August 2017 – Sarah Nibbs

You Never Stop Learning

This time, I’m going on a course! What could possibly go wrong?

For two days last month, I attended a course. In hindsight, this may have been a mistake after first scaling the AXA PPP insurance complaint mountain in the same week, which felt something akin to climbing Everest in terms of endurance.

Anyway, in the spirit of Lifelong Learning, off I went with my study guide and a willingness to engage with others. At first I thought I had the wrong room – everyone else seemed very, very young. They had all evidenced this by:

multi tasking on hand-held devices and;
wearing jeans. In the background, a Spotify playlist threw out musical delights that I was not au fait with.

Secondly, I had made the gauche error of not turning up with a Mac Book Pro on day one – probably because I was the oldest one there, apart from the tutor. Personally, I enjoy a nice seminar with a bacon roll at the beginning and some pastries that you can slip in your bag at the end. Sometimes you even get a certificate for nodding earnestly for an hour or two in the name of CPD and often there’s a cup of tea and a branded pen in it, too.

Education and learning are funny things, mixed as they often are with the gaining of both knowledge and disappointment. 21 years after receiving my A Level results, I still can’t bear to watch students opening the envelopes containing various letters of the alphabet on live TV* and then seeing the photos of excitable girls (who only ever seem to wear vests and shorts) jumping for joy outside their school building. *Last week, I told Twitter that I was starting a one-woman campaign to stop this awful practice, but as I only received two likes and one re-tweet for the post, I’ll leave it until next year.

I also have yet to have anyone in the real world ask me about my dissertation, the catchy title of which was: “The Juggling Fiend – Motifs of the Devil in the Plays of Shakespeare and Marlowe.” So there!

Anyway, back in the room. As with courses everywhere, we had to “go round the room” and introduce ourselves. I stated my job title and said what I did, which was re-interpreted as: “So, you’re in sales and marketing.” Umm….not really. As professional services firms don’t really like the word “sales”, you never, ever use it. You say Business Development, or “BD” if you’re in a hurry.

They always say that you never stop learning and I soon learned that nothing sets my nerves on edge like people all typing away in one room, like pixies doing Riverdance in teeny tiny tap shoes.

180 slides over 60 pages also stood between me, the acquisition of new knowledge and a G&T on Friday evening. I had to focus, and I had to stay sane. I usually do this by obsessively taking notes in bullet point format and being the life and soul of the seminar room when asked a question, but that just wasn’t happening on this occasion.

After some time, I became obsessed with mastering marketing metrics, using imaginary sales platforms, pipelines and plug-ins. I was certain that, if only I could get huge amounts of money spent on systems like Microsoft Dynamics, Sales Force or Interaction, everything else would be fine and I could just concentrate on remembering acronyms such as ROCE, ROI and PESTELE.

After all, what is life without understanding Porter’s Five Forces, or the 7 Ps? As the tutor said, “You don’t want to be thought of as the colouring in department.” I thought that was a bit unfair, because I’m sure that people think that we do a lot more in BD than that! As one of my friends said to me when I started out in Business Development, “You’re playing to your strengths Sarah – coffees and lunches!”

On day two, I got to the point (the small dog that I refer to as Anxiety was back), where I could not connect the learning from the morning with answering any questions. It was hopeless. I was hopeless. I was thick. However, lots of other questions crowded my thoughts, and very helpful they were, too. How could I think that I was good at anything at all? How did I get here? Why on earth was I studying for yet another qualification? What was the point of it all? Why weren’t there any custard creams?!

I thought of my past failures, not my successes, and I shut my laptop (I had lugged in my old Mac Book to try and look younger), went home, put on my pyjamas and cried for two hours, because I couldn’t think of anything else to do. Yes, it was late afternoon on a Friday – and I was snivelling under a cushion, wearing my slipper boots.

Happily, my wonderful work friends were not having any of this nonsense and I was asked, then ordered, to join them for drinks. As I wallowed on my sofa, I was told to come for a drink, just the one, and so I did. I even got changed first – those slipper boots have got to last.

So, after all that, what did I learn? Two large gin and tonics (I’m nothing if not predictable), a burger and some much-needed laughter later, I was ready to face the weekend. You never know, I may yet master those metrics whilst juggling a phone, an ancient laptop and a mini pastry, after all. It’s true you never stop learning, but the lesson here is always listen to your friends when they offer you food, drink and laughter.

Septimana Horribilis*…a week of First World Problems

(*It’s been a rubbish week, but I thought that you would be more likely to read on if I called it the same thing, but in Latin).

I overheard this conversation between two women in a shop last week:

“I need to get back to the size I was.”

“How did you do it last time?”

“Anxiety.”

My old enemy, also known as Anxiety, was back in town and it wasn’t good to see her. As usual, she was uninvited and, like the dog who tries to mate with your leg at a sedate dinner party, I couldn’t seem to shake her off for a few days. (Hopefully you would get rid of the dog before this if it really was a dinner party).

I realised that I last felt this anxious when I found out that I had been going out with a delightful man, who actually turned out to be someone much less pleasant, some years ago now.

I remember that (after checking the contents of my bank account – you never know, he used to creep round at night), I used to walk on Hampstead Heath, taking in deep breaths beneath the trees and chanting to myself: “I’m still breathing the same air. Not that much has changed.” Not that much, of course, apart from feeling utterly humiliated and wondering how I could have been so stupid.

There was a time after that, when I was in a job that terrified me so much towards the end, that my hands shook, all the time. In fact, everything shook so much that I lost a dress size. But don’t worry, I’ve since found it again.

I really don’t want to be anxious. No one does, It’s like having a weight on my chest and an emptiness at the top of my stomach that I can’t fill, no matter what I eat, or do. Almost everything during the horrible week makes me anxious – meetings, phone calls, courses, whatsapp messages, the lack of whatsapp messages, cancelling appointments, battling with health insurers… you name it, there it was.

Apart from going out with the cad mentioned above, I have found out that it’s often not really the “big stuff” in life that causes anxiety. Sometimes it’s a millefeuille of “middle class problems”, that in many ways I know I am fortunate to have. In short, I can cope with most things, but I have realised as I grow older, that I can’t deal very well in the same week with:

a) talking to health insurance companies;

b) going on courses where everyone else is younger than me – at least, not in the same week as (a), above;

c) garden centres in the same week as (a) and (b). They may tip you over the edge, causing you to bulk purchase reed diffusers.

For the remainder of this post, we’ll just deal with (a):

Health Insurance Horribilis

Last week, I arrived home to a veritable swathe of envelopes! Musing on my sudden popularity, I soon found that they contained ill-photocopied chaser invoices from a Consultant and other medics who had become so fed up with waiting to be paid by a health insurance company that they had forwarded the bills to me – and the message was, “pay up.” In another helpful turn of events, I found that the medics in question didn’t take credit cards, even when “Please give this your urgent attention” was written in red biro, using the top of a ruler.

Six phone calls, two cups of tea and various levels of frustration later, the “Mystery of The Medical Report That AXA PPP Said They Never Had” was solved by a lovely woman in Guernsey. It was sorted. She had a contact. He had looked in an archive, on a server, and there it was, the document which had always been there, stating why I had needed to be in hospital for seven nights (not because I just fancied it), and stood between me and £2,300 (to be exact) that I now didn’t have to find a way to pay – the fees I should never have been asked for in the first place. Someone had “archived it”.

Everyone got paid, as they should have months ago. And that was that.

After six months of dealing with the same claim, (and taking to Twitter – I was mad with a lack of sleep in hospital); I felt like a robot repeating the same story, if robots are capable of almost breaking down when anyone in a position of authority in a health insurance company is actually kind to them.

It’s great to have health insurance, I’d just rather not speak to a Claims Team who repeat ad nauseam:“Is anyone else on the policy with you?” At this point, I begin scanning my life for invisible dependents and imagine us all standing on a piece of A4 paper. “We still need some more information. Have you logged into Customer Online?” Believe me, dear, I’ve tried. That’s why I’m calling and yes, I know it’s being monitored for “training purposes” under the category of “How not to deal with the Crying Woman six months after she was in hospital.”

Anyway, all’s well that ends well, as I believe Shakespeare said. As you are no doubt thinking, “Stop whining, and do a bit of deep breathing and count your blessings.” I promise that I do indeed practice this, a lot, but sometimes you have to acknowledge Anxiety for the little unexpected dog enemy that it is, wait for it to detach itself – and get back to that dinner party. Thank you for reading.

Next time: You Never Stop Learning.