Mister Loud writes

When I first heard that some sort of person who I suppose fancies himself as a bit of a wag had set up a faintly satirical webpage which purported to be based on what I was doing here at LE which I might just say I'm delighted to be a part of having only just joined the company a few weeks ago and everyone here has made me feel extremely welcome except perhaps for the tall and if I may say so rather attractive young coloured lady who sits not exactly opposite me but sort of ahead and across the desk if you understand what I mean but I must say that when I looked at the webpage I found a great deal there which rang a lot of bells with me so to speak and I then thought what a good idea it might be to contribute a little something from time to time just to fill in people's perceptions of what it is that I'm actually supposed to do here while I'm setting up what's going to be an absolutely first rate team who are going to go out and really make some significant inroads on the gas and electricity market not only in the existing area LE although obviously there's no need to sell electricity to our existing customers and what you actually need to do with them is to reassure them that they're doing the right thing by not switching suppliers and by tying in gas with that same commitment if you see what I mean but also in the outlying areas which border on to the old LE REC area because I do believe that we can expand into those regions just as I was able to do when I was in Procter and Gamble's sales-division and we hadn't really penetrated the Irish market although we had a fair amount of distribution and placement in Northern Ireland though that was just after I'd been doing some work for Legal and General helping their policy salesforce really to turn that operation around from being the old sort of man-from-the-Pru style of organisation into being a team of people who could instantly recognise the customer's needs from the moment they wedged their briefcase in the kitchen door and then of course I did a short stint with British Airways and their direct marketing setup was in a terrible state and my old schoolfriend Geoff Aylward and I put together a sort of task force which believe it or not actually used to swoop on the various branches and call-centres and that sort of thing and of course people resented it at first but after a while and a few resignations I can tell you they came to see that there was actually something which my team and I could do for them to make them much more productive in a relatively short space of time which was what Geoff and I had also done during my time with British Aerospace at Farnborough where incidentally I was having lunch with the personnel director only the other day and he was telling me that the company had changed an awful lot since I was there what with the collapse of much of the Middle Eastern ballistics trade and some new sorts of management-practice which I for one resisted because I don't believe you can impose things on people from the top so to speak if you haven't got their wholehearted support and I've always tried to practise that even when I started out with United Biscuits only it was McVitie's then and we really transformed their whole representative sales-culture overnight because what I used to do was go around to the grocers and to the very early cash and carrys which were only just starting up then and I used to talk to them in detail about all the problems which we were having what with the ever-increasing price of raw materials especially sugar and flour and the cost of distributing the products to them because of course the transport-cost makes up a significant part of the total cost of putting the actual products on to the supermarket-shelves and after a while of listening to me speaking to them in rather the same way as I'm talking to you now I do think that they came to see it from our point of view if you understand what I'm driving at and I wonder if you'd mind if I answered that only I'm expecting a rather important call from Jim Morris at Doorstep the sales-agency we're using at the moment and do you know what Jim I was just saying to these good people here that I was expecting a call from you only I wonder if we could somehow make our meeting at the Little Chef in Taunton a bit later in the afternoon because I'm expecting to have to be in Aberdeen that morning seeing a very old friend of mine who's with Scottish Hydro and with whom we just might do a bit of mutual backscratching on the sales side if you see what I mean so if that's all right with you we'll leave it at that and maybe we could get together when I'm next in your neck of the woods only it really was important that I took that call and anyway I'm afraid I can't quite remember what I was saying before I did take it but I hope that gives you the general sort of gist and I was actually due to be having lunch in the City with a couple of chaps from Thomson directories a few minutes ago and they will probably although this is all somewhat hush-hush be providing us with the mailing list updates which we need for our campaign in the autumn and goodness these lifts do take a long time to come don't they ah here's one.