Midnight At The Oasis

www.paulcoia.com

I don’t like to boast, in fact I’m the best in the whole world at not boasting, but I doubt your weekend was as interesting as mine. I spent it in the desert with a pole dancer, a clown and a Vietnam veteran.

Sadly they weren’t all one person as I could have earned fortunes hiring him or her out to reality shows. The three of us were joined by a relative of one of the members of Abba, the great nephew of the man who created Disney’s Dumbo, and a man who once wore tights to a reception at the British Embassy in Kuwait. Oh, and around one thousand other people were there too.

I was in Dubai presenting at a conference and I asked the audience to share something about themselves that no one else in the room could know, hence revealing the pole dancer, clown, et al. My reasoning was that we get so caught up in seeing colleagues as just office furniture that we forget they have lives, and I wanted to show the diversity of hidden talents the company had to draw on.

The feedback was provided semi anonymously but I could work out the identities of the two people who had provided the usual nutcase answers like “I have had gender reassignment” – though, on reflection, one of them could have been telling the truth. The person who told us he likes walking on water obviously has a power complex but I took his business card anyway as he might be handy for changing water in to wine next time I’m hosting a dinner party.

The company holding the conference was wonderfully diverse but, until I asked on stage, did not realise its workforce included a concert standard violinist, an old rock star, a former children’s TV presenter from Pakistan and a qualified medical doctor who had changed careers, as well as a girl who can recite the alphabet backwards, someone who has had fifty blind dates in the past two years, a worried man who is juggling twelve girlfriends, and a guy who has had a credit in the last two Star Wars movies.

It’s a pity so many of us are forced because of work practices, traditions and our view of professionalism, to leave our real selves at home as the diversity of our experiences is what makes us unique, but how much of that do we bring to work? This lot were special but probably didn’t realise.

I next asked for their nicknames at school. I was never popular enough to have a nickname, unless you count Wallflower, so I’ve always been jealous of people who have, although having seen some of the answers given I may rethink this one. Amongst the thousand or so people in the room were a former Sooty, Poops, Big Bum, Camel and Wimpy along with a sprinkling of Not So Smart, Chipmunk, Potty and, for some reason, several Boobys. I so wanted to meet the person who owned up to the nickname Armpit. I imagine he started shaving well before his classmates.

Finally, I asked for the worst job anyone in the room had ever had. My own experience of this was as a student at university when I spent a summer break working for a brewery. You may think three months surrounded by beer is a dream come true for an unwashed, unshaven, unsociable teenage oik but I spent the whole twelve weeks throwing empty bottles at a wall so that they smashed and the collected glass could be recycled. If I was very good, occasionally I was allowed to do an hour here and there watching labels being attached to product and making sure the loader was fully charged with Brown Ale stickers. Even for a person of limited brain such as myself, this was mind numbing.

However, I cheered up when I read the feedback from the room in Dubai. Perhaps I wasn’t the only one to suffer in the past. Amongst the former waitresses, burger flippers and dish washers, we had a pig farmer and a sheep dagger. As I had no idea what dagging sheep entails I made the mistake of asking and, when the guy told me, my days of bottle smashing seemed life affirming. This poor man had spent all his time cutting the dirty wool from around sheep’s bottoms. I reflected later that this was perhaps a metaphor for many in business life.

There were some wise crackers who reckoned the worst job they’d ever had was getting married, but many really went for it and shared that they had been garden gnome makers or toilet cleaners, and there was one who admitted to having been an assistant in an abbatoir. I’m not sure who it was that shared with us that his worst job was being a bully, but perhaps he should seek counselling.

One poor soul had obviously had a tougher life than most and wrote that his worst job was selling mangoes from the family farm in order to survive.

So, a random bundle of individuals who all have one aim, which is to make their company as successful as possible, but all bringing so many different experiences and skills to the job and managing, amongst the serious task of carrying this out, to have a laugh and open up a bit. I can promise you that the party that night was special and, despite sore heads the following day, they would all get stuck right back in to earning success for their business, knowing just that little bit more about each other.

My only regret is that I didn’t manage to track down the pole dancer, but perhaps it was just as well. I fear it may have been the very butch Senior Vice President I interviewed on stage.