Old skool lunch

I could have used this photo as a start point for talking about the phenomenon whereby one becomes friends with a client. Probably never fully friends - at least not until they aren't a client anymore - but it does happen. Like today, I had a client in and I suggested, around midday, that we might walk up to Asda to buy some lunch. "Or we could go to the pub", he replied. 

Which we did. I negotiated that we'd walk (for STEPS) rather than drive and we set off along Natland Road, over the new bridge, and then up to Romneys. To be honest, I'm not super comfortable with lunchtime drinking when I'm at work - outside work, though: YES! - so I had a bottle of Heineken, which was pleasant enough.

But this reminded me of my first proper job, working for British Aerospace in Weybridge. I joined in, I reckon, October 1988. As far as the work went, I was hopelessly out of my depth (at least until the legendary Jackson Structured Programming Course: see Blips passim) but I also had to adapt to working every day, Monday to Friday. There could be no skiving and I became an avid clock watcher.

Fridays,  though, Fridays were different. On Fridays, at midday, we went to the pub. Primarily, I would hang out with my friends Gareth (now lost to me, despite many Internet searches) and Matt Wallace. (Sometimes, we'd go with a chap called Tim, too, who I could never quite make out. Years later, I bumped into him, while I was running a team at NatWest, and I realised that being difficult was his defence mechanism.)

We'd always have at least two pints, usually three. But no one went home until the managers did, so from sometime after one o'clock we were on a variable amount of borrowed time. I guess we'd usually be back at our desks by two o'clock but I can remember a couple of occasions when we went back after three, everyone pretty much hammered, the drivers manoeuvring carefully along the lanes of Weybridge. 

I encountered this phenomenon again at various places over the years, the last bastion of this behaviour being when I was on a contract at Scottish Provident in Kendal in the late nineties. By this stage, though, I would forsake the drinking for a long lunchtime run, and no one would notice how drowsy I was in the afternoon!

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