Hakim’s memories from “The land before our (digital)time”.
In this series I will publish unrelated-related anecdotes from my past. The goal is to entertain. Not to hurt nor to make any political, religious or any other statements. Have fun and a cup of tea. Love, Hakim
Ok, time for another memory post.
Category: stories from the old days when Hakim’s hair was long and plentiful and business was still conducted without the internet.
I posted a story yesterday about my time at a company called then “Bierbrauer + Nagel”. It was one of Germany’s leading “Office Supplies” companies, based in the beautiful shire of Stuttgart-Vahingen. Of course in the industrial district there.
Your typical German industrial zone looks a bit same-same no matter where in the Reich you are. Business and factory buildings lacking inspiration, broad streets, boarded in regular distance by “lunch snack shacks” that sell the typical selection of slaughtered pig and other animal and high-fructose-glucose ingredients in the form of “Pommes Schranke”, “Currywurst”, “Bockwurst”, “Schweinebrötchen” — names might differ by region but I’m sure it’s one piece of German “Leitkultur” that is quite similar everywhere.
Another commonality of these districts is the more or less typical bordell / adult club. But let’s not focus on prostitution and it’s part within German society in this post.
Well it was in this glamour-less world that I had my first full-time employment (I did an apprenticeship between 1992 and 1994), and I was “on purpose” looking for a one year contract only as I wanted to go to university, but only with a minimum of work experience under the belt in the hopes that this would allow me to find a job post-university even though I was set to study a very, very exotic topic: Japanese studies and Religious studies, with a focus on Japanese religion… go and find a job with that…
The job title I got was as glamorous as the office surroundings: “Vertriebssachbearbeiter im Innendienst”. Oh glorious German language.
It is a German word for: you work with clients, but your work will look like that of a clerk. No creativity needed, just do why the book says.”
I had the exceptional glamour to replace the “cool guy” in the team (who went for the then one year mandatory military service — my window of opportunity for a one-year assignment). He was the only one in a team of probably 40–50 people who was responsible for the state-of-the-art order software the company issued on 3.5" floppy discs (remember those?) to their existing clients. Each client had negotiated a different set of prices for the papers, pens, printer cartridges etc… that they were ordering with the company.
Margins in that business were (and probably still are) so low that every cent counted. And I was to be “the man” who held the one ring, or let’s call it the one floppy disk, in his hands: it was a dream-job for as long as it lasted, bc I was probably the only one who had a clue about how to configure that software and how to send it out to clients.
It also meant that I didn’t have to do what everything else was doing: spend the whole day on the phone, taking the old-fashioned phone orders.
What’s more: I was placed in the one “open space” room where the B2B Furniture team was sitting — a team apart from the rest that had their own banter, little work rituals and that adopted me into their fold — we were like a little family in that larger team of people.
From the many small anecdotes I could tell about this time, I want to talk about Armin today.
Armin — with a bit of an unfortunate family name that could be translated as “Baggins” — was another “cool guy” because he was spending his day only pretending to work but was most of the time on his Nokia phone buying and selling shares — it was the year 1998/99 and the “New Market” was booming.
It was for me also the first time I got internet access on a daily basis and an email-address.
Armin lured me into the world of investing. He gave me “hot tips” about companies that would “go through the roof”. I have to say that after the .com-bubble burst, they all vanished and I was lucky that I got out without too much losses.
Different for Armin: he was a day-trader and at one point claimed that he made “the value of a Mercedes S-Klasse” on a daily basis.
He got a warning from our department head (a very unpleasant, choleric person worth another post) that he should immediately unsubscribe from his external, stock market related email-addresses and put down his phone at work.
He then resigned on the spot, with the phrase that made him a real hero in my eyes: “You can’t pay me enough per month to make good for the daily losses I would have to endure were I to stop daytrading!”
And off went Armin, the first “Wall Street”-person I had met in my life. He made me hijack the family TV each evening to glimpse at the price of my investments on Teletext.
He made me open a brokerage account.
He recommended my really, truly shitty companies (in hindsight) that all perished in the burst of the bubble.
I heard later that he had taken another job after the burst, but this time in financial consulting. Ha.
