Traditionally, Irish people were employed through a recruitment technique known as pull. Pull was where one of your relations, already in the organisation, would ‘pull you in’ by putting pressure on the boss. Persons who were connected to others through kinship, friendship or having intimidating family members who were owed a favour traditionally staffed Irish companies. Because it is impossible to halt the juggernaut of modernising influences, sadly the system of pull has been replaced by the competency-based interview. But if you still value our traditions, get yourself pulled into a job because it will spare you developing your interview techniques. Tell your mother that you are going to work with her tomorrow. If all your relations are unemployed, send out a hundred custom-written CVs to a wide variety of companies. Sit back and wait for the interview.
Interviews: The Self-Depreciation Rule
During the course of your interview, you will inevitably be asked about your weaknesses. If you are honest, you will get the job. If you lie by describing your weaknesses as being on a slide towards alcoholism; blogging all day on your laptop; not liking to get up out of bed before 11.30 a.m.; not liking to make decisions or take responsibility; and being happiest while daydreaming of a different life in a tropical country, you shouldn’t expect to get the job. What your potential employer is looking for is honesty, so you should tell the truth. The truth is that, if anything, you are too conscientious; you take on more work than is good for you; you have no home life so you like to work late into the evening; your motivation goes way beyond being paid; you like to take on responsibility without any authority; and you are happiest while taking on extra work. If you have one really big weakness, it is trying to do the work of five people. Such honesty will get you the job.
The First Day Rule – Exhibiting Enthusiasm
On the morning of your first day in your new job, you should plan for your retirement. Meet your pension representative to make sure that your payments will be in place so that you can retire as soon as possible. But before that happy day comes, you have to settle into work. Conventionally, it is important to make a good impression on your first morning. Work etiquette demands that you not be more than fifteen minutes late. While it is acceptable to look happy on your first day, thereafter you should exhibit as many symptoms of clinical depression as possible and participate in the communal complaining.
Appearing happy at work is a breach of work protocol. Your boss will become anxious if you look happy. He may start to worry that you know something he doesn’t. Maybe you are planning to leave for a better job. It’s not that he cares about you; it’s just that he doesn’t want you to be happy somewhere else. ‘Employees these days’, he is likely to think, ‘You just can’t get good ones. Not like in the old days when we were all happy to be miserable together head-butting rocks in the quarry.’ Use Peig as your role model. Remember how unhappy Peig was working in that shop in Dingle and how she didn’t complain about it more than nineteen times per day. Therefore, even if you are not miserable, you should act and look miserable from your second day onwards because you don’t want to upset the boss. This is particularly important if you are a receptionist. Following sporadic feelings of guilt, because you look so miserable, your boss will attempt to cheer you up with small bonuses. In general, looking depressed is the quickest and most effective way of giving the impression that you are hardworking and efficient.
On the first day, you may be taken around to meet your colleagues, who will be introduced as your teammates. Don’t try to get on with them; try to bond with them. Don’t have arguments with them; have diverging strategies. Don’t have bitching sessions; have team meetings. If there is a welcome lunch, go to it and stay at it all afternoon drinking the complementary wine. Go from there to the after-work drinks session. Make sure that you start a drunken brawl with your teammates. This will mean that you will be too unwell to come in to work for your second day. Result!
The Rules of Taking Sickies
If you do manage to drag yourself in on the second day, use your time to fill in your leave sheet. The normal working week runs from Monday to Friday, inclusive. However, traditionally you can take Mondays as a sickie along with your allotted holidays and Bank Holidays. As no one can do anything on a Friday afternoon, there is no point in coming back into the office after lunch on a Friday. If you take a day of your holidays each week, say, Tuesdays, you can average a two-and-a-half-day week. Make sure to come in on Friday mornings because they are a doss anyway. You can still take two weeks’ holidays during the summer by contracting some kind of resistant virus.
You should inform your new employer as soon as possible of your disabling conditions. Something that keeps coming back, which is both incurable and embarrassing, will cover your Mondays. Parasites are unfairly maligned. In the right host, they have their uses. Parasites growing somewhere inside you are good. You can bring pictures to the office. A parasite that becomes active after Sunday lunch is even better because it can be ‘playing havoc’ with your kidneys by Monday. Escape-artist parasites are best as these can evade the weekly attempts at the hospital to evict them from your chosen organ. A parasite with a large number of beneficiaries is an attractive choice because these can take over in the unlikely event of a successful eviction of the parasite. Anything that prevents your employers enquiring too closely is good. For instance, piles. You can bring photos of these into the canteen. People will stop asking. But remember not to look like you enjoy sitting down, even though you do it quite often. Squirm in your chair every now and again for effect, especially if asked at a meeting to make a decision.
You can also have a large family of disease-prone relations at home, who you are obliged to rush to the hospital at least once a week, preferably on Mondays. Why not let the whole family be hosts to a parasite you all picked up at a salad bar in Morocco? Remember, you can only have your appendix out twice because surgeons have been known to leave a teensy-weensy bit behind the first time. In order to avoid the attention of The Lancet journal, you can donate only one kidney to a sibling, but you can be the recipient of as many as you like. On the morning a colleague of mine was due back at work after she set a new world record for the length of time needed to recover from an appendectomy, her husband fell down the stairs and concussed himself. Nice one!
As a male employee, you can ask for maternity leave for your phantom pregnancy. What employer wants to see that go to the Labour Court?
Don’t waste the benefits of a real disease. If you are actually sick, go to work to show the suppurating lesions in your armpits to your boss. When he pays for the taxi to take you home, you have the satisfaction of knowing he won’t want you back any time soon.
How to Be Important
It is practically impossible to understand who is in charge of things at work and who has the power. There are three fundamental laws of power in the Irish workplace. The first states that the less important you actually are, the more effort you invest in convincing your colleagues that you are actually important. The corollary of this is also true – the more important your colleagues come to think you might be, the less important you have actually become. The second law of power states that if you really are important you are less likely to try to convince anyone of your importance. However, if you don’t try to convince people of your importance, the less important you will become. The third law states that most people are not important to the organisation. If you actually are important, it is unlikely that you will think you are not. Therefore, it follows that those who try to look important are not, and those who don’t try probably are, unless they actually are not important. The most confusing group are those who are not important but feel they should be.
This means that when you turn up for work on your first day, it is impossible to tell who really is important and who you can ignore, because most of the unimportant are masquerading as essential to the company. The important are probably cleaning the toilets as the ultimate demonstration of their hidden powers. How c
an you tell the difference? It is not necessary. Just join in and try to look important. Helpfully, there are a few rules you can follow.
The Size-of-Office Rule
Genuinely powerful people within your organisation may have enormous offices. But, then, so also may losers. You will need to carefully study the details to work out who is who. These offices will be decorated with hardwoods, preferably mahogany, with matching billiard-table-sized desks. It is crucial to put some thought into the type of wood used for panelling so as not to make the wrong impression. As a general rule, don’t use an endangered species of tree unless you advertise it to everyone. A genuinely important boss should be willing to reinforce their ruthlessness symbolically. A white rhinoceros skin on the floor and an ashtray made from a mountain gorilla hand will impress. But for the aspiring middle manager with less means, the presence of a dead plant will also signify authority. The dead plant will connote that this person is too busy to properly look after it; watch out, because if he neglects a plant, you may be next. But appearances can be deceiving. Anyone who goes to the trouble of bringing a dead plant into work to instil fear in their employees is not worth fearing. If they are really important, they would have a lackey just to water the plants. You should fear the big office with the jungle running along one wall hiding the full-time gardener. Don’t fear the office with all the files piled up on the desk in the lame attempt to give the impression of frantic work. Everyone knows that the higher up the scale you are, the less work you have to do.
Inversely, there is the one-of-the-lads boss who occupies the smallest and darkest office because she leads from the back. She may actually be in control or she may just have issues with asserting her authority. Like the boss with the big office, it is unwise to form a rash judgement on the basis of first appearances. Look for the small clues. I once had a boss who condescended to occupy a small office only because she went on a management course where she was persuaded that it was better to look like she was one of the lads. She wasn’t a great student, so, while she moved to a smaller office, she brought her Alessi limited-edition tea set with her. Also, her hair gave her away because she had power-hair to match her power suits. Watch out for the woman in the Paul Costelloe suit in the tiny office.
Then there is the boss who is so important that he has no office at all. He will turn up some morning asking, ‘Do you mind if I borrow a corner of your desk for a minute?’ Before you can say no, he will have sat down, opened his laptop and proceeded to use your phone to confirm his afternoon golf partners. Then he will confide that he has to prepare a short presentation for the Chairman of the Board. He will say, ‘Oh, but that’s me. What the hell am I presenting to myself for? [Laughing manically] Sorry for disturbing you.’ He will then leave. If anyone occupies a corner of your desk, wait about ten seconds, look at your watch and then exclaim, ‘My God is that the time! I am late for a meeting.’ Then run away.
Title Rules
We have a national weakness for bureaucracy and those who tell you that they have no interest in it are the worst offenders. The best way to express your bureaucratic self is through your title. When you have kitted out your office to an appropriate standard of intimidation, you need to think about the title that will appear on your nameplate on the door. If you are an anarchist, just put your name on the door. If not, you need a title to signify your place within the organisation. It is not conventional to call yourself Lord of the Universe, King of All You See or just plain The Boss of You. You have to follow the rules of titles. Fortunately, the rule governing assigning titles is time consuming and, if you are the boss, will give you something useful to do when you do turn up at work.
First, divide the company into arbitrary departments. For each haphazard department, start at the bottom and, as you work your way up, make each title longer and more abstract than the one below. For example, in your Administration Department (God, don’t ask what they do!) call the people at the bottom Assistants. These, who have neither doors nor nameplates, can be herded together in open plan offices. They report to the Administration Assistant Officers who have desks in the open plan office that either face the wall or the windows, if you actually have windows in the cellar (some employers really spoil their staff). The Administrative Assistant Officers report to the Heads of Administrative Assistant Development, who can have glass cubicles in the corner of the cellar. You may fit in four of these for symmetry. This will be the level at which employees will be allowed a title plate on the side of the cubicle.
As you will now be running out of room on your title plates, you can drop back to shorter titles by the device of introducing the term Supervisor. This allows you to start again, working your way up following the same principles. Down the hall, in a two-per-office set-up, you should have the Administration Supervisors. In the first office, we find the Supervisor of Administration, who reports to the Administration Supervisor Officers, who in turn report to the Heads of Administration Supervisor Officers. Ideally, you should have as many of the latter as you can afford, to facilitate the distribution of blame, undermine clear reporting lines, divorce responsibility from authority and sow confusion. The responsibility of the Heads of Administrative Supervisor Officers is to make sure that no one ever works out what exactly is happening in Administration.
Upstairs, with access to natural light, you should have the offices of those to whom the ones in the cellar report. Including the term Director in their title can indicate their superior status. In their own office, but without windows, you should have at least two Directors of Administration Supervisors. In the next office, with a paint-on window, we find the Director of the Supervisor of Administration, who reports to the Director of Administration Supervisor Officer, who has a window that doesn’t open. This person, in turn, reports to the Directors of the Heads of Administration Supervisor Officers. Again, have as many of these as possible, but allow them to have windows.
Repeat this process as you go up from floor to floor, introducing the terms Senior, Director of Development and Vice-President. This structure can be reproduced for each of your random departments by substituting the words Human Resources, Engineering, Sales, Marketing, Quality Assurance, Research & Development, etc. in the place of Administration. The only occasion on which a member of one department should communicate with a member of a different department is if there is a fire in the building, and only then after an agreement has been reached by the joint heads of supervision for those departments affected by the blaze. In general, in the case of fire, the people in the cellar can stay where they are. If you have five departments, for example, ideally you should have five departmental vice-presidents. If any employee becomes unhappy, you should agree to include the terms Joint, Vice, Chief, Senior, Function, Executive, Regional, Divisional, Transnational or Chancellor in their title, as you see fit on the day. Finally, on the top floor is the President, which is you. Get yourself a white Persian cat.
Punctuality Rules
Even if you are not the President, another way of demonstrating your own self-importance in the Irish workplace is by the punctuality rule. The later you turn up to meetings, the more important you clearly are. If you don’t turn up at all, it’s obviously because you are very important. Always arrive late for meetings. When you get there, offer the apology that you were tied up at an even more important meeting than the one currently underway. As a bookend to this, try to anticipate the right moment during the meeting to jump to your feet shouting, ‘Oh, I am late for an important meeting,’ and run out of the room, thereby demonstrating your condescension to have been present at all. It is difficult to get the timing exactly right. Don’t leave too soon, but don’t allow yourself to be upstaged by another important person at the meeting. For this reason, meetings can be very stressful.
Phone Etiquette
Another rule is that the more phone calls you receive, the more important you are. Hire someone to continuously ring you on your mobile. If your budget doesn’t stretch to this,
set the alarm on your phone to ring every few minutes. Pretend someone is on the other end. Immediately following your profuse and intentionally hammy apology for being late for a meeting – because you really don’t want anyone to get the impression that you actually care – your phone should ring. You should say, ‘Oh, it’s you. I am sorry I can’t talk right now because I am at an important meeting. Can I ring you back? Really? Really? What did he say to that? What did you say? How did you leave it?’ At this point, place your hand over the phone and whisper confidentially to everyone at the meeting that you are really sorry but that you just have to take this call because it is really important. Proceed to talk loudly, preferably with shouts and threats, for at least ten minutes without leaving the meeting. When you finish, say – again, with the least conviction you can manage – ‘Sorry about that. Where were we?’ At this point, your phone should ring again. Roll your eyes, as if saying ‘What can you do?’ Answer the phone and repeat the routine above. You should do this at least three times per meeting.
For advanced phone etiquette, you need two mobile phones that are connected by speed dial. Hide one phone in your pocket or handbag. Leave the other on your desk. When one of your minions comes to your office to ask a tricky question such as ‘Have you read the report I sent you that you screamed at me last week to write, which took me sixty hours to do over the weekend?’, hit the speed-dial button on your hidden mobile. When the mobile on your desk rings, hold up a finger to halt the diatribe of the underling, while debating aloud with yourself why you cannot talk right now. Keep this drama going until your employee leaves the office. If you have a particularly contrary employee before you, pause the phone ‘conversation’ and say, ‘Is it okay if I get back to you because I just have to deal with this important phone call right now?’ Repeat this tactic on every occasion that an employee comes to your office looking for feedback, because it is more productive than actually reading a report. This approach is especially useful for anyone with a financial role who deals daily with irritating employees looking for pay reviews, invoices to be paid, equipment, holidays or leave, paper or paper-clips, or those who are informing you that the building is on fire.
How to Be Irish Page 12