Man Management

29th January 2007

I was reading the other day about the famed man management skills of football managers Sir Alex Ferguson and Jose Mourhino. It reminded me that when I was a supervisor with Ferodo Brake Lining a long time ago that on at least one occasion my own man management skills weren’t all that bad.

George was the night shift sweeper-up on my shift, employed to keep the passageways of my section and other sections in our block clean and dust and debris free. He was without any doubt the most lazy idle sweeper-up in the world. He should have been shown the door long since but this was pre-Thatcher when trade unions were very strong and the only offence that warranted the sack was murder, and even then the offender might have got off with a written warning. So how to get rid of George?
On company headed notepaper I wrote to him pointing out that the company had just taken on, as his opposite number on the day shift, a man with only one leg. I went on to say that as that it was clearly unfair that a man with two legs should be paid the same wages as a man with only one leg the options now open to George were –
(a) Carry on with the company, but on half the wage he was on previously. Or –
(b) Have a leg off.
I signed the letter with a fictitious name and added under the name Manager and Chief Executive. I put the letter in an official Ferodo envelope and handed it to him at the start of the next shift. Five minutes later he was in my office.
“Have you seen this?” he said in a shocked tone, brandishing the letter, and all of a shake.
I took the letter off him and read it. “Hmm,” I said. “Actually I do know about this, George. The Manager and Chief Executive left this for you.”
I handed him two pieces of paper. One was a leaving notice, made out in his name. The other was an appointment with Cavendish Hospital, Buxton, to have a leg amputated. He looked at them in turn.
“You’re to sign one of those and let me have it at the end of the shift,” I said.
He thought about it for about ten seconds or so then said: “Tha can have me answer now. Because I’m not having a leg of, t’job’s not worth it.”
With that he signed the leaving notice and handed it to me. Man managers? I’ve shit ‘em.

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Dear Air 2000

Football Crazy 

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Razzamatazz

Hi. I’m Terry Ravenscroft, I’m aged 67 and…..whoooah, come back, I’m not ready to have the lid nailed down on my coffin just yet. Anyway I’m a very young 67. (About five years ago I went to see Pulp at the Manchester Evening News Arena. I was older than everyone else by at least 35 years. The eighteen-year-old next to me asked me if I’d ever been to the venue before. I replied ‘Yes I saw George Formby here once’. She’d never heard of him.) This blog is going to be about my life and the way I see things. Before I retired I was a comedy scriptwriter for Les Dawson and Smith and Jones amongst others so there’s a sporting chance that some of the things I write will be funny. One of the reasons I’m writing this blog, although by no means the only reason, is because I have a website www.topcomedy.co.uk which I hope you will log on to occasionally. I have yet to meet anybody who doesn’t like Dear Air 2000…. My hobbies are walking, playing crown green bowls, watching football, birdwatching , cooking, and, according to The Trouble, moaning. Oh, and I have a thing about Kristen Scott Thomas. A couple of people I will be mentioning from time to time are The Trouble and Atkins Down The Road. The Trouble is my wife. I don’t call her The Trouble because it’s cockney rhyming slang for ‘wife, trouble and strife’, but because she has the habit of starting sentences, especially to me, with the words ‘The trouble with you is….’ Then goes on to complete the rest of the sentence with words like ‘you never listen when I’m talking to you’ or ‘you never see the other person’s point of view’ or some such other frivolous complaint. Atkins Down The Road is my best friend and lives, not surprisingly, down the road. I started a weblog a couple of years ago but stopped doing it to write a novel about golf called ‘A Good Walk Spoiled.’ If you want to read the weblog it can be found on my website, if you want to read the novel it can be found on my other website, Razzamatazz, at www.razza.fsnet.co.uk along with lots of other things. Hi. I’m Terry Ravenscroft, I’m aged 67 and…..whoooah, come back, I’m not ready to have the lid nailed down on my coffin just yet. Anyway I’m a very young 67. (About five years ago I went to see Pulp at the Manchester Evening News Arena. I was older than everyone else by at least 35 years. The eighteen-year-old next to me asked me if I’d ever been to the venue before. I replied ‘Yes I saw George Formby here once’. She’d never heard of him.) This blog is going to be about my life and the way I see things. Before I retired I was a comedy scriptwriter for Les Dawson and Smith and Jones amongst others so there’s a sporting chance that some of the things I write will be funny. One of the reasons I’m writing this blog, although by no means the only reason, is because I have a website www.topcomedy.co.uk which I hope you will log on to occasionally. I have yet to meet anybody who doesn’t like Dear Air 2000…. My hobbies are walking, playing crown green bowls, watching football, birdwatching , cooking, and, according to The Trouble, moaning. Oh, and I have a thing about Kristen Scott Thomas. A couple of people I will be mentioning from time to time are The Trouble and Atkins Down The Road. The Trouble is my wife. I don’t call her The Trouble because it’s cockney rhyming slang for ‘wife, trouble and strife’, but because she has the habit of starting sentences, especially to me, with the words ‘The trouble with you is….’ Then goes on to complete the rest of the sentence with words like ‘you never listen when I’m talking to you’ or ‘you never see the other person’s point of view’ or some such other frivolous complaint. Atkins Down The Road is my best friend and lives, not surprisingly, down the road. I started a weblog a couple of years ago but stopped doing it to write a novel about golf called ‘A Good Walk Spoiled.’ If you want to read the weblog it can be found on my website, if you want to read the novel it can be found on my other website, Razzamatazz, at www.razza.fsnet.co.uk along with lots of other things.

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