9. TQM

Humanity must have been at a pretty low ebb the day it gave ‘quality’ a capital Q, thought Rupert standing on the roof with an Embassy Filter.  There it was, one day a perfectly happy common noun and part-time adjective being applied harmlessly to farm produce and footware and the next, superstar status - a proper noun, up there with Milton and the Taj Mahal.

No doubt it told its friends it wouldn’t change.  Still the same old quality underneath.  But it wouldn’t be long before the ten-foot fence went up with CCTV and remote controlled gates.  Parties galore for the first six months, new cars, mansion in Buckinghamshire, regular appearances in Hello Magazine.  Then the inevitable retreat into affluent isolation as friends drop off like satiated sheep ticks and Personal Security Advisors recommend a less exposed life style.   From then on it’s just head scarves, dark glasses and long-lensed exposés.

No doubt Quality sat by its pool sometimes with its tall green drink and looked back down the path it had travelled to fame and fortune.  Perhaps sometimes it missed the local chippy and Sunday morning banter in the post office on the corner.  Perhaps it even missed buying a tax disk every six months, or receiving that dreaded phone call from the garage with news of the four digit ‘damage’ required to get its car through its MOT.

On second thoughts, probably not.

Rupert had been introduced to the wonderful world of Quality (with a capital Q) for the first time that week.  Now he could hardly imagine life without it.  For three days he had been working on a proposal for a video about Total Quality Management or TQM.  Strange how shrinking something into an acronym had exactly the opposite effect on its perceived importance.  It also seemed a way of fast-tracking banal new phrases into common usage.  If you drop TQM into a conversation no self-respecting business person is going to ask what it means.  They assume, because it’s been shrink wrapped into a snappy three letter delivery, that everyone else knows.  Hence their ignorance is something to be kept quiet about and addressed later within the privacy of one’s own workstation.

However, Rupert was quickly coming to the conclusion that not knowing what TQM meant would not, in actual fact, prove an obstacle in any conversational exchange.  Because it meant nothing.  Any mention of it was therefore irrelevant to the meaningful content of the conversation.

Of course TQM was much quicker to say than its full-blown origin, minimizing the proportion of the conversational airtime taken up with meaninglessness.  Presumably this was what acronyms were invented for in the first place.  For reasons of economy.  Wouldn’t work with ‘w’ of course.  Why ‘w’ had been allowed to keep its extra syllabic baggage he had no idea.  What made it exempt from the rules and regulations that had led to an otherwise entirely mono-syllabic alphabet?  Meant that nobody was likely to come up with a usable acronym full of ‘w’s anyway.

The misapplication of the word ‘total’ further subtracted from the usefulness of the phrase.  To say that ‘Total Quality’ was different from ‘Quality’ was surely suggesting that Quality itself was in some way incomplete.  Quality’s lawyers must have had a field day with what was obviously libel on the part of the ‘total’ camp.  How could the general public ever trust plain old Quality again after being misrepresented in this way?

Luckily Kenneth was an expert on Quality – ironic considering his idea of a dinner party desert was an Arctic Roll presented on a breadboard.  He’d been invited to Kenneth’s for a meal shortly before the pathological fear of having to see him outside of working hours set in.  But only once.  He hadn’t been asked again and wasn’t sure whether this was because Kenneth sensed that his respectful equanimity was a mask that he couldn’t guarantee would stay on outside of the office – especially with his girlfriend present who could detect an imbecile from 400 yards away and operated a zero tolerance policy towards them.  (But then it was easy to see a person for what they were when they didn’t have their claws in your brain.)  Or whether he didn’t really like Rupert much either.  He lived comfortably in the belief that it was the former.

Quality, Kenneth informed him, meant fitness for purpose or conformance to specification.  Given that Management meant achievement through others and Total meant including everything and everyone then TQM simply meant:

The achievement of conformance to specification or fitness for purpose including everything or everybody through others.

So that was straight forward enough.

But what is it about? Rupert asked himself, attempting to pre-empt the inquisition that Kenneth would inevitably subject him to when he offered up his effort at the end of the week.  He knew exactly how the conversation would go.  It’s about the achievement of conformance to specification or fitness for purpose including everything or everybody through others.  Okay fine.  But let’s not forget video is a visual medium.  The pictures tell the story.  So what does ‘the achievement of conformance to specification or fitness for purpose including everything or everybody through others’ look like?  If Butternut’s back catalogue was anything to go by it would look like a smartly dressed person sat in an enquiries booth, or a whole room full of smartly dressed people sat in a circle with jotters on their knees.

As a well-educated and creative individual Rupert felt he was duty bound to challenge this and come up with something original.  He found that he possessed a kind of mental overdrive facility that enabled him to pursue an idea vigourously while being aware that it was completely inappropriate.  He found it quite easy to justify this approach to himself on the grounds that every great new idea must have seemed completely inappropriate to someone, somewhere when it was first dreamt up.

(He was later to realise that the secret of success was to steer clear of completely inappropriate ideas in favour of appropriate ones – especially appropriate ones that could easily be achieved at minimum cost.  ‘Original’ was to ‘Appropriate’ what cryptonite was to superman.)

So what about a historical approach to the subject?  Perhaps an examination of the changing role of ‘quality’ in a socio-historical context would prove fruitful:

Before the dawn of industry, when we were all mainly concerned with pulling ploughs round fields and wearing sacks round our wastes, Quality probably meant being covered in oozing sores yet remaining alive, as opposed to being covered in oozing sores and being dead, stacked on a pile of carcasses in the middle of the village’s drinking water.  Total Quality was about scraping together enough dry roots and dung to keep your family going without having to give half of them to the local landowner in exchange for a sheep’s carcass that would probably end up giving the other half the plague.

Then, when towns filled with chimneys and the sun disappeared for a century, people had to adapt to pulling levers instead of ploughs.  Quality now meant staying alive longer than twelve years and avoiding loosing your limbs in some enormous steam powered hammering device.  Total Quality meant living high enough off the street not to be up to your neck in human excrement.  As technology developed however, and the sun came out again, we could leave the machines to get on with it and invent exciting new jobs for people to do, such as work in holiday camps, bank branches and advertising agencies.  Now Quality meant owning your own twin tub and getting together on royal occasions to gather round your neighbour’s toaster.  Total Quality was about owning a motorcar that could go up hills and get you to the coast in less than a week without troubling the chaps from the Automobile Association.

So that brings us up to the present day, with a crowd of people stood with their suitcases on a pier in Aberdeen.  An engineer stands on a fish box with a loud hailer shouting “Of course it’s safe!  Please get on the boat!”  But from the pictures they’ve seen the oil platform looks very narrow and tall.  And the sea is incredibly deep and cold at that particular spot which just happens to be 250 miles away from the nearest heated towel rail and mug of Horlix.  And if a bronze medal for the under 15’s fifty metre relay represents the sum total of your swimming achievement then not getting on the boat is, quite frankly, a no brainer.

“Look,” says the guy with the megaphone, playing his trump card and waiving a certificate over his head. “It’s BS5750 accredited!”

“That’s alright then”, say the drilling crew and start to load their stuff onto the boat.  Why?  Because a British Quality standard can be trusted.  It says that all the bolts are tightened enough.  It says that all the load bearing bits can keep on bending, twisting and supporting populations of barnacles indefinitely without snapping.  Which is exactly what you want to hear when they are all there is between you and water cold enough to make a penguin seriously consider flying south.

Okay, so there’s a good introductory sequence.  It’s got drama, danger, tension and, most importantly, it’s got an opportunity for Roger to spend half the budget on a trip in a helicopter to get some aerial shots of an oil rig.  It was an unspoken agreement between the partners that Kenneth would put something into his script along the lines of ‘the plant occupies a fifteen acre greenfield site that looks like this if you’re a bird’ to give Roger a treat and prevent him from walking out with the petty cash tin.

But what about the next bit?  The bit where the corporates hi-jack the idea and apply it completely inappropriately to their own business?  Perhaps the time-honoured ‘case study’ approach was needed; cleverly creating an illustrative scenario that was so true to life and unremarkable that it was totally unbelievable:

So meanwhile, back on dry land, you have a company that makes medium to light-weight paper-based packaging solutions (envelopes).  Not quite life-preserving mid Atlantic engineering triumphs but important until someone comes up with an alternative to Christmas and birthday cards.  Especially important to the guy with the Mercedes with the PAP R1 number plate who owns the company and knows the envelope business better than the backside of his golf club’s bar maid.

Always looking for ways to maximise returns so that his daughter can have another horse and his wife another Mediterranean holiday each year he invests in the most sophisticated paper-folding machinery, the latest stock control and sales management software and the finest fork lift trucks money can buy.  He even invests in a mixed media training package for his staff on the EC regulations dealing with the Health & Safety risks associated with the consumption of soft porn literature while operating paper folding machinery.

But no matter what he does one out of every ten of his envelopes fails to stick down no mater how long you lick it.  But what more can he do?  Well, he needs to sit down with a fully qualified Quality Assessment Consultant (QAC) and carry out a full analysis of his factory’s work patterns to identify problem areas.  Then simply implement the necessary Quality Assurance Measures (QAM) to eradicate the problems.  And voila – ten out of ten deficient-free envelopes and hello to a burgeoning order book, increased returns and PAP R2 in the driveway.

But it’s just not like that, suspected Rupert, wandering over the lead and asphalt to the front edge of the roof over looking the prison.  Humans are a nine-out-of-ten-good-envelope species.  No matter how many acronyms with a Q in them you introduce the guy with the glue pot is still going to swap the brush to his left hand when he has his hourly fag.  And who could blame him?

Quality, it seemed, was the placebo effect applied to business.  If enough procedures were put into place, forms filled out, job titles changed, diagrams drawn, then maybe, just maybe, a business would begin to feel better about itself.  It had nothing to do with getting people to do a better job.  That would require such things as charismatic leadership and vision.  Unfortunately, most of the people with those qualities had been killed trying to escape from Colditz.  The few that remained tended to be busy heading up tyrannical regimes in the East or appearing in works of fiction in the West.  The only other option was genetic modification which was clearly out of the question.

In the absence of these the glue man continued to require an hourly fag and the tenth envelope a strip of cellotape.  Which didn’t really matter anyway because most of the factory’s competitors were also prone to One In Ten Envelope Deficiency Syndrome on account of employing the same species.

Quality was about appearance.  Perhaps an analogy would best illustrate the point.  Corporate video tended to favour sporting analogies simply because sports often required people to work together as a team to achieve something significant, an ideal that some Human Resource personnel still believed could be achieved in the workplace - even outside of Japan.  It was also felt that if you sat somebody down in front of a TV showing somebody hitting a ball or driving a fast car they might think it’s Saturday and unintentionally become interested.  For a second their defenses might be lowered and they might become receptive to the video’s message.  They might even apply what they’ve learned to their work, going away feeling informed, motivated and generally internally communicated to.

Scoring a goal isn’t just about getting the ball, running like mad towards the other side’s goal area and kicking it in.  Oh no.  Scoring a goal involves a myriad of interrelated skills - skills that we can learn and apply to make us more effective in our day to day work.  Real goals are about obtaining the ball, passing it around a bit to get others involved (remember: a committee invented the camel and look how well that’s lasted), perhaps performing a little fancy footwork to impress the shorts off your team mates, falling over and crying when one of the other guys runs past you too quickly shattering both your knee caps, making a remarkable recovery, then forcibly swapping shirts with your opposite number and knocking the ball effortlessly past the confused goal keeper.

So what kind of sporting analogy would suit TQM?  A police convey poked its nose out of the prison gates and sniffed the air before hurrying off down the dual carriage way towards the court house.  Bet Quality isn’t at the forefront of his mind, thought Rupert.  Unless TQM had found its way into the prison service that is:

“You’ll be glad to know, Mr warden, that myself and the other members of the Problem Elimination Team (PET) have carried out a rigorous Problem Identification Analysis (PIA) and are ready to present our Purposive Quality Assurance Strategy (PQAS) that we feel will maintain Quality Standards (QS) within the premises on an ongoing basis, establishing us as a ‘best of breed’ custodial facility.”

“Very good Smithe.  Let me hear your plans?”

“We’re going to kick the shit out of Parker in the shower this afternoon.”

“Excellent Smythe.  Go ahead and keep up the good work…”

Rupert’s mind settled back on the subject of a suitable analogy for TQM.  The horse racing world could perhaps offer a solution.

A racehorse owner is stuck with a bunch of aging horses that are finding it increasingly difficult to keep up with the influx of fresh new talent from Europe and the Far East.  As the bottom has fallen out of the second hand horse market they’re worth practically nothing in part exchange so he can’t afford to get new ones.  He could always put adverts in Horse Trader Magazine but the truth is that the market is awash with second rate beasts like his own so there’s very little demand.

Diversifying into Pet food or Chinese Poultry seems like his only option. Then one day, while he’s stood in a car showroom trading in his Mercedes (GG1) for a Metro GTa (H357 SJR) he has an idea.  How do you create the impression that something has improved when it hasn’t?  Simple.  You attach a sign to it saying ‘Improved’.

So that night in his garden shed he knocks up a series of signs to hang round his horses’ necks saying ‘Top Speed 120 mph’, ‘150 Break horsepower’, ‘0-60 in 3.5 seconds’, etc. and some others to dangle from their sides: ‘Unrivalled Handling’, ‘Superbly Satisfying Ride’, ‘The Ultimate Riding Machine’ and so on.  The following day he gets his head trainer to apply them liberally to his animals and informs him that his job title is now High Speed Horse Handler.  His stable hands become members of the Motor Horse Track Side Maintenance Team and his jockey Jet Horse Pilot.

Not surprisingly his enterprise attracts considerable media attention, culminating with the owner being invited on to start the ball joggling machine for the National Lottery.  Due to his success in making a handful or ordinary people millionaires at the push of a button he is invited on for a second week where, miraculously, he pulled off the same trick again.  The lottery operators decided to ban him at this point on the grounds that if it goes on like this, in less than 250,000 years the entire population of the UK would be rich beyond its wildest dreams, rendering the lottery redundant and the franchise worthless.  In any case, mansion prices in Buckinghamshire would plummet and as several members of the lottery operator board are in the process of selling this is not deemed an attractive prospect.

Needless to say the owner’s horses become odds on favourites.  In fact when it came to race day the organisers decided it’s hardly worth staging the event as no other horse can possibly run at 120 mph and so empty their purses directly into the coffers of the Formula Horse Stable.

The other owners are, to say the least, disappointed with the decision and begin reconsidering their own approach to the sport.  Realising that it would be outrageous to claim that their horses could run faster than 120 mph they decide instead to develop the ‘power stable’ concept still further: building long straight test tracks in the Nevada Desert, fitting their animals up with rump-mounted parachute deployment apparatus and ultra light weight, crash resistant horse helmets.

Laboratories are set up to examine exactly what happens when a horse runs, developing complex computer models to measure performance against the range of race variables including wind direction, level of precipitation, grass length and pilot weight.  Equine dieticians formulate special oaty components and silage substitutes are developed to shave precious milliseconds off lap times.

The first High Speed Motor Horse Pilots School is founded in the States, offering a two week crash course on how to make oneself small enough not to effect the animal’s speed, while still being big enough to steer and act as a reassuring presence.  Pilots spend hours in industrial spin dryers to develop a tolerance for the extreme g-forces experienced round tight bends.  Then they’re catapulted at tyre walls to learn how to hit a semi-solid barrier head first at 120 mph and walk away with only minor cuts and bruises.  Soon the Centre’s High Speed Horse Handlers are respected throughout the sport, as are its Horse Tuners and Speed Horse Technologists.

For a while the race-going public are none the wiser.  The horses are just the same, although the prevalence of tobacco advertising, sixty foot long horse tuning stations and glamorous horse-babes in skin-tight palomino and chestnut cat suits are occasionally commented on.  But after a while they began to notice a marked deterioration in performance to the point where, at the 4.14 at Wetherby, the entire crowd decides to go home to bed and come back the next morning to watch the finish.  Various horsy bones became more prominent and the individual struts across the high performance chassis cage began to stand out alarmingly.  The horses however refuse to comment, professional pride being more than outweighed by the seven figure sums they now command for every race.

But equine greed cannot stave off the inevitable forever; more and more horses fail to finish the race - not because of injury, but because they’re too damn tired.   The reason: the Horse Motor Horse Track Side Maintenance Teams have been so busy testing ultra lightweight, fire resistant tack and exploring the speed-critical aspects of horse psychology that they’ve clean forgotten to feed the damn things.

But by this point the race goers have largely lost interest anyway.  Some find they can re-capture the thrill of horse racing as it used to be by watching greyhounds through binoculars.  Those with insufficient imagination, or no binoculars, take up go-carting  (where they are also watched through binoculars by Formula One fans who can’t afford the Silverstone admission).

And there you have it; a perfect sporting analogy for TQM.  Rupert headed back down the fire escape automatically inserting a quarter of a pack of polo mints to disguise the incriminating pong.  He washed his hands in the gents toilets and bumped into Noreen on the way out who was heading into the ladies with a suspicious cylindrical bump under her cardigan.  She had her secrets, he had his.

Wonder what Kenneth did to help him cope?  Rupert suspected that this wasn’t an issue for him.  That he lacked the personality component that tends to react against sitting in front of a PC all day thinking about nonsense like TQM and has to go on the roof for a fag (or into the toilets for a packet of Jaffa Cakes).  Or perhaps there were two kinds of people in the world; those that found it hard to cope, and those that those who found it hard to cope found it hard to cope with.  And he was the latter.

Rupert sat back at his black ash desk and experienced that familiar feeling of finding it almost impossible to make sense of what had seemed so clear on the roof.  The air must have been significantly thinner up there, or perhaps it was the view of the prison that catalysed his thoughts.  Better take a pen and paper up there with him next time which, the way things were going, would not be very long.

He was sat ruminating on the mysteries of the creative process when his computer spoke to him for the first time.

It’ll kill you, you know.  How’s the proposal coming?  By the way this is an email.

Rupert recoiled from his screen at the sudden realisation that he’d been rumbled.  By his computer!  Danger often lies in unexpected quarters.  But his computer!  Surely not.  To think that he’d always thought of it as a passive work tool that tended not to display anything much on screen without him putting it there.  Apart, that is, from the community of dull little gray boxes and unintelligible icons that had made computers usable (curse the day) and the Microsoft headquarters the only manmade structure visible from Jupiter.  But not only did it have a grasp of the English language but also, most frightening of all, an awareness of what was going on on the roof.  Then he saw it had come from Kenneth.

There it was, coming to him across the Local Area Network that Kenneth had spent a weekend setting up to link the office’s four computers.  At the time Rupert had marveled at this as an example of spiritual self-mutilation and extreme time wasting.  He didn’t have to do it.  It was his company for God’s sake!  And on the Monday Kenneth could hardly contain his excitement at being able to look at other people’s documents and back up the office’s entire dull output on a single tape drive.  But it wasn’t all tedious and mundane.  Noreen got to stick labels on a box of tapes and Rupert, having been to university, got to devise a paper-based rota system to ensure that no more than 24 hours work could ever be lost at one time and everything produced up to the previous week could be salvaged from the offsite archive deposited in a fire safe in a concrete bunker a hundred feet below ground.  And each night the last person to leave had the pleasure of swapping tapes, putting a tick in the appropriate box and leaving the building feeling wonderfully well protected against hard disc failure.

Apart from the fact that they weren’t.  It was three months before it was discovered that the tape drive was blowing instead of sucking, streaming huge amounts of blankness onto the server which eventually filled up with it, elbowing the actual files into the cooling fan which dispelled them into the office as sub-atomic particles that were eventually trodden into the carpet and lost forever.  Or something like that.  Anyway, it didn’t work.  Although it did feel good doing it.  A bit like TQM.

So this was the real reason for Kenneth’s network – he could converse with his staff without having to prize himself free from his frigid confrontation with Roger.  He could further indoctrinate Rupert without Roger knowing.  And even if he did find out he wouldn’t be able to join in on account of only knowing where the number keys were on his keyboard.

Suddenly Rupert foresaw a future where even the need for human interaction did not constitute a legitimate excuse for peeling one’s eyes away from one’s VDU for a moment.  He wondered if they would all get frozen into their workstations like Kenneth and Roger.  How long would it be before their respective next of kin sent out a search party to dig them out?  They could be there for weeks.

His eyes were drawn back to the little gray box on his screen, sat on top of his half-hearted list of futile TQM programme objectives.   Perhaps it was the TQM proposal that would kill him.  At that moment that seamed just as feasible as tobacco smoke.  In fact that might be quite a good title for the programme – ‘It’ll Kill You, You Know.’  It did cause certain parts of your brain to shut down with shear boredom which, he guessed, could prove terminal if your life suddenly depended upon being wide awake and generally enthusiastic.

Or perhaps it was email that could kill him.  Could deep vein thrombosis be brought on by spending one’s whole life sat looking at a VDU?  Perhaps scientists would find that talking to people face to face was actually good for you, like smiling and masturbation.

"Are you right then Kiddo?" said Roger bounding out of his office sports bag in hand.

This, thought Rupert, definitely could kill him.  Circuit training.  But, as he had sworn eternal allegiance, he scooped up his pump bag and meekly followed him out of the office.

Within fifteen minutes they were jogging round the gymnasium nervously eyeing up the rubber mats laid out at various intervals with their small piles of torture implements.

Roger took the usual opportunity to find out what his partner was doing.

"What you and Kenneth working on then at the moment?"

Rupert slipped effortlessly from fellow athlete to obedient employee.  "The Bank's signed off the bank raids script - auditions next week.  I'm working on the proposal for TQM.  Just trying to get my head round the treatment.  I've got something, but I know Kenneth's not going to like it."

Roger immediately showed an interest.  "Why's that then?"

"Well it's not exactly like anything we've done before.  Bit more creative.  Metaphorical rather than literal if you know what I mean."

Roger didn't, not having covered 'metaphorical rather than literal' at BBC training college.  But he did understand the meaning of 'Kenneth's not going to like it'.

"Sounds good."

He had long dreamt of a Christ-like person who would float into Butternut, beat Kenneth at his own game and start producing programmes that were fun to make as well as just being ‘effective’.  Rupert was his great white hope.  But he was worried that any talent he had when he walked in was well on the road to being thrashed out of him by his partner’s opinions.  But perhaps there was still hope.

“It takes an historical perspective on the whole Quality concept,” explained Rupert, “tracing its origins in off-shore oil exploration - including some pretty exciting aerial footage of rigs and such like…”

“Nice.”

“Then there’s a sporting analogy to emphasise the importance of maintaining a balance between simple common sense and the technical complexities of TQM implementation.”

  My God, he was beginning to sound like a Quality Assurance Manager.

“Sounds good,” said Roger, grabbing a couple of dumbbells and swinging them around vaguely in a very easy exercise he’d invented himself.  “What’s the budget?”

“Twenty-five grand.”

“Actors?”

“One main character.  Perhaps a few extras.  And some horses.”

Roger began to see his margin slip away before his very eyes.  “Horses?”

“It’s all about horse racing – that’s the analogy.”

“Get stock footage for that?” asked Roger, pumping some very small weights up and down in front of him like a slightly balding steam pump.

“Don’t know.  Need to look into that.  Should be okay.”  Another feature of Rupert’s mental overdrive facility was his ability to overlook obvious pitfalls in the pursuit of his inappropriate ideas.  Even if a broadcaster were willing to sell him racing footage at an affordable price would it include glamourous horse-babes, speed horse testing tracks and emaciated horses dropping like flies at the 2.30 at York?  Probably not.

Roger mentally checked off each of the rows on his spreadsheet in time with the sit ups that he was now putting himself through on a nearby mat.

“What do you think – three days’ shoot?  With camera and sound?  Shouldn’t need lights should we?”

“No, probably not.”

“Three days off-line, one day on-line?”

“Yes, fine.”

“What about music – couple of minutes do it?  For the start and finish?”

“Might want to get some composed,” ventured Rupert, envisaging the opening shot:

…breaking through low cloud we descend to within feet of the heaving ocean and speed towards a desolate pier where a small crowd of people huddle together like teetering skittles beside a tethered craft. Above the thundering swell and lashing spume we hear the plaintive tones of a man stood atop a fish box with a loud hailer…

Usually they’d use the synthetic sludge scraped off one of the millions of CDs sent to them by music libraries every month, with titles like ‘Achievers’ and ‘Corporate Conquest’.  As Roger seemed to have lost his sense of musical taste following an overdose of Spandau Ballet during Thatcher’s second term he didn’t seem to mind.   But for a man like Rupert, who knew how to screw together an alto saxophone and elicit sounds approximating to at least half of the available notes, it just wasn’t on.  This was music that wore trainers with windows in the sole and an imitation Rolex watch.  It drove a Vauxhall with a spoiler like the back end of a whale and at least two sets of unnecessary fog lamps.  Rupert was thinking Aston Martin, or Bentley at a pinch.

“I got a CD a couple of days ago that I think you’ll like,” said Roger.  “Pay once, use it as often as you like.”

That sounded like real Quality, thought Rupert.  That special spreadsheet-positive kind of Quality that they were bound to hear a lot of over the next few years.  Luckily they arrived at the press up mat where conversation was temporarily suspended as they confronted the personal hell of ever weakening arms and ever growing body mass.  Rupert’s excuse was that he had long since rejected the baseness of flesh and muscle in pursuit of intellectual endeavor.  Roger’s was that he was nearly forty.  Bulldog, the fitness instructor, squeaked around the gym rolling his fortified shoulders menacingly as his instructees did unnatural things to their bodies to the up tempo best of Elton John.

“Never did a bad song”, Bulldog once remarked about the mop-topped star, confirming that his musical tastes were as inaccessible to Rupert as his fully laden multi-gym.  At the star jumps, Roger recovered sufficiently to continue their conversation.

“Why don’t we do this one differently – you and me.  Sure, let Kenneth have a look at it to make sure it’s okay but then we’ll leave him out of it.  He’s got plenty of other stuff he should be doing.”

Flailing up and down like a possessed, monster pair of scissors Rupert looked his thirty pieces of silver in the face.  And suddenly felt very good about himself.

“Get me a copy of the treatment and we’ll get together to do the shot list,” Roger panted.   “Kenneth’s got to learn that different people do things different ways.   This could be the opportunity you need to find your own style and make your name with Derek.”

The boardroom inquisitions didn’t have to be a fact of life.  Rupert suddenly envisaged a world where, instead of being pulverised by Kenneth at birth, his own opinions and views survived and made a name for themselves in the outside world.  In a world where not everybody was as incisive as Kenneth they might even think he was quite clever.  Of course, this wasn’t something that Kenneth wanted.  He wanted to preserve his hard fought for monopoly on valid observations.  This could be the beginning for Rupert.  The first in a monumental series of corporate videos acclaimed the world over for their artistic integrity and faithful depiction of the human condition.  Real telly would be knocking at his door within weeks.  And he might just turn them away.

Half an hour later he returned to his workstation red in the face and slightly wobbly.   Re-energising himself with a tuna salad sandwich, half a pint of milk and packet of cheese and onion crisps he set to work on the programme proposal.  When Roger left at five o’clock to pick up the kids he was still there typing.  When Kenneth left as half past seven (having made a resolution to start getting away at a more civilised time during his week on a Portuguese beach) he unleashed the spell checker on the first draft and deciding that any more effort would diminish the freshness of the piece (which he’d worked on for not very long to establish) and make it like a Kenneth proposal (which took months).  Printed and stapled he dropped a copy on Kenneth’s desk and another on Roger’s.

Reclining in his MG up the dual carriage way past the prison he felt that familiar buzz of having put a bit of himself out there.  Now there was an astutely observed documentary programme exposing the true nature of TQM where formerly there was not.  For that night at least it was just his, and his imaginary future universe where it existed as a finished programme was as real as anybody else’s.  He intended to savor the next thirteen hours, enjoying the company of his perfect little baby before Roger and Kenneth opened their proposals and began dissecting it into lists of camera angles and hard-to-find props (that it would probably be down to him to find it hard to find).  For thirteen precious hours him and his baby could enjoy a precious intimacy, his very own creation gazing up at him with the wide-eyed adoration of one who has never known anybody else and has yet to understand the concept of obnoxious artistic ego.

He handed over control of his car to his knees for a moment and felt not a morsel of guilt as he extracted and lit a cigarette, automatically lowering his window an inch and temporarily converting his side parting into a centre parting.  As the nicotine flushed into his brain he permitted his little baby to bounce joyfully around inside his head, jostling weary neurons into life and bringing a smile to the lips of even the most jaundiced corpuscles.

It all looked like great fun until the rush began to fade and rationality stepped in, clapping its hands a saying ‘right off to bed you little monkey you, it’s time for the grown ups to start worrying’.  And once the cushions were back on the sofa, the soggy biscuit remnants scraped off the rug and Cbeebies switched to BBC4, the inside of his head became a very different kind of place to sit in for the remainder of the journey home.  And it remained so until the third can of Grolsch loosened the atmosphere a little, egged on by the aromatic fusion of superheated garlic, onion, ginger and chilli conjured up by one of his regular, yet always strangely unfulfilling, home made curry nights.

The following morning, the silence emanating from Roger and Kenneth’s office seemed even more profound than usual.   Rupert sat at his disk positively rigid with expectation.  The document had moved position on both partners’ desks – a covert reconnaissance under the cover of a coffee delivery had established that.  Yet Kenneth hadn’t entered his head, and the partners hadn’t exchanged an utterance beyond the standard recognition of each other’s existence when they first arrived.  Perhaps it was okay.  Perhaps they both loved it.   But Rupert harboured the uneasy certainty that in Butternut silence never gave consent.  In Butternut silence gave one an ulcer as one waited for Kenneth to deliver his damning verdict within the context of a day-long exposition of socialist values.

Despite the apparent suspension of the space/time continuum within the partners’ office, the morning somehow wore on and took lunchtime totally by surprise.  Rupert wasn’t at all hungry and got by on two and a half Embassies consumed atop nervous striding two stories above the partners’ heads.  By home time, it became obvious that this wasn’t going to be a sudden death type of event, and that he better prepare himself for a lengthy siege.  He resolved there and then not to leave the office until at least one of the partners mentioned his proposal, and psychologically chained himself to his pedestal drawers for the duration.  When Roger passed his desk on his way out without mentioning the issue, he hurriedly released himself.  As it was Friday the rest of the staff had already gone, and with only Kenneth and himself left in the office the risk of becoming stranded for the night as an opinion target was far too high.  He had promised his girlfriend that he would be home before Saturday.

At this point, had he been able to fast-forward to Monday morning he would almost certainly have taken advantage of that functionality.  As he couldn’t, he was facing one of those only-half-there weekends, when most of what went on around him would go unnoticed as he worried about what was to come the following week.  His girlfriend would urge him to pay a bit more attention to the physical world and, ideally, get another job.  He would assure her that this was a major opportunity for him and his career, and his current other-worldliness would be more than compensated for by effluence and recognition beyond her wildest dreams.  To which she would reply that she’d heard all that before and perhaps they could go to the pictures to take his mind off it.  To which he would replay that that would be fine if she wouldn’t mind driving so he could get drunk first.  Realising that this meant that he would be asleep for everything beyond the opening credits she would reply that she might as well go with her sister instead.   Detecting that his protects were less than heart felt, that’s exactly what she would do.