Shirt tale

I don’t think I’ve previously used a photo of a cellophane-wrapped shirt as an illustration for one of these posts, so perhaps I owe you an explanation.

The shirt was the spur

The only reason I’ve done it today is that I came across the shirt in a wardrobe while I was looking for something else, and it brought some memories to mind, as well as a smile to my lips. Because, as you can probably tell from the fact that the shirt isn’t symmetrically placed in the cellophane, it isn’t because it’s new that it’s in cellophane at all. No, that’s the wrapping it was in when it was returned from the laundry service of a hotel I was staying in when I was last working.

Now, that particular company didn’t authorise us to use hotel laundry services or (come to that) have a good dinner or a drink while away on business. Fortunately, though, I had an indulgent boss – the best boss I ever had, a great final act to a long and not particularly glorious career – and she never made any difficulties about signing off my expenses, even if they included such forbidden gems.

There’ve been times when I’ve wondered whether perhaps excessive expenses didn’t contribute to the car-crash end to my time with the company. She tells me they didn’t, because we were always well within budget, but I can’t help feeling that this only means the budget was high, set at a level too conspicuous to escape the probing eye of a newly-appointed finance officer, fixated on costs and blind to value. It had always been my fear that some such character would eventually turn a baleful glare on us since, while I thought our team was doing invaluable work maintaining customer loyalty, it wasn’t actually bringing in any revenue of its own, while its costs were substantial.

When the company did indeed appoint such an accountant, his first step was to start sharpening his axe for any costs that could be saved. A former director I worked for used to say that accountants were people who only knew that the numbers run from nought to nine, and I think this guy fit that bill. Within months, he’d dumped three-quarters of my boss’s team, and all but one of the eight in my own within it.

I wasn’t the one spared.

My boss repeatedly warned me that the good times were coming to an end as the moment of execution approached.

“I don’t even know whether they’ll allow the team to keep going,” she kept telling me, when we were trying to make plans.

I certainly can’t claim I wasn’t warned. But, like lots of people who’ve been warned, I preferred to keep on going as though the future were serene. Right up to the moment when the future stopped. 

That’s why I still have a shirt in a hotel laundry’s cellophane wrapping, ready for a next use that never came. It joins the jackets hanging in another wardrobe, unused since the day in September 2019 when all those concerns ended. One of those jackets has never been worn – yes, so deep was my sense of denial that I was still buying clothes for work a few weeks before work ended.

Jackets hanging to no purpose

Execution was, as is traditional, at dawn. However, since this was an American company, dawn there was a lot later here – more like noon. Still, it did strike me as significant that I had been summoned to an on-line meeting when it would be six in the morning at the other end of the call.

The night before I can only describe as disturbed, as any condemned man’s must be. And it only took a few seconds to confirm my fears, when the other person on the call, alongside my boss, turned out to be someone from human resources. My wife Danielle came in to find out what was happening, and she was at least as taken aback as I was at the news.

Equally taken aback, if in a different way, was my boss who followed her dismissed team members out of the company soon afterwards.

But it was far from all negative.  I decided immediately that I wasn’t going looking for another job at 66. Danielle had been urging me for some time to give up on my irrational idea of retiring only at 73 or 74, and I told her I was going to take this painful experience as an excellent motive to take her advice.

I’ve never regretted it. Indeed, the idea that I might be working for another three or four years even now, strikes me as bleak. Today, I can concentrate on my history podcast, on these blog posts, on my novel of the life of an outstanding eighteenth-century woman, instead of donning that shirt and one of those jackets to travel to places which are exhausting to get to and little fun to be in once you’re there.

So the shirt stays in its wrapper and the jackets hang on in their closet. A reminder of a nasty little moment that opened the door to a great deal of satisfaction. And, since I still count my ex-boss as a close friend, what do I have to complain about?

That’s why the spur for this post was the discovery of that badly packed and never unpacked shirt…