed to be, depends who you talk to. They are all-in with their snow-flakiness and their demands for a better life.

Now any serious statistician should never promote an argument on anecdotal observations, or even worse, some kind of statement that starts with, “well I was very different when I was [insert age here]”. So I won’t do that. No, really.

Back in early 1989 I had been itching to bring my training scheme to its conclusion and move on to my (see the possessive determiner there?!) first real job as an Assistant Manager. Wherever you group people together, they will form a hierarchy, don’t let anyone tell you differently, and back then Lloyds had one that was impressively structured and all-pervasive. Over the years it changed the letters, the numbers and whatever other classifications they had, many times, back and forth, but always the essential truth remained, that there was a clearly delineated status to every single job in the organisation.

I was obsessed with it. Most of my peers were obsessed with it, and actually, most of the people who claimed not to be, were obsessed with it too. I wanted to advance up that pyramid, if that was the right shape to describe it, as high as I could and as fast as I could. So did everyone else around me, we talked about it amongst ourselves all the time, and we let our managers know about it all the time. I must have been a right pain in the behind to manage with my constant demands. Hard to believe I was ever like that isn’t it?

Looking back now I spent a lot of my time doing jobs I didn’t enjoy that much because I saw it as the route to some kind of hierarchical Nirvana. I could have taken more time to enjoy the day-to-day, rather than endlessly worrying about the future. But more on that in a later post, because it does not end well. 

Fortunately for the young ambitious upstart, for that is what I was, my time arrived in April 1989, when I was “posted” to the job of Assistant Manager, Marketing, at Lloyds Leasing Limted, (LLL). In those days, the Bank still decided where you were going and when you would go there. I don’t know f there actually was a Masterplan, I doubt it, but how the choices were made was hidden in the opaque clouds of HR process.

 I had been doing real work, with real customers in the first two branches, but this was a step up in all senses of the phrase, although in some respects it was a bit like going back in time. I may be overplaying this. Whilst part of the Bank’s Corporate Banking Division, it was a far cry from all that 1980s champagne and red braces. For one, we were located in a slightly down-at-heel office block at the end of Southwark Bridge Road - south of the river! For another, the general office vibe was very friendly and mutually supportive, not at all what you see n 1980s films about high finance. 

The office was nice enough though, I specially remember the swivel, high-backed comfy chairs that we all had, unlike anywhere else I ever worked, they had deep, beige, cushioned seats and backs, with arms and an ability to recline. At the time I just thought that was normal, but now it seems just bizarre. There was no cafe in the five-story building, so when I didn’t buy a sandwich from the shop around the corner, I might walk to the Bank’s large processing centre - Sampson House, where there was a huge canteen amongst other things, to cater for the hundreds of staff that worked there and in other nearby Lloyds buildings. All gone now of course, replaced by one server and a silicon chip. 

To get there we walked along the south bank of the Thames, past the huge and seemingly rotting Bankside Power station. Little was I to know it would become a favourite haunt of mine thirty years later when it was converted to the Tate Modern.

Later on while I worked at LLL  archaeologists discovered the remains of the Rose Theatre in the rubble of a demolished building nearby, just along from the new replica of the Globe. Nowadays that part of London has an arty chic to it, but back then it was emerging from the post-war gloom and was decidedly down-at-heel. Other changes were happening too.

The stereotype of the Bank Manager as Mr Mainwaring (a la Dads’ Army) had long gone by the late 80s, and although there were still long lunches and trips to the golf club, they were certainly becoming rare, and I had never saw any of them personally. But at LLL, things were a bit different for some very distinct reasons. First, the business that we wrote (tax-based leasing of a ticket value of £250K and upwards, for major corporates and public bodies) was pretty technical. But we closed deals at the end of every financial quarter, and this meant we had one quite busy month every three months, and very busy third week of the quarter end, an almost frenzied final week, and practically no sleep for the last 24 hours. I specifically remember one or two quarter-end periods where I was going home in taxis in the middle of the night for a couple of weeks, such was the volume of business we were doing.

I may be exaggerating a bit, but it meant we spent a lot of the rest of the time trying to drum up business in advance, calling clients, doing research, and most of all, the favourite occupation of the Mangers in the team, entertaining clients. More on this later. 

The team consisted of six teams, each comprising a Manager and an Assistant Manager.  With an overall Head and his Assistant Manager. We all had our sectors that we focussed on, yes even back then there was segmentation - it is not a new thing - as well as particular focus on doing deals for specific asset classes. DOn’t tell anyone, mine was for financial institutions and secondary leasing.

 I have to admit the precise details of how it all worked are a bit beyond me these days, but I do know that a big reason that we existed at all was to shelter and offset the profits of the Group by using what is known as “tax capacity”. As long as Lloyds Bank was making its huge profits we could remain in the market and be competitive in the rates we sold at, and they were very fine margins over the cost of funds that we lent to our clients in order to acquire their assets.

So there we were, a team of 13 people in the one room, (the Head naturally had his own office) and by today’s standards it was horrifically un-diverse. All the Managers were men, aged between about 40 to 50. There was one female Assistant Manager, and six males. Everyone was white and I am pretty sure all heterosexual too. I was too wrapped up in my own little world, trying to get to grips with the job, impress my boss, impress the Head, that I didn’t really think about it that much then. Nowadays I’d have been appalled at the way we all thought the same, and lacked any diversity at all. Don’t get me wrong, I wanted to do a great job, I worked very hard but I was 24, and all I thought about was myself. Sound familiar?

I looked at the middle-aged managers and thought they had no understanding of my world. Didn’t they know how hard it was for my generation to get established and climb the ladder? They had had it easy I thought (in truth I had no idea, just loads of assumptions) and couldn’t they see how much harder it was for my generation? I really wanted to learn and I did get experience of how to deal with very complex lending and sophisticated clients. My manager was actually very good to, and for, me, and after a while he was happy for me to even look after a couple of smaller deals and clients all on my own. I also thought I looked very smart in some natty suit and tie combinations. Very pleased with myself. 

One thing the managers were VERY good at was “entertaining”. In part this was the tail-end of that culture that had died out in the branches, but it was also reflective of a different client base, and a different set of assumptions about how this could, and would be done. If ever the phrase “different times” was invented for something, it was invented for how the managers approached the serious task of entertaining clients.

Back then Lloyds Bank owned a sailing boat, called predictably enough, The Dark Horse. Teams within the organisation could book it for a day, and it would ply its way from Portsmouth across to the Isle of Wight and then back again, crewed by the resident professional and qualified Skipper and crew. So it came to pass that the Marketing team hired it one Summer Day to entertain some of their clients, and they needed an Assistant Manager to do all the running about for them. That of course, fell to me. 

When I rolled up n the car park in Portsmouth at 7.30 in the morning, in my crappy Fiat Uno, I was a bit surprised to see all the managers being dropped off by their wives. The clients were also arriving by similar means, or by taxis, having made their way to the South Coast by train. It didn’t  take me long to find out why, as everyone was soon tucking into champagne and bacon sandwiches on the boat, before we had left the harbour. That set the tone for the day, and my chief responsibility appeared to be to make sure no one fell into the Solent. 

By the time we got to Cowes a couple of the party were so drunk they couldn’t get up the steps to the quayside, so instead of lunch in the Royal Yacht Club, they had a little nap on the boat instead. Luckily it was a fairly breezy but sunny day, and the trip back to the mainland passed without incident, and I made sure everyone got to the right place to get themselves safely home at the end of the day. It was real eye-opener in the world of corporate hospitality, and workplace alcohol consumption that I have not seen since. Except once.

Me and another Assistant Manager from another department were asked to “entertain” some visiting graduate trainees, they were spending time with us as part of their training, and on their final day we were asked to take them out to lunch. All I will say is that my Manager gave me the corporate credit card, told us to go to a wine bar, and uttered some kind of “encouragement”. I did go back to the office, but I don’t think I was that productive. It was both the first and last time I was ever drunk in the workplace, and I very much learned my lesson. Although it seemed the Managers had never learned theirs, because they frequently came back from client entertaining the worse for wear. I think it was also during my time at LLL that the office smoking ban came fully into force too, as even smoking rest rooms closed their doors for the final time.

More change was happening in the outside world which was to have a profound impact on the direction of my career within the Bank. The economy had been booming in the lates eighties, too much unfortunately and the bubble, fuelled by cheap credit and overconfidence, and an over-inflated housing market, had finally burst. A new recession was tearing through the UK and the Bank’s profits were also under strain. Without profits to offset against tax, LLL literally couldn’t write any leasing business. We went from being incredibly busy, to twiddling our thumbs almost overnight, as our clients were also finding things tough, and cutting back on borrowing for expansion.

A reckoning was coming.