At lunchtime, our Managing Director, Ken Braun, was reading the latest copy of Marketing Minds Monthly. Nobody in my office knew that I wrote the column for that magazine, and I didn't want them to, so I sensibly used the pen name - ‘Felicity Moore’. 

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I suppose you could call me a marketing spy, really. The content of my articles was sometimes risky and below the belt, but people in my industry loved reading them, and I got a buzz from writing them.

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Ken read my article to everyone in our Monday afternoon meeting. The article was about role-playing in a business environment to help get the best from your employees.

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In the meeting, we were supposed to be covering the subject of, ‘plan a little so you can do a lot more’ but Ken changed his mind and continued with the role-playing theory. I choked on my coffee when he suggested that we try the exercise.

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Ken selected certain people in the company to take part. His aim was for us to identify how we could improve our performance by seeing how someone else perceived us. To make it a fair test, names were drawn from a hat. I was to be our ghastly Sales Director,  Peter lobster chops for the following hour, and I was disturbed when I found out that he was going to be me.

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As a matter of research, I discreetly placed my mobile phone on a bookshelf so I could record the role-playing exercise and make reference to it for my next article, which I decided was to be entitled, ‘Who do they think you are?’

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Needless to say, the whole exercise was a disaster. People fell out, cried, shouted, blamed, cursed, and the entire thing was a disaster. Not what I had planned at all, and I realised that the article I had written could be responsible for hundreds, maybe thousands, of disgruntled employees across the nation if they had tried what we had.

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That night, I went home and transferred the recording from my mobile phone to my laptop. I sat back with a glass of Pinot, a notepad pad and took extensive and very revealing notes.

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This is how it went...

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Bernie was his secretary, Miranda for an hour, and he pranced around the office pretending to wear stilettos, drawing pictures of flowers in a notebook, and filing his nails. Miranda was offended by his impersonation. She slapped Bernie around the face in front of everyone, and Bernie hid in his office for a while.

 

Miranda pretended to be the Managing Director, Ken, she sat at his desk reading the Financial Times and picking up the phone up saying, ‘tell them I’m in a meeting and I will call them back’. Ken was not amused and walked off in a huff.

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Ken was Fiona, our Finance Director, and he kept getting up and performing Tai Chi, eating fruit, drinking glasses of water, and going to the toilet every fifteen minutes. Fiona was Bernie, and she walked around the office shouting, ‘Miranda, coffee, Miranda, where the hell is my diary?’.

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Michelle, our HR Director, was John from Accounts, and Michelle sat at his desk pretending to send text messages and write messages on a dating website.

 

John was Molly from Admin, and he kept pretending to ring Shanice, who was Molly’s best friend. He giggled and pretended to talk about their recent 18 to 30s holiday. Molly gave John the evils. Needless to say, they didn't talk to each other for the rest of the afternoon.

 

Molly was Michelle, and she sat at her desk scrolling through her social media.

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I was rotund, red-faced Peter lobster chops, so I put layers of blusher all over my face, shoved my cardigan up my blouse to make a beer belly. I  burped, pretended to pick my nose, slumped in my chair, and chewed heartburn tablets. Peter growled at me, and I laughed so much that I had to go to the toilet. 

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Peter was me, and he ran around the office with his shirt unbuttoned halfway down, pretending to talk on my mobile phone, saying, ‘Andy, can you at least put the washing on? Max, turn the music down. I can’t hear what you’re saying, and Jessica, wake daddy up, please.

 

I hated Peter's accurate interpretation of me.

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We still enforced our swear box during the hour of role play, and we made a total of ninety-five pounds, and later we bought a couple of bottles of wine and boxes of chocolates and consumed them during our ‘what did we learn about each other today?’ meeting.

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Whilst I had been looking at the recording on my laptop, my daughter Jessica had been watching it from the doorway in the study.

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Jessica asked me if all marketing companies were like that. I said yes, and she shook her head in disapproval. She told me that the children in her class at school were better behaved. She’s only five and so wise. 

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Bye for now, Samantha.xx

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Written by Rachel Roussell.