if you lack the means to pay,
Proverbs 22:27 NIV
your very bed will be snatched from under you.
One day I was in the Stevenage office; the same place where I had my initial interview with ICL over a decade earlier. The lead finance manager in the Network Services organisation had recently left and in his office, we noticed a number of strange men in suits, pawing over computer generated documents and wearing worried looks on their faces.
Over the previous few years, our department had been noted for the way it was making profits whereas other parts of the company appeared to be haemorrhaging money. We were the “Golden Boys” showing the rest how business should be done in this new age. For this reason, we were allowed to continue what we were doing even though we were trying new things which rather challenged the old order. I often observed in those days that as long as you were making money, they left you alone.
That is, of course, when you were really making money. Apparently, our financial position was a bit of a fiction.
I am not 100% sure what exactly happened but it was something to do with calming revenue, before stuff was delivered. If you are approaching the end of a financial year and say you are short of your revenue target. Say you suggested to your customer that you could send them the invoice this year, even though you had to finish the job next year. This would create a false position in that you were claiming revenue before you had expended all the costs of delivering it. I.e over-stating profits.
Again, I don’t know the details because maybe it was too embarrassing, but I was told at the time the amount of money we were short of was of the order of £4M. The accountant who had left wasn’t stealing money for himself but borrowing company money from next year, to bump up profits in the current year and this was discovered when new accountants started to look at the books. I know that in the present day, the finance people in the company keep a very tight control on this sort of thing and I can understand why.
We were all called into a big meeting and told that everything we were doing was coming to an end. Our boss was fired (or resigned) and the whole department was being wound up. As for the people, the solution was not what we were expecting.
Under such circumstances, you would normally assume that we would all be made redundant. But things were different. There were vacancies all around the company and so were transferred into a sort of parking department where we would carry on getting paid until such time that we found a suitable new post. This began what I think ended up being called “Linkwise”; a bucket for dispossessed staff.
In those days, there was no such thing as working from home so for several months I turned up to my desk in the Wakefield office even though there was no work to be done.
I eventually got a new job because of my experience with TECs (See Chapter 16). It was something a bit out of my comfort zone but a new challenge was about to begin.
Richard Mann 