TREVOR, THE TERRIFIED HR DEPARTMENT AND OPPORTUNITY KNOCKS
Yours truly has been offered a job and I'm waiting for the formal offer to come in the post; this got me thinking a bit about my friend Trevor. Trevor and I knocked around together in the early 1990s in London, just after the death of Stephen Lawrence. Trevor developed a short career applying for jobs, accepting them and then contriving to have the offer withdrawn. Being black – he came from Jamaica – he would cry foul, allege racial discrimination and then ever so reluctantly, he'd take the cheque. Trevor made quite a tidy sum over the course of a year or so, we're talking thousands I suspect.
Trevor had been educated in the United States with a first degree in maths and then a masters' in something too. He was doing a Ph.D. in London and basically, his antics, funded his course and kept him in some comfort. His wife was something in marketing and was white. The latter point is most important because it allowed Trevor to sort of see 'into the mind of the white man' as he used to put it. Trevor was also the kind of guy whom if he spoke about something important, it could change the way one would think too. For instance, Trevor had no time for economists whom he saw as nothing more than political ideologues and useless court intellectuals on the pay roll of party hacks. It was Trevor who introduced me to economists like Haslett, libertarians like Murray Rothbard and Lord Acton and concepts like destructive capitalism as opposed to what he saw as the utter stupidity of John Maynard Keynes.
Ah yes, the white stuff. Trevor had no time for political correctness and told me quite a lot about race. For instance, he said that many black people don't really trust one another and as for whites, he used to moan about 'there sometimes being a personal hygiene problem' and the fact that you never quite knew what some 'white folk', as he put, were thinking. He used to say that he much preferred dealing with the Irish who were much more like Caribbean’s in his opinion i.e. saying what they really believed.
After the killing of Stephen Lawrence, John Major's Britain was suddenly very sensitive to any hint of racial discrimination. Although a report had called the London metropolitan police 'institutionally corrupt', Trevor said that this was cods wallop, it was 'institutionally corrupt'. Anyhow, Trevor quickly discovered through his wife's marketing colleagues, the sort of 'right on' white liberal that he'd met in the States, ultra sensitive to any racial issues if it advanced his or her career and terrified off being labelled a racist in any way. Trevor always said the Woodstock generation were in essence, as racist as their parents – because white people only really value the esteem of other whites - but here I beg to differ, sorry Trevor.
Being very clever, Trevor would pass any test he was given (usually 100%), sail through interviews and knew exactly what white interviewers wanted to hear. Of course, he was utterly enthusiastic up to and including being offered a job. I suppose he played on the white guilt thing for all it was worth. His main targets were 'right on' consultancy firms, smallish media organisations, market research/advertising companies and even some charities. His tactic was usually to be offered a job in writing and then phone up with a query and say something rather odd so that all of a sudden, there were mental health concerns and oh dear, they didn't want him now, the offer would be withdrawn and he'd allege racial discrimination because he'd come top all the way through the selection process. Other tactics were to keep phoning up the HR department requesting additional information about their sickness and disciplinary procedures, what kind of information would be sought regarding references and anything else he sometimes thought up on the spur of the moment.
Unlike many intellectuals, Trevor was very practical and could think on his feet and improvise. Trevor also realised, that many employers would want to shut him up quickly by buying him off. Because racial discrimination is sensitive, the 'payment' would only be known to a handful of people and generally wouldn't leak out to other companies. I believe the average payment was about a couple of grand or more.
Overall, he probably didn't get money out of more than half a dozen firms. He told me of one company based in London's West End where after the test; he was congratulated on doing so well and told that nobody had ever scored as highly before. Aware that all the other candidates were white, he managed to get his test scores written down on the firm's headed note paper by a fawning HR employee so that he could show them to his Mum! Trevor said that he then did an outrageous impersonation of a boy from 'the hood' complete with all the gangster slang and funny walk. After about three weeks he phoned up the personnel department whom obviously were not aware what was going on and was sent a standard rejection letter about him not being successful on this occasion blah blah blah and picked up five grand later. I understand he had contacted a local newspaper who had rung up the company and as Trevor said, 'they always pay up in the end'.
Napoleon met his end at Waterloo and Trevor's was Paddington when he applied for some consultancy post. After flying though all the assessments and interviews they could chuck at him, he was rather tempted by the package on offer; unfortunately, he had a PhD to complete. To make matters worse, the people he'd been dealing with had integrity and he felt unable to start making silly phone calls to HR priori to taking up his appointment. The other problem was that there wasn't a proper HR department to do silly things to. In his favour was the fact that the entire workforce was white apart from the guy on reception. What's a clever guy to do in such a situation?
Poor Napoleon never did make it after his Belgium fiasco but not so with Trevor. He resolved to take up the offer, start on day one and get suspended during the morning of day one too. The problem was that he was put in charge of staff (a most unwelcome surprise) and he needed someone superior to be beastly to. He started at 10 o'clock so he told me and the work was interesting - all pie charts and whatnot - his colleagues - all Oxbridge white bright lights types – very great and oh my god, it's a quarter past eleven and Trevor was still there with the prospect of the payout receding to cloud nine before returning to earth with a crash in the form of a director who suddenly appeared and called him into an office for a chat around half-past eleven. The guy - according to Trevor – looked like a comprehensive maths teacher a la 1970s but was smart. I don't believe Trevor when he says the dislike was mutual but then we all have to work with people we don't particularly like in some way. Trevor managed to bring the conversation around to the American civil rights movement, white power elites and the fact that the only other black employee in the company was on reception with the implication that...This guy was completely unfrazzled and then proceeded to talk about Trevor's work schedule for the coming weeks with meetings here and there and cloud nine beckoned again. Trevor had landed himself a very good job and what he should have done would have been to stick it out and to postpone his Ph.D. for a while. Remember I said that Trevor could think on his feet and this is what he actually did, for about a week anyway.
The end game. Lunch with a white male client whom Trevor didn't like. The subject should have been about developing industrial software for the advertising industry; the subject that Trevor chose was the prevalence of white racism in the advertising industry with particular emphasis on the client's own company. Needless to say, the client was somewhat shocked and walked out but didn't report back on the incident. In fact, nothing was ever said and Trevor's company kept the account. To make matters worse, when Trevor next met up with this guy, he was all apologetic and said that he had passed on Trevor’s concerns to a director.
The update. Trevor kept the job for two years, was one of their star employees and resigned to complete his Ph.D. Returning to the United States – which is when we lost touch - he worked for the software industry in Seattle for some years and never pulled any more stunts. I only know this because coming out of Latimer Road tube station one Friday afternoon en route to the St. Mungo's writing group; I was stopped by a market researcher and invited to a group discussion about the congestion charge. There was a guy there who had worked with Trevor in that Paddington company and gave me an update. He told me that a couple of directors intuitively knew what Trevor might try and pull a stunt but valued him as a work colleague and friend. Trevor apparently returned the compliment and even gave a moving tribute when one of the directors lost his life when the World Trade Centre came down on September 11 2001. Apparently, Trevor was in London for a conference when the funeral took place and was able to attend the service; I was no longer in the UK then although he asked after me. Trevor died in 2004 from complications brought on by a drugs overdose, God bless him.
Andrew
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