Thursday - Me, me, me

"You need to carry out a massive PR exercise on yourself," Ted began on his last lesson. "Take credit for all the good that you do. Make sure everyone knows about it. Blow your own trumpet. Send emails to the right people."

"And the bad stuff?" I asked.

"Find someone else to blame. Or better still find some mistakes someone else has made and bring it to the attention of the powers that be so that your faults don't seem so bad. Everything you say and do has one sole aim - to promote you and your career. To move you up the ladder. Forget working for the company. Work for youself."

"But doesn't that go against all of the company values."

"Yes but do you really think that the people that dreamed them up believe in them? They're just the equivalent of Marxist propaganda. The reality is that everyone you see above you has applied the same guidelines to their careers."

Ted finished his lesson leaving me feeling despondent. There were two levels to this - one that I don't think I'd like to be the sort of person that I'd have to become and two, that was there really that little team work in the higher echelons. And if that was the case, how could anyone ever trust anyone else. I'd be forever feeling my back for the hilt of knives. I was living in the world that the society in the novel 'Brave New World' wanted to prevent.

Back in the team Gareth and Dan were working hard at avoiding work, pretending to be drafting responses to complaint letters that they'd already dealt with in the hope that I wouldn't give them any more work. Jo was telling a disinterested Ted all about the characters in Big Brother 7 to which Dan butted in to tell Jo that she was just like Nikki. A number of hurled insults later and I felt a bit better. I wouldn't become the career man that I knew I would despise.