OR, how tea making can lead to a great career. More than once!
In the UK, regardless of the industry, most apprentices start off making the tea. As an apprentice you’re unskilled, clueless and a complete novice. Tea making is just about the only thing you can do thats worth a damn. Most people try to get out of this stage of work life as quickly as they can. Seeing it as beneath them. It’s just ‘dogsbody’ work right? Wrong.
The ability to be the guy or girl that makes the tea and who not only enjoys it but also does it with pride and care. I’m sure the Japanese have a term for approaching every task – no matter how small – with precision and care. Sadly I can’t recall it!
Tea making has opened a lot of doors for me over the years. Doors that would have been closed without my awesome tea making skills! So let me tell you a little tale and teach you a valuable life lesson along the way. Hang on, this might get deep!
My first real job was as a gardener. I’ve never been interested in gardening but this job happened to at a local recording studio. And I’ve always been interested in music. Like, VERY interested. I started working there with the head gardener, ‘Old Tom’. Tom needed an assistant because his knees were buggered and needed a job because my bank account was in a similar state to his knees. He was a lovely old bloke who took me under his wing and I enjoyed working with him a lot. But I had designs on becoming a sound engineer. The studio already had a couple of trainee engineers that were on trial. But, as they seemed to spend most of their days playing pool, watching TV and not actually assisting anyone, I thought I might be in with a shot. I just needed ‘an in’. And that was Tea.
One afternoon I was making tea for Tom and decided to knock the door of the room full of the flashing lights. I later found out this was called the control room. As a gardener I wasn’t allowed anywhere near this room normally but I had a cunning plan. “I’ve got the kettle on, does anyone fancy a cuppa?”
That simple question opened the door to a career that would take me around the world and give me a series of life experiences I’d never have had.
Of course, I didn’t know it at the time. My offer was greeted with a chorus of “Yes Please!” I told Colin (the head engineer) that I’d knock the studio door every time I was brewing up if he wanted me to. He replied “don’t bother knocking, we wont hear you. Just come in.” Now I had access to the control room. A place where even the trainees weren’t often allowed. As long as I had a cup of tea in my hand for Colin of course. After a few weeks and many cups of tea later we had a new band due to ‘load in’. I’d been asked to clean the kitchen area. While I was cleaning, the other trainees teased me for doing my ‘dummy job’. ‘You’d never catch me doing that’ type of thing, you know.
I thought to myself that if they won’t clean, maybe Colin would appreciate ‘the teaboy/gardener’ cleaning the studio area for him. It was a perfect opportunity to show off my cleaning skills. So I offered to clean and hoover the studio area and he said yes. I stayed after work that evening and spent a ridiculous amount of time cleaning the studio. Polishing, mopping, hoovering, dusting, replacing bulbs etc etc. I even polished the Piano! By the time I’d finished the place looked brand new. I knew it was an opportunity not to be missed so I went for it. The following morning I apologised to Colin for not cleaning the Control Room. “I didn’t want to break anything” I said.
As I’d hoped, my tea making and cleaning abilities were enough for Colin to say “come in after you’ve finished with Tom and I’ll show you what you can and can’t touch” And he did. After that I continued with tea making & cleaning but slowly more tasks were added.
“Coil all the mic leads but leave the mics on the stands”
“OK, now you can put the mics away”
“Now you can put the mics out”
Over the next two years I progressed from gardener to studio assistant. Studio assistant to Tape Op. Tape Op to Assistant Engineer and eventually Assistant Engineer to Sound Engineer. I carried on helping Tom until he found a new assistant because, honestly, I loved the miserable old bugger and I didn’t mind pushing a wheelbarrow about! You might be wondering at this point ‘what happened to those stuck up trainees?’ Well after about a month of cleaning and tea making they stopped being around. I’ll let you draw your own conclusions.
I left The Old Smithy when I was about 19 and went to work at Rich Bitch studios in Birmingham. Colin was an ex BBC engineer who trained me properly and very well. I was also very fortunate to be learning the craft at a time of huge change. The digital revolution was just starting so I gained experience in the analog way and the digital way.
I learnt all the old school, invaluable engineering techniques that create all the classic albums I’d grown up listening to. Along with the new ones being employed to make the modern music of the day. With all that training and proper studio experience, by the time I was 19 I was pretty good. Actually that’s a lie. I was fucking great. I did one session at Rich Bitch and Rob offered me a job on the spot. He knew talent when he saw it and I repaid him by taking a little 8 track demo studio to a state of the art, 32 track digital studio. Mixing a number one single and 2 grammy nominated albums from that studio. Along with countless major and indie releases for dozens of labels. All before I was 21 before quitting studio work to go on tour as a FOH engineer.
And it ALL started because I made a great brew.
A few years later I had met the love of my life and started a young family. I didn’t want to go on tour anymore so I decided to pursue my other passion. Design. The only problem was that I knew nothing about design! After a very brief stint at college after blagging my way onto a design course. I managed to score a job at a local newspaper. Mainly because I hit it off with the production director – John in the pub next door to the college! With so little experience the only thing I could do was work the 7pm to 7am night shift scanning pictures of houses. The very first night I sat down to work I knew I was way out of my depth and knew even less than I’d realised. Watching the guys in the production department I could see that I had a lot to learn to even get on the bottom rung of the ladder as a Mac Operator.
Fortunately for me I was sat next to a miserable old sod called Pete.
Pete was an old school typesetter. I didn’t know it at the time but quite recently manual Typesetting had been replaced with Macintosh computers. The old typesetters who’d apprenticed for 4 years to become so highly skilled had been (almost) replaced over night. By far the cheaper Mac Operator. Understandably Pete was pretty salty about this. In the few previous year he’d gone from (literally) being worth his weight in gold to the lowest job in the production department. Other than me of course.
Pete didn’t even speak to for two weeks. I sat next to him, scanned a thousand pictures and then went home. Night after night after night. Until one night I asked him if he wanted a cup of tea. “go on then” was the only answer I got. But it was a start. Over the next few weeks I made the tea, rolled his cigarettes and tried to teach myself QuarkXpress. One evening, as I was delivering another cuppa, Pete leant over to me and told me that needed something called ‘Roman hanging punctuation’ for what I was setting. “The what now?” was my reply. “Oh, for fucks sake” said Pete as he proceeded to show me.
In the months that followed I got a crash course in real typesetting from someone who’d actually done it. In return I would stay behind and help Pete to clear his workload. To be honest I probably wasn’t much help to start with but I’m a quick learner. The lessons I learnt were Invaluable. I was – once again – straddling the analog to digital changeover. It wasn’t long before I could refer to myself as a mac operator without anyone laughing at me. But I had my sights set on becoming a graphic designer.
The newspaper group had a small design team. Just two. Who were mostly ridiculed by the production department for their lack of knowledge about anything in publishing beyond making a few fancy graphics. Graphics that quite often didn’t print properly! Thanks to my brother in law Kevin I taught myself enough about Photoshop and Illustrator on an old PC running hooky versions of the software at home. So, when a job came up in the design department I applied for it.
Jason was head of the Graphic Design department. He was a ‘real’ designer. He’d worked for an agency and wasn’t particularly keen on having ‘one of the production mob’ doing his job. Honestly, I think I only got a chance because I was cheap and if I failed they figured they’d just put me back in the production department. Jason was waiting for me to fail and clearly didn’t intend to make life easy for me. Upon being introduced to visitors as the Design Department he’d regularly correct the introduction saying “I’m the designer. He’s just a monkey with a computer”
“Do you fancy a cup of tea Jason?”
Once again I was at the bottom of the pile. Clawing my way up with a tray of tea in my hands. So that’s exactly what I did. Over the course of the next couple of years Jason taught me the basics of layout, flow, readability and best practices. He was a stuck up dickhead but he was a good teacher. From this jumping off point I studied and taught myself more about graphic design and the new tools designers were using. Jason hated ‘the new way’. He continually moaned about it and refused to update his skills beyond the very basics. Often claiming that this computer shit was just a fad so it wasn’t worth it. I – on the other hand – knew that these emerging technologies were taking over everywhere so I set about becoming as expert as I could. As quickly as I could.
As quickly as I could involved working my way through a series of tutorials that I’d found on the clipart discs that we bought in to use on adverts. I spent every lunch hour for about a year and a half copying a technique step by step. Usually with a Philadelphia sandwich hanging out of my mouth! By the time the discs ran out I’d become a design ninja. I’ve also never eaten Philadelphia since!
It wasn’t long before I was the designer and Jason was the guy that couldn’t work the computers very well. Everyone would ask me how to do stuff and ignore him. Eventually his ego couldn’t take anymore and he left. I was promoted to Head of the design Department. Over the following 10 years I won a number of deign awards. I built the magazine division and the Internet department. Employing another 5 designers along the way before I finally left to set up my own design business. In the end I left – not because I didn’t love the job – but because I got bored and wanted a new challenge.
THE POINT?
So what’s the point of telling you this?
Well, I think the point is that humility is the key to learning. Being prepared to go right back to to bottom rung of the ladder. To literally become the tea-boy once more, in order to learn a new skill. I could have told Tom to make his own tea and never offered to clean recording studio. I could have told Pete to have some respect for a Grammy nominated sound engineer. I could have told Jason to give me some cred for becoming a Mac Operator in half the time it usually takes. And they’d have all told me to fuck off.
And that’s the point. It doesn’t matter if you’ve been an expert previously. If you’re starting something new you have to accept that you are once again, a beginner. Being prepared to accept that, have a word with yourself and learn is the key. That and making a fucking good cup of tea! See you next time. p