The Boy Who Loved To Eat

“Miranda Priestly is a huge deal. I bet a million girls would kill for that job.”

As those of us who are au fait with our fashion-centric film will realise, these words, taken from the indomitable Streep-Hathaway tour de force, The Devil Wears Prada, cannot help but leave somewhat of an acrid aftertaste in the mouth. Protagoniste ordinaire, Andy Sachs, played by Hathaway in the film, lands a coveted job as personal assistant-cum-lackey to Miranda Priestly, editor-in-chief of the illustrious and highly publicized fashion magazine, Runway, despite initially being chastised for a dearth of style and a galling amount of chutzpah for a fresh-faced employee. Enticing though the job may have appeared, and eventually sated with enough Dolce & Gabbana to leave even the most commendable fashion fetishists jaded under the sheer weight of such artifice, Andy triumphantly walks away from the post after a year spent at the rear of human-sheepdog, Meryl Streep, in order to pursue her ambitions as a serious journalist.

In this respect, Anne Hathaway and I are bosom buddies. No, I have not indulged myself in the likes of Giorgio or Donatella to advance my career, but I have just left a decent position in the City which, I am led to believe, thousands of candidates would give their right arm to be in. And for those of you who are indeed thinking of donating a limb, please, allow me to spare you the trouble, not least, the mess. For a proper grown-up job, as I used to tell myself, was the hallmark of adulthood. A sign that I had finally escaped the shackles of higher education. Proof that I had, at last, been promoted onto a new grade of shackles, those venerated shackles of real life I often found myself mawkishly pining over. Lord knows why.

Perhaps, like all naïve twenty-somethings desperate to hop aboard the corporate bandwagon, I too was hornswoggled by the allure of sleek company logos and the odd overenthusiastic, cocaine-buzzed, guest speaker at the periodic university careers fair. Don’t quote me on this, by the way. It could just have easily been a case of overdoing it on the Red Bull. But nonetheless the circumstances were such that the competition was so stiff it was practically in a stage of full blown rigor mortis by the time I managed to bag a position working for a Big Four professional services firm in London. The talented and ambitious students of my year were pinning down jobs left, right and centre. Finishing my final year and leaving Oxford without a job to go into simply wasn’t an option. God forbid I should voluntarily choose to enter a state of occupational purgatory.

And yet, here I am three years later, doing just that. Wait, what? Yes, in a world of endless uncertainty where the future of the United Kingdom under Brexit, the fate of the United States under Trump and the tautness of Renee Zellweger’s cheeks under Botox injections all hang in the balance, I find myself now champing at the bit to take a calculated risk and enter the glorious yet exciting abyss of the unknown. And it was all shaping up to be such a beautiful career as a chartered accountant. Truth be told, chances are I would probably have found myself pilloried less as a senior tax collector who’d just been awarded employee of the month and who had received a 50% bonus…composed of public taxes.

By all accounts, the lifestyle of a chartered accountant is not known to be a sexy one, mind you, however glammed-up the conglomerates would have you believe it is, in all its “razzle-dazzle” and “pizzazz”. (As a general rule, I find, if a word has at least four z’s in it, it will, more often than not, be sufficient to describe the corporate workspace in some way, shape or form. Use of letters other than ‘z’ is optional.) In fact, when I first heard that Ben Affleck was releasing a film last year entitled, The Accountant, like most sceptics I presupposed that this was just another YouTube skit some sixteen-year-old whizz-kid with way too much free time on his hands had masterminded in his own bedroom. Still, forgive me if I don’t leap out of my armchair whilst writing this to crack out the Butterkist and wedge a fistful of salted caramel popcorn down my cakehole, but the cynic in me finds it nigh on impossible to believe that a multi-million-dollar blockbuster could materially alter my views one way or the other on the nine to five drudgery of my former professional bondage.

Only it never was nine to five. Nor even eight to six. Behind the glitzy façade of the corporate brand lay a profusion of timesheets, review notes and PBC (‘prepared by client’) lists. I developed such mastery in exercising “professional scepticism” that I practically found myself running a sensitivity analysis every time one of my colleagues asked me to lunch. And then, of course, there were those days I would spend hunched over bank statements and invoices in a do-or-die attempt to ferret out that holy grail of discoveries – the all-elusive material misstatement. Honestly, you haven’t lived until you’ve watched your boss virtually orgasm at something so utterly tiny and insignificant (in the grand scheme of things, that is). I mean, really, who the hell cares? If you find one, get it sorted. No point in fan-girling the issue for any longer than necessary.

And how could I forget Busy Season? Where chartered accountants go to detox after the Christmas lull and emerge, three months later, ravaged by time, sleepless nights, and the annual bout of vitamin D deficiencies. Because nothing screams employee satisfaction like self-described quarantine during the spring. The time for gregariousness is over. You belong to the company now. Tap tap tapping your existence away into the wee hours of the morning, teetering over the rim of your chair and sitting in wait for a fellow colleague to make the first move to leave as you fantasize over how your pillow must be feeling at home in its isolation. Eventually collapsing into the back seat of a cab only to have the overzealous Uber driver quiz you on the events of your day, all the while assuming that they’ve just picked up some big-city exec who’s spent all evening closing an eye-wateringly important deal. Until they realise what you’ve actually spent your evening doing and then it’s as if you’ve just told them that you watched paint dry for a living. That always adds a lovely bit of awkwardness to accompany an otherwise exhausted employee on the remainder of their cab ride home.

So, why do we go through this? Well, if you’re anything like me, you do it because you want to make the most out of your opportunities whilst sheltered under the protective umbrella of a respected multinational. To gain exposure to the industry in which you find yourself, to learn from those around you as much as to walk away with a prized qualification at the end of it all and, of course, the fleeting excitement of a few more letters squeezed onto your business card. If not for these reasons, three years spent at the forefront of one of the world’s biggest enterprises looks bloody amazing on your CV, right? And even though it may not seem so after reading this, I am, in fact, mightily grateful for all I have been taught during my time spent working for the company. My colleagues, bar none, were some of the most courteous and truly wonderful people I have had the fortune to know.

But, evidently, I haven’t just written over a thousand words simply to point this out. Leaders within the firm, and indeed in the rest of the industry, could really learn a thing or two from actively listening to their employees, shedding their hard-nosed business exteriors and, just for once, acting like normal human beings. I mean, for goodness sake, it’s no wonder the financial services sector has the lowest satisfaction rates of any in the UK. People find themselves treated like resources as opposed to beings made up of flesh and blood and so they end up leaving after three years, as I have just done, owing principally to a sense of disenfranchisement and a lack of recognition for their efforts. Go figure.

If anything is to change long term, which I sincerely hope it will, I would suggest that firms in our industry seriously need to have a good long think about whether the culture they are fostering from within is truly sustainable. And that comes not from looking at financial results but from addressing the contentedness of its staff. In all its guises. Not an easy thing to do, given that each employee is unique. But certainly not impossible. In any case, nothing ventured…

Credit to the feature image photographer: Hayes Davidson for NLA (https://newatlas.com/london-skyline-skyscrapers-town-planning/31610/)