Campbell's and Gucci don't mix

I was surfing along the other day and fell into this delicious website, I am not the most graceful woman on the planet and this reminded me of one of my more clutsy moments.

Many moons ago I worked as a recruitment consultant in central London - insane hours and happy times at then Alfred Marks - now Adecco I believe. I had been working particularly hard on my sales targets and things were going well. I was looking for a promotion to Branch Manager. My existing Branch Manager, (god bless you Irene - you rocked!) had been very supportive and encouraging.

We'd had a visit from the Area Sales Manager in the morning and we'd been flat out so by lunchtime we were ready for a break. It was winter and pretty chilly that day, so I went out and got a cup of steaming hot tomato soup. Mmmmmm.... tomatoey. I went through into the back office to start my lunch, leafing through a magazine and eating my lunch. ...not paying attention.... ...knocked the cup of tomato soup straight off the table. Damn! I'd only had one sip of that! Went to clear it up, only to discover the floor was completely clean as Irene's handbag had made a valiant save of the entire contents of my mug. Gloopy credit cards and tampons... Eeeeek! To make matters worse it was a fairly new handbag that she had bought on a recent trip to Italy and a steaming hot mug of Campbell's condensed was not what she wanted in her Gucci...

To say I apologised profusely was an understatement. The bag was irreplacable, even in London. I paid to have the bag professionally cleaned for her and thankfully they got all the stains out, even though it did smell kinda savory for a while. She used to arrive at work and make us all hungry.

I learned two very important things that day;

Firstly Irene never lost her temper with me, she never shouted or yelled or made a fuss. "Don't worry about it", she said, "it's already done". She had already moved onto thinking about how best to fix it. She said there was no benefit in playing the "blame game", it was a waste of time and delayed getting to the resolution. That was a great learn and I still try to emulate her attitude every day.

Secondly I learned that tomato soup is not to be trusted...