Bert was in charge of a large warehouse owned by a mail order company. The picking and packing operation was complex, with a vast number of parcels despatched each day. Thousands of items were stacked in bays on shelves that reached from floor to ceiling. The picking process had recently been computerised but there were still many jobs that required human brains and hands and Bert had some 200 staff, many of them part-timers, to help him.

Bert was an ex regimental sergeant major and still retained many of the behaviour patterns that had stood him in good stead during his 20-year career in the army. He had a ramrod straight back and he didn’t walk, he marched briskly. He had steel tips on the heels of his shoes that made loud clicking noises on the concrete floors of the warehouse. In the army he had developed the endearing habit of calling everyone idle. ‘Good morning, idle corporal.’ ‘Good morning, idle guardsman.’ This habit he retained as he marched around the warehouse on his morning inspections’. ‘Good morning, idle packer.’ ‘Good morning, idle telephonist.’ ‘Good morning, idle cleaner.’ The idle label was applied indiscriminately regardless of how hard people were actually working.

The routine on his morning inspections was also reminiscent of the days when he would inspect barrack rooms or a parade ground full of soldiers standing to attention. In those days he would often fling a soldier’s kit out of the window if it wasn’t in order. He had also perfected a technique for remembering soldiers on parade from the front and the back. One of his favourite tricks was to thrust his hand inside a soldier’s belt and if there was any slack to charge the soldier with having ‘an idle belt’. Then, having completed the inspection of fifty or more soldiers from the front, he would go down the back of the line, remember the man with the offending belt, repeat the hand test and charge the unfortunate soldier again. Two separate charges for the same idle belt!

Now, back in civilian life, Bert had learned to temper some of these tricks – even though he still marched around the warehouse calling people idle and straightening this and that. Untidiness and litter were pet aversions. He would organise occasional litter parties and sometimes at night he would roam the deserted warehouse picking up rubbish and leaving it on display in the reception area as a reminder that he expected his ‘idle’ staff to be responsible for tidiness.

A two-day conference was called of all the senior managers. Some months before, the company had been acquired by a bigger German competitor with depots throughout Europe. The management conference was therefore large and multinational. Bert had been invited to give a presentation sharing his experiences during the recent project to computerise the picking operation. Bert prepared his 30-minute presentation with his customary attention to detail. He drafted and redrafted his speech and synchronised the words with PowerPoints showing images of the warehouse. He then learnt the text by heart and rehearsed it until it was perfect.

The conference got underway with an upbeat welcome from the new German managing director. He spoke good English but with a heavy accent. A number of presentations from different parts of the business then followed. Bert’s presentation was scheduled to be in the ‘graveyard’ slot straight after lunch.

During lunch Bert was surprised to find himself feeling uncharacteristically nervous. He picked at his food, excused himself early and went for a swift walk round the conference centre, going over his presentation in his mind. The conference reconvened after lunch and everyone settled down to listen to Bert. His nerves were not helped when a carefully rehearsed John Cleese type joke about not mentioning the war fell worryingly flat. But he pressed on undaunted. About half way through he accidentally pressed the button that brought up the PowerPoints twice which meant that a image upon which he planned to dwell, only appeared subliminally.

Flummoxed by his mistake, and trying to remember how to retrieve the lost visual, Bert reverted to type. He stood to attention, clicked his heels and screeched ‘As you were!’

Once a soldier, always a soldier.