Tidying Up the Flight-Only Mess and Meeting My Future Wife

Sometimes people remember meeting you far more clearly than you remember meeting them, particularly when your introduction involves changing their job. That was the impact I had when I first met my now-wife, Ruth, although I would love to claim I made a more charming impression.

Ruth was 23 and had just joined the Airtours sales team to handle third-party promotions Seamus and the commercial department were developing, as she had been working in this sector for several years. However, according to her, I barged into Seamus’s office, said hello and announced that she would instead be helping Seamus clear up the flight-only mess described in my previous blog. At the time, I doubt I gave much thought to how that introduction felt to her.

The brief was hardly straightforward: visit the retailers involved, explain that we knew about the scam and had fired the culprit, while making clear that we still needed to work together. In some offices, Ruth’s smile was welcome, but Seamus was banned, which tells you something about the reception awaiting them.

It was an early example of something I have come to appreciate more with age: the version of events remembered by the boss can differ from the one remembered by everybody else.

Getting together with Ruth after the breakdown of my first marriage has provided plenty of opportunities to discover this. She has never left Norden, close to Airtours’ old Lancashire heartland, so I now find myself surrounded by people who knew me as one of the senior bosses and are happy to explain what they thought of me.

Fortunately, most remember the growth and success fondly and give me credit for some of the good things we did. However, marriage also appears to have given me lifetime membership of an unofficial Airtours feedback panel, where the less flattering stories are regularly available.

I have always known that my reputation can arrive before I do. People often tell me I am much nicer in person than they expected from my arrogant, outspoken blogs, presumably meant as a compliment. What took longer to understand was how a throwaway comment could leave somebody with a lasting grievance.

Visiting my close friend Adrian Walton at Icelolly.com, I arrived on time while he was delayed in traffic. I casually told his business partner, Lesley, that I would have a coffee and wait, meaning there was no problem with the delay. She heard a senior man dismissing her importance and expecting her to make the coffee. With hindsight, spending that half-hour talking to her would have been rather more sensible.

I also upset my now good friend Kirsten Hughes at a Travel Counsellors drinks reception before the Northern Ball. They were serving champagne, which I dislike, so I announced my preference for beer and wandered off to the main bar. Others followed, unintentionally undermining her reception, and my innocent search for a pint took rather longer to forgive than I expected.

When I realised Avis wanted the announcement to coincide with a major refinancing, I pushed the advance to £9 million. To me, this was a commercial triumph, rewarded with another double annual bonus. To Ruth’s high-mileage sales colleagues, it meant changing cars virtually every month, often for an identical model in a different colour. They remembered the inconvenience, and I got the blame.

Thankfully, the parties and commercial weekends I organised produced rather warmer memories. What I regarded as team building became stories people still tell decades later, along with quite a few marriages and lasting relationships.

Looking back, I am struck by how little control you have over what people remember about working with you. The deal that earns your bonus may become somebody else’s monthly irritation, while a weekend away stays with them for life. And the young woman whose job you abruptly change may eventually become your wife, ensuring that you never get to write your own history entirely unchallenged.