Open Writing

I immediately applied for the position of trainee manager with Woolworths. (This company is not connected with Woolworths overseas). Before the course began, I worked for a few weeks at the storeroom in a tyre shop.

We stayed in the rooms of the ground floor in a house on York Street, a very old inner Sydney suburb right under the Cahill Expressway. We were not happy there, as when Jennifer, who had just started to crawl, sat up her face, hands and knees would be black from the settling exhaust soot.

After a few weeks at this place with the additional problem of trying to live without adequate shopping and recreational facilities, we found a house for rent in the leafy suburb of Narrabeen. Our neighbour in York Street was horrified at us going out to the bush 'where there were spiders and snakes'. As far as we were concerned it was a godsend. Stepping over comatose derelicts in the lane on my way to and from work was something I certainly would not miss.

Unfortunately for me though, I had to cope with over an hour's bus trip each way every day. I had to leave the house about six in the morning and would not arrive at home until it was time to say good night to my fed, bathed and powdered children. I was a weekend father.

While we were at Narrabeen we had two more children; Rodney was born on the thirtieth of October 1961 and David, on the twenty-ninth of December 1963.

Managing on a trainee’s salary - I was about ten years older than most of the other trainees - with a wife and a growing family was not easy. Even Jan's considerable money management skills were put under a great deal of strain. I remember on one occasion, we were waiting eagerly for the child allowance cheque to arrive. Jan was planning on spending it new shoes for Jennifer or some other vital piece of equipment for the house. However, a day or so before the money was due to arrive; I had been pulled over by a policeman who informed me that if I didn't get new tyres for my car immediately I could face a large fine. There went the child allowance.

Like the airlines, I enjoyed dealing with people. I also enjoyed learning about sales, stock control, merchandising and display.

After about a year of working in the training store I was transferred to the Balgowlah store as a variety section manager. I was now nearer to Narrabeen and thankfully spent less time each day on public transport.

Late one afternoon when I was in Balgowlah, Theo Kelly, the General Manager of Woolworths, arrived unexpectedly with a couple of other commonwealth executives. Ted G, the manager, was having a sandwich when I gave him the news. I was astounded to see him throw the uneaten sandwich into his desk drawer, whip the papers he was working on off the top into a drawer and literally run to the fixtures in the storeroom where he started rearranging stock with a look of absolute terror on his face. I was beginning to have doubts of my future in the company; this incident made me even more concerned. Knowing how I have always felt about carrying out orders unquestioningly my theory of management was to try to get people to work with, rather than for me. I still do not know if my theory is correct; it is something over which I have often pondered.

In 1963 I was transferred to the Manly variety store and was given a section to oversee. The dissimilarity between the training store in the city and the reality of this place was unbelievable.

While I was at work one day Jan rang to tell me that Rodney was missing. I had to leave work early to go home and help find our little two and a half year-old. We searched up and down the street and walked along the edge of Narrabeen Lake without success. We were both distraught with worry when we rang the local police. They told us that a 'four-year-old' had been found wandering down the footpath on the main road and was presently being held at a butcher shop. We anxiously rushed down to the shop to find our errant son sitting up on the counter grinning at us quite unconcerned with an ice cream cone in his hand. After Jan had seen Jennifer off to school unbeknownst to her Rodney had followed his sister and her friend Cherylin from next door. He had trailed them up a steep hill then down the steps on the other side and along another couple of blocks to the highway. That following weekend I built a physical barrier on our veranda to keep him in.

One of the area supervisors, nicknamed “Uncle Harry”, came into the Manly store one Thursday morning and told me to swap the travel goods section with the plastic flower section. Anyone working with plastic flowers, a pet aversion of mine, will know that when you try and remove the flowers from the chicken-mesh, in which they are invariably displayed, they easily come apart. I knew that the work would be tedious and time consuming I wrote the job down on my diary to be done the next morning right after 'morning routine'.

Every day in a Woolworths’ store was, and probably still is, organized with a morning routine. We began with the opening routine of removing the covers from the shelves and organizing our cash registers and serving customers. This was followed by a customer service period during morning tea, then a section cleaning and relaying period, another service period again during lunchtime, followed by a special job and ordering time and finally the closing routine, which included balancing the cash register.

I had an hour to do the job of transferring both sections with the help of two female assistants. The problem was that one of my female staff had unexpectedly asked for the Friday afternoon off, as her daughter had been taken ill. I decided to defer the job until the following week.

“Uncle Harry”, came in about four thirty that Friday afternoon and found that his order had not been carried out. In front of customers and staff in a raised voice, among other things, he called me a `Bloody Idiot'. I would not have minded him taking me up to the office and him saying what he did or his even giving me the sack but this sort of humiliating behaviour was out of the question as far as I was concerned. I walked away from him without saying a word, went straight upstairs and rang the personnel officer at Head Office to demand an apology. He did not agree with me and tried to make some excuse of the pressures of being a supervisor, of which I have no doubt.

Another factor in my upcoming decision was that I had been previously told that not one person employed in Woolworths after reaching the age of sixty, the mandatory time for retirement, had lived long enough to collect their superannuation payment.

I brought forward my holidays, found another job and gave my notice.

© Clement 2006