The mean are rarely punished. They just go about their lives being petty, mustering up the occasional, usually public, burst of generosity to fool people into believing that they are full of selfless munificence. It’s a creepy way to live your life and one that is as popular with celebrities as it is in offices up and down the country.
Until recently, the mean generally went undetected, their parsimony hidden from everyone but its recipients. But the advent of e-mail has changed all that: it means that, for the injured party, the modern-day equivalent of giving your tormentor a stint in the stocks is only ever a mouse-click away.
Just ask Richard Phillips, a City solicitor specialising in — the bliss — computer law and electronic commerce. Phillips, 36, works as a senior associate for Baker & McKenzie, the world’s biggest law firm, and reputedly earns £100,000 a year. The average profit share of a partner, one step up from senior associate, is £364,000. Phillips’s secretary, Jenny Amner, a mother of two and “a slim bespectacled blonde in her fifties”, according to The Times, is thought to earn about £25,000 a year.
At some point last month, Amner accidentally spilt some ketchup on Phillips’s suit trousers. This resulted in her receiving the following e-mail on May 25: “Hi Jenny. I went to a dry cleaners at lunch and they said it would cost £4 to remove the ketchup stains. If you cd let me have the cash today, that wd be much appreciated. Thanks, Richard.” Amner’s response was insufficiently speedy, so on June 3 she turned up for work to find a Post-it note on her desk reminding her of the outstanding £4.
She replied by e-mail, copying in all 250 staff. The e-mail read thus: “RE: Ketchup Trousers. With reference to the e-mail below, I must apologise for not getting back to you straight away but due to my mother’s sudden illness, death and funeral I have had more pressing issues than your £4. I apologise again for accidentally getting a few splashes of ketchup on your trousers. Obviously your financial need as a senior associate is greater than mine as a mere secretary.”
She went on to say that colleagues had offered to carry out a collection to raise the £4 but that she had declined their “kind offer”. She added: “Should you feel the urgent need for the £4, it will be on my desk this afternoon.”
Needless to say, Amner’s e-mail was immediately forwarded, hooted over and discussed all over the City, from where it travelled all over the world. While everyone else was falling about, Baker & McKenzie completely failed to see how funny the whole thing was and last week would only — inadvertently hilariously — solemnly state that the Ketchup Trousers matter was “under investigation” and that it could not therefore comment at this time (markedly poor PR skills for such a grand firm).
People often blame e-mail for everything from poor spelling to the end of correspondence as we know it, an accusation I’ve never really been able to get to grips with. The fact that so many children can’t spell is to do with texting rather than e-mail, which to my mind forces people to be courteous in the acknowledgment of their correspondence and prompt with it, too (actually, while I’m on the subject of texting: what’s with the hand-wringing over what to do about horrible “happy slapping”? It would die a death overnight if mobile phones were banned in schools, which they should be, pronto, for health reasons as well as social ones. It’s not rocket science, is it?).
Along with posting on internet boards, e-mail — the “forward” button in particular — has democratised the workplace to an extraordinary extent, whether the workplace is a Hollywood talent agency, a government department or a suburban office.
Curiously, since the internet is by and large not a polite place, the knock-on effect societally has been — or will be — to remind people of a fact that the legacy of the egomaniacal Thatcherite 1980s did a great deal to obfuscate: namely, that if you are not nice to people on your way up, you’ll pay for it in spades on your inevitable way down.
And so, oddly enough, we have the internet to thank for a new kind of courtesy — one that’s far from ideal, since it is basically founded on fear of exposure, but one that is nevertheless better than nothing. Or better, at least, than the blatant disregard and rudeness with which it had become acceptable to behave towards what Leona Helmsley, some time hotel magnate, so memorably called “the little people”.
As Phillips found out to his cost, having a secretary with online access can very easily turn into the equivalent of a crack team from the News of the World squatting in a corner of your office. And several of the more vicious sites devoted to celebrities remind us daily that you should not be rude to the tea-boy, because he probably has a laptop and a broadband connection and doesn’t feel shy about sharing his impressions about your coke habit/eating disorder/delusions of grandeur.
There is a flipside, naturally: while something like the circulating of Amner’s e-mail is nothing but good, in that it shames the shameless, it is also true that the internet is not short of sad people, eaten up with hatred, envy and resentment, jotting down their thoughts for all the world to see.
So this isn’t an unqualified rave: the problem with democracy is that every maladjusted nutter has a voice, too. But a story such as Amner’s and Phillips’s knocks all that on the head, no matter how temporarily, by giving a voice — a big, loud roar of a voice, at that — to someone who would not usually be heard and who deserves to be.
Amner’s got a way with words, too.
If I were Baker & McKenzie, I would give her a pay rise.
- It’s Father’s Day today. I don’t think I ever paid attention to it in my childhood, what with my father being geographically miles (and a sea, and what felt like a lifetime) away. And although the rational part of me knows that Father’s Day is a commercial invention, probably thought up by the cunning masterminds of the sock industry, remembering all those years of sulky teenage non-observance make me feel quite sad.
It’s too late now — because he’s dead, not because I’m still sulky — and what with the freaky acceleration of time that seems to kick in once you hit 35, I will be busy helping my children to make cards this morning, rather than busy failing to be a dutiful daughter. But I would urge you to take your dad for a drink, or to ring him up, or to take him round some socks, even if it’s the last thing you feel like doing.
Fathers get shorter shrift than they deserve and today’s the day to put that right, if only for an hour or two.
