13 October 2016
Socking it to them
A meeting on the brink
by Chin Chin
It was absolutely fine until I blew my nose on my socks. No, no, not like that at all. I am not a contortionist. I was not wearing the socks at the time. They had been rolled up in my pocket where I had put them that morning, meaning to add them to the laundry pile by the washing machine. I cannot think what distracted me, but one way or another I never thought of them again until I mistook them for my handkerchief, pulled them out and, without looking at them because at a marketing meeting you should never take your eyes off the client, blew my nose into them.
The client, or rather the potential client because he had still not decided whether to appoint us, looked surprised. And well he might. Until then everything had been spit and polish with cards being put down in the right order, solicitous offers of tea and coffee (the home team choosing Japanese tea as a compliment to their guest) and a perfectly choreographed presentation of coloured charts. Like many Orientals he reacted well to formality and I had felt that we are getting along well. And then, well, the expression on my boss’s face said it all.
The difficult question was what to do next. Things often go wrong at meetings; of course they do. The real test is how you deal with problems when they arise. Sometimes they can even be used to advantage. I was once at a large meeting where one of the lawyers present had a new phone. He decided to send a message back to the office, presumably a warning to his secretary that he would be returning late, but unfortunately he had not quite mastered the controls. Instead he took a flash photograph which lit up the room and then, just as everyone’s eyesight was getting back to normal, he had another go and did precisely the same again. Bad news, you’d think, but he simply turned to his assistant, handed him the device and said “send a message saying that we will be late”. Perfect. From idiot to grandee in one easy step, but how would you do it with socks. The only person junior to me at my meeting was a young lady and if I had passed her a rolled up pair of used socks on which I’d blown my nose, she might have made an immediate complaint to personnel.
Sometimes of course there are things which you simply cannot recover from, the equivalent of falling off your horse in a race. One of my friends was a member of a team sent by a famous firm of chartered accountants to make a presentation to an investment bank which was going to carry out a particularly difficult transaction. They were escorted into the lift by a secretary and on the way up one of them said to the others:
“The transaction is really too sophisticated for this bank. They will certainly need us to see them through it.” They thought no more of it until they got into the interview when the first question asked by the chairman was:
“Do you think the transaction is too sophisticated for this bank?” There was no way back from that and they were down in the street again five minutes later. Using old socks as a handkerchief is not as bad as that or indeed the other no-no of actually falling asleep when someone else is speaking. The only escape there is to give the impression that you have been concentrating deeply. If you’re lucky you will not have snored and everyone will connive at the fiction but it does depend on how you wake up. If you just open your eyes, the way judges do in court, you will probably get away with it. If on the other hand you fall off your chair and particularly if, like one unfortunate I saw at a lunchtime meeting, you grab the tablecloth as you go before disappearing under a rain of coffee cups, cheese, glasses of wine, and half eaten puddings, you will blow your cover. Then the best thing is to scuttle off to the bathroom to wipe things off your suit and save everyone the embarrassment of pretending that they are not laughing. If you are just one of a team, your colleagues may be able to use the incident as the ultimate icebreaker.
Socks though are different and, to those who are not foot fetishists, intrinsically unattractive. I could hardly have pretended that the incident had not occurred. The surprised reaction of my colleagues made that an impossibility. Then again to try to make a joke of the incident would just be embarrassing. Worse still it would be counter-productive. Even the most forgiving clients do not like advisers who make idiots of themselves. They may not hold it against them personally but they are bound to wonder will happen when they are acting on their behalf. No that really could not be the right course.
So was all lost or was there still a way through. There remained one thing to try. The potential client was from abroad and probably knew little about English manners or etiquette. I could take the socks and pass them to him with a deep bow. If I was lucky he would assume that it was an eccentric English ritual, rather like passing round the loving cup at the end of a livery company dinner. He might even blow his nose on them before passing them on.
If I was unlucky, of course, it would turn out that he has been living in London for ten years and had an English mother. If that was the case my conduct would simply be too embarrassing to think about. Still if I did nothing we were certainly lost. My chances of getting away with it must have been about one in four. The laws of mathematics said that it was well worth a shot.
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