Splendid Isolation

Back in South Africa, I’d just returned to the office after a lengthy business trip which had involved client meetings in Cape Town (three days), Port Elizabeth (two days), Durban (three days) and Bloemfontein (two days).

I’d avoided going back to Johannesburg by spending a weekend with my mother, who lived just outside Durban, so I hadn’t been in my office for two full weeks.

So that Monday morning I got my coffee and hit the old in-tray with a vengeance, made a few client calls, and was just about to tackle some intensive data analysis and meeting prep (with a couple of Jo’burg clients) when I heard a strange voice saying, “Oh there you are!” in a very plummy, upper-class English accent.

The owner of said accent was a man in his late thirties, immensely tall (about 6’6″) and very bony, with a wide, pleasant smile under a massive mustache.

“And you are?”
“I’m the new chap in Client Service — Richard Dorman is my name.  And I am very glad to make your acquaintance.”
We shook hands, and I said, “Forgive me for asking, but why are you so glad to meet me?”
His smile grew even wider.  “During my T&O [training and orientation], I was repeatedly warned about you and told to avoid you at all costs.  So I’ve been looking all over for you ever since.”
“Why do you think you were warned about me?”
He gave me a serious look and said, “Apparently, you are a world-class drinker, carouser and all-round bad influence.  Well, so am I, and I was wondering if you’d care to slope off at lunchtime for a welcoming tipple, so to speak?”

I never made it back to the office that afternoon.  It was the start of a wonderful friendship.

Dickie was very loud, especially when he found something really funny.  His bellow of a laugh was explosive, and could be heard all the way around the office, no matter where he happened to be at the time.  I too have a loud laugh, so we actually had to avoid each other during the day, because we Had Complaints from the various pecksniffs and Karens that infested the place.

About a year earlier, I had had occasion to have dinner with a man named Lester (forgotten his last name) who’d just taken over as marketing director for a company named Reckitt & Coleman, headquartered in Cape Town.  Les had come up to do his due diligence thing with his ad agency and with his data supplier (A.C. Nielsen), both in Johannesburg.  He’d been told that the ad agency types would be wild and crazy, but the Nielsen folks would be buttoned-down, serious stats types.  In fact, as he told me towards the end of our somewhat drunken dinner, it had been the exact opposite:  the agency people were obviously terrified that they might be replaced by the new guy and were on their best behavior, whereas Nielsen had been their research provider forever and thus more ummm easygoing in our dealings with him.  Even though his company was outside my remit, I had nevertheless been asked to brief him on the retail grocery business (which was), hence our dinner.  His day-to-day contact would be through our Client Service department.

And the man eventually appointed to be their Nielsen client service representative was… Dickie.

Some time later, Les told me this story.

“Richard came down for his first quarterly presentation with me — it was about the Insecticides & Pesticides category — and arrived at my office promptly at 8.30.  He sat down in my visitor’s chair, and placed his briefcase on his knees.
He did nothing for the longest time, and then said, ‘Sirrah!  In here…’ (tapping his briefcase) ‘…I have your data!’
“Well okay, Richard… can we look at it?”
“No Sir!”
“What?”
“We first need to celebrate!”
“What?”
“Your quarterly sales results are not only good, my dear chap;  they are magnificent!”

Les continued to me: “He then opened his briefcase and proceeded to take out a bottle of French champagne with two glasses, popped the cork before I could protest… and there I was:  drinking champagne in my office at 8.45 in the morning with this British lunatic.”

Nielsen’s data presentations to Reckitt had always been rather dull affairs, with few people bothering to attend the larger, annual ones.  Inside a year, Lester told me, they just about had to sell tickets to manage the demand.  Dickie was a brilliant analyst and a spectacular speaker, and as funny as all hell.  On one occasion, when Reckitt’s market share had improved at the expense of their major competitor Bayer, Dickie had bellowed out, “We’ve got the Huns on the run!  They’re running around with their hands in the air, shouting ‘Kamerad! Kamerad!’ and they’re lying on the ground, flapping their arms and legs in the air like beetles on their backs!”  And Dickie suited the action to the words, himself lying on the ground, waving his enormously-long arms and legs around and howling for mercy in a fake German accent.

According to Les, it took five minutes for order to be restored.

Dickie was even worse in social occasions.  One evening a crowd of us Nielsen folks had gone out to dinner together, whereupon the maniac told us all about his latest sexual conquest, which had taken place on the back seat of his rental car.  Just the visual of the lanky Dickie trying to achieve sexual congress inside the cramped confines of a Toyota Corolla had us in hysterics, but it got even worse when he described how, with his pale, naked buttocks pressed against the side window, his enjoyment had been somewhat curtailed by a policeman rapping loudly on the glass with his flashlight, asking what the hell all the noise was about.

“I think Swanepoel [his generic name for cops]  thought that I was murdering the girl,” was Dickie’s explanation.  “I must say, she was making a fearful racket.”
“More than you?”
“Oh, much more.”

The mind boggled.

Then there was the time, also in Cape Town, when the local Hertz office received a phone call from an indignant Dickie.  “My dear young lady:  your conveyance no longer works as it should.  Can you bring me another?”

What he failed to tell her was that he was as drunk as a sailor on shore leave, had crashed and rolled the car, and was now phoning from a house a hundred yards away.  Small wonder the “conveyance” no longer worked.

Dickie was also a thief.  I always wondered how a single meeting in, say, Durban required him to take full two days out of the office.  His breezy reassurance was that he spent the time preparing the presentations because the IT department always got him the data at the last minute.  That was a common occurrence — I was always getting bitten by that situation myself — so I thought no more of it.  Then one night Dickie confessed to me — whilst much in his cups — that he would take all his dirty laundry with him (in three suitcases), and hand it in to the hotel’s laundry service immediately upon checking in, of course charging the huge amount to his room bill.  “One just doesn’t do one’s own laundry,” he said to me earnestly, “Quite infra dig, not so?”

I have no idea what other expense account items were similarly handled — I suspect a great deal of liquor store purchases disappeared therein, for his home consumption — but I do know that he was never caught at it.  And Nielsen had some serious people in Accounts whose job was to root out just such misdeeds.

One of the other guys at the office once surmised that Dickie obviously came from a good family, but might well have been the so-called “black sheep”, sent away to the Colonies to get on with his life away from Polite Society.  It was a distinct possibility.

After some time, Dickie was transferred to the Nielsen office in Cape Town because most of his clients were based down there, and we kind of lost touch for a while.  While that was not good, it did at least give my liver and kidneys a chance to recover somewhat.

One morning I took a memo out of my in-tray (no email back then, of course) and found that Dickie had been promoted to Account Director — a very large move, as it turned out — and in the memo the department’s head, a tough Kiwi named John Shanahan, was fulsome in his praise of Dickie’s achievements and the appropriateness of his promotion.

So of course I called Dickie to congratulate him.  However, in one of those wonderful examples of corporate efficiency, not only had he not yet received the memo, he hadn’t even received Shanahan’s official letter informing him of the promotion.

“Read it out to me, old chap,” was his request.  So I did, and at the end there was this long silence, ended only by his comment, “Oh.”  Then:  “I suppose that this would be the wrong time to tell Shanahan that I’m resigning, and taking a job that offers greater reward and a better chance of career advancement… as a deckhand on a fishing trawler.”

This time, it was my laugh which shattered the peace of the entire office.

I lost touch with Dickie after I emigrated to the U.S.  I did send him one letter (by snail mail) but got no response.  Given the efficiency of the South African postal service, he probably never received it.  Much later, I heard through the grapevine that he’d gone back to the U.K. and was working at some job in Edinburgh, but I was never able to reestablish contact with him, to my great and enduring sorrow.

I don’t even know if he’s still alive.  Somehow, given Dickie’s penchant for excess and living life to its fullest, I doubt it.

But good grief, it was fun while it lasted.