This week I presented what I ‘manage’ in my professional
capacity, to some heavyweights from the Japanese Head Office.
They were unfailingly polite and showed interest in what we
were doing. They raised eyebrows, made noises, asked questions and said things
like, “We will be back to talk more about this.” They were senior and polished
and experienced.
I was polite and reserved. Maybe a little more than usual. Afterward, a colleague asked why
I hadn’t taken the opportunity to really show them how it was done. Why I hadn’t
gone all out and impressed them with the numbers and the doovers and the
thingamebobs.
I answered with the below story. Partly, because I wondered why I’d
been bashful myself (and the answer had only just popped into my head at that
moment) and partly because I would like the word “gnomic” in my obituary.
In or around 1983, when I was a teenager, I bought my first
3-in-1 stereo. It was bought with the savings from my job at the bookshop (see
how long ago that was? Bookshop!) and topped up with Birthday gift cash. It
cost hundreds of dollars. That’s hundreds of 1983 dollars, I’ll have you know.
Not your crazy Bitcoin imaginary spondoolies you young kids are smoking.
It was a Panasonic with a turntable in the bottom that came
out on a tray (so it could go in a bookshelf without needing room to lift the
lid). It had twin tape decks. 'Tape-to-tape' meant you’d joined an elite club
that no longer needed to put two tape players face-to-face and then quietly
leave the room, to get their mixed tape pirating done. It had 25 or maybe even
50 watts per channel and I was enormously proud of it.
A friend of mine was over to get changed for a party and I
had the stereo on. I’m painful these days with a new gadget, so I cringe to
think of what I would have been like with 30 less years of
disappointments in my electronics cupboard. She showed genuine interest. She
listened closely. She asked to hear it up loud, hear her favourite song on it as
well as mine and generally made me feel like I had indeed made a good purchase
and it could well be one of the finest stereos ever to have been manufactured.
A few weeks later I was at her place to change for a party. It
was my first time there and we went to her room to put some music on. She powered
up her hand-made, fluid damped turntable, swung the imported tone-arm suspended
on the latticework of counterbalanced wires onto the platter, warmed up her NAD
pre-amp, switched on the Yamaha amp and kicked the pile of clothes out from in
front of one of her four JBL, totem speakers, grabbed the remote and turned up
the volume. Then my head caved in and the wallpaper started to bleed.
She didn’t say a thing, just went to hunt for her mascara.
When I had picked my jaw back up and had moved to spluttering and pointing, she
just gave a graceful little shrug.
And that lesson has really stuck with me.
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