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LIFE in the marketing department of the Global Indemnity certainly has its variety. Shortly before the weekend, I am tapped by our leader Jaques Portmonie to take myself off to the Paris office to attend the Strategy Week, a global get-together of all the company’s movers and shakers.
Typically JP asks me to do some briefing notes so that our department can hold its own amongst the international heavyweights, consultants and corporate flim-flam men.
Long into the night I prepare two papers: About Takaful and About Sidecars. A quick unscientific survey of the folks on the seventh floor discloses that nobody entirely understands what these are. Ignoratio Insurance Non Excusat as the saying goes.
The next morning my luggage hastily packed 10 minutes before my taxi arrives, I head with fear and dread to T5 at Avgas City, aka Heathrow. There I find things under control and calm, but I have taken the obvious precaution of bringing hand luggage only. At the last-chance discount electronic superstore, my eye is caught by a 6 by 6 strobing sign over a display of Digimemos:
Use it @HOME, @WORK, @SALES, @PLAY, @SCHOOL, @COURT, @HOSPITAL, @THE STORE, @THE GAME, @MEETINGS, 4 OVERHEAD PRESENTATIONS, @THE LIBRARY, @THE HOTEL, @THE LAB, @THE SHOP FLOOR, @MUM’S AND DAD’S, @THE KIDS’, @THE BUS, @THE TRAIN, @THE PLANE, @ EVERYWHERE!
At last I find the antidote to my handwriting and spelling problems, which have dogged my steps since school. With this handy device you can handwrite notes into a memory. A further purchase of handwriting recognition software means you can covert your notes to digital form, allowing them to be imported into office systems. Only 150 quid as well. Impulse purchasing at its best!
The Paris meeting is a mixture of the sublime and the mundane. On day one, the item labelled Bon Voyage Convergence turns out to be a roundabout announcement that Global’s foray into re-insuring the financial risks of the investment banking boys doing credit-default swaps is leaving our environs abruptly and taking up permanent residence in the Rue de Regret. We took quite a bath apparently. And I know Swiss Heinz is pretty downbeat about the whole thing.
Instead, the latest go-go product is the Just in Time Car, a method of piling into to reinsuring disasterrisks and making 30 points on the management fee. By the way, our exposure to the earthquake in China is not significant. Mainly because we haven’t got any Chinese business, as the Big Man lost a lot of money there in the 1980s.
By day two, the presentation of the marine and transport boys was like a journey back to a simpler time. Grumbling about falling rates, weighing containers, ship construction standards, cargo flows.
During the meeting, the loss at sea of the Toujours Alacrity on passage from Felixstowe to China is reported as a non-event for the cargo department. She was carrying baled waste paper, electronic scrap and well oxygen. Produit en Europe.
Bit of a faux pas on the dressing front. My last-minute array of “business smart casual attire” did not stand up very well against our dressy French colleagues. Certainly my packed-in-error second best cross trainers and the polo shirt with a hole under the arm were not flattered by comparison with the Milan fashion week look of France HQ.
Back home now, I am almost looking forward to writing up my Digimemorised notes.
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