Tales from Mediaville (Part 2: The Summary Executioner)
Read Part 1 HERE
Much has been written about the year 2001 – the year everything changed, the last stand for underground music, the clash of civilisations – but rather less documented is my first contact with the Swedish corporate media sphere that spring.
The company I joined, hereafter referred to as TSF (The Swedish Firm), was based in Farringdon and distributed press clippings and news summaries to clients around London or boardrooms in Malmo. It was niche (although some would argue so am I).
Four years on from graduation I still had no idea what I was doing and found myself applying indiscriminately to jobs in the Evening Standard, occasionally landing interviews where my scarcely concealed apathy was exceeded only by theirs. Occasionally I would show some initiative and send speculative letters, on paper with stamps and stuff. (ask your parents). TSF replied the following week suggesting a ‘chat’. All incredibly exciting. I was calling the shots. Something about my CV must have piqued their interest. Or perhaps I was saving them cash putting out recruitment ads for more support role cannon fodder?
They seemed to like the fact I could speak basic Spanish despite its arguably ‘limited value’ in Anglo-Scandinavian business. I was promised the possibility of a secondment to Spain at some unspecified point in the future. I was to start the following week. My boss was a shy Anglo-Hungarian with fluent Swedish. He seemed permanently agitated and for the first 2 months gave me little to do. I spent much of that time exchanging quasi-flirtatious emails with females from my university I had tracked down on Friends Reunited. My immediate colleagues were a sloane to my left and a Serbian lady sat opposite, neither of whom seemed interested in anything around them.
The hours were 7–3 and we overlapped for an hour with the night team, whose endeavours I recognised well (see part 1). I commuted initially from a shared house in Swiss Cottage where a revolving door of antipodeans and Europeans and deserters from the Israeli army did their best to remind me of student life albeit paying £400 extra a month.
Slowly I began to assume new tasks and projects, writing press summaries, translating documents and identifying bias in the media. Clients sought press coverage of all sorts of markets.. sexual performance pills, stately homes, tyres, restaurants, house builders and chocolate makers, sometimes in Spanish and Catalan, where periodically I would feel useful and instrumental in driving customer satisfaction. I was occasionally sent out to training sessions in Acton or Baker Street or the outskirts of Gatwick Airport, showing clients how to click on portals. It was a rare opportunity to wear a suit and feel relevant amidst the burgeoning ranks of London’s media third rankers.
Gradually I got to know and befriend colleagues there, people from all over Europe with little in common beyond a mutual suspicion of TSF. Friday nights were particular venomous around the watering holes of Barbican and Moorgate, where the ubiquitous booze (and much else..) loosened tongues with reliable ease.
For there were undoubtedly good times at TSC. From hilarious team games to suggest outlandish brand name and job titles (see also essay title) to ‘fun days’ in the office car park, where a marching band was once mysteriously hired to perform on the back of a fleeting cameo on Eastenders.
There were trips to places like Hyde Park and Brighton Pier where everyone was forbidden from mentioning work. These gatherings helped break down the residual tension between indigenous workers who remembered life pre-TSF takeover and those Scandinavians who later descended on London en masse. The UK sales executive who called a director a ‘fat Swedish peasant’ was – perhaps for the best – never seen again.
For all the business coming in and enforced bonhomie, there were continual grumblings and plots forming behind the scenes worthy of the Borgias, splinter groups and factions dedicated to shaking things up or in extreme cases bringing the whole edifice down. Bored by the mundane tasks and minimal opportunties for career progression, the underground resistance proved seductive and – ultimately – destructive. Such was the mood at the regular Tuesday night badminton club in Finsbury Park where putsch leaders and sympathisers would not only vent spleen but also shape an alternative future – outside the organisation.
By 2004 I had decamped to West Ealing, where in a shared house of similarly minded males, the remote control in a smoky lounge quickly became an agent of self-expression. Kindred spirits whose cavalier attitude to everything offered a stark contrast to the corporate tyranny of TSF. There is a special skill to spending hours feasting on MTV Base and Heinekens and then somehow driving along the North Circular in the morning compos mentis for a 7am start.
Consequently my professsionalism took a hit, any lingering aspirations for progression snuffed out by a team reshuffle which saw me further marginalised by a management team who – perhaps not unreasonably - viewed my deterioration with alarm.
Hopelessly naive and oblivious to the gathering stormclouds ahead, ‘advanced conversations’ were entered into with 2 plotters with imaginative ideas on poaching clients and setting up a parallel operation. The legal implications were stark but the dangling carrot of promotion and recognition at a new company were mesmerising. To compound matters, around this time I briefly became infatuated with a French colleague which clouded my judgement only further.
When the end came it was nasty, brutish and short. Ordered to leave the building immediately by some officious twerp in the HR team, there was no time to clear the desk – or emails. You quickly learn who your real friends are in business and only 2 later met me in the pub. Once you are out you are out. Don’t fuck with the system, and don’t play with fire.
I learnt an awful lot about business, trust, friendship and personal relationships. Hopelessly immature and addicted to drama, I forfeited the trust of everyone I knew and worked with. I retain loose contact with only two. I never did join that other company. It was time to sever all ties and start afresh. At 29, office politics was not for me and that secondment never materialised – but my media odyssey was by no means over.