Confessions of a Quality Manager  

Being the adventures of four jet-setting quality consultants who like to talk shop even more than they like good food and drink.

This is fantasy consulting. For the real thing, go to Fell Services' Quality pages.


 
I was ok at maths at primary school - not too good, not too bad, just ok. At least, so my mother used to say, she said I was about the same level in all my subjects, which could have been parental bias, as I was actually very good in English. Still, I didn't realise then, not like now, that the truth is infinitely flexible - which could be one reason why I like working with statistics. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

When I was eleven, I had an exam to take at school. I didn't take it all that seriously, as I'm one of those people who isn't phased by exams, or by interviews, for that matter. I didn't even understand the implications at the time, but the result was that after I left my local, neighbourhood, primary school, I found myself going to a secondary, single sex school on the other side of the big city.I remember my first day there. The journey involved three bus rides, which I didn't mind too much, followed by a hurried sprint up a fairly sharp hill. I'd aimed to arrive on time, not knowing any better, but it took about ten minutes to get through the school grounds and then another ten to find the classroom, by which time all the desks were bagged. Everyone had gone off to the daily assembly, to worship God, or the headmistress, and I was left alone in the deserted classroom, waiting for my desk, which came up from stores, was dusty, an older model from everyone else's, ugly, revolting, unwanted. And that's not even describing my chair. The head mistress of the time, Miss L-W, was very experienced in dealing with (manipulating?) vulnerable girls. She would toss her silver hair regally and make some apt foreign quote (Greek? Latin? Gibberish?). She left the term I started, and was replaced by a big bosomed administrator, whose first act was to abolish our cherished Friday afternoons off, so that we could study more science. This, predictably, had the effect of infecting a generation of school girls with a pathological hatred of science.

The first lesson on the first day was maths. I'd just got comfortable when the teacher walked in and everyone stood up. I didn't understand. Had they all simultaneously got ants in their pants? Even then, I could vaguely work out the statistical unlikelihood of that. But, after realising that this was part of the awful routine of my new world, and that there would be no sitting down without permission, I still felt enthusiastic about maths and when the teacher asked for subscriptions to the magazine, Mathematical Pie, I was first to put up my hand - I was keen on cooking, after all. And so, I was landed with getting this magazine for the next two years, which I found totally incomprehensible, and soon learned not to even open.

There were three maths teachers at that school. I don't remember one of them at all. One was married (a rarity in those days), and looked as if she had a life out of school. The third was the one I ended up with. Miss H - I remember her well. She was another of these big bosomed women, slightly drooping, and she was actually quite short and more than a little obese. She wore dowdy dresses, dark, murky colours like olive green or burgundy, with small, busy, floral designs. Her hair was dark and greasy, straight, cut level with her ear lobes, her eyes were the colour of stones, left too long to soak in a polluted pond. She had a wart on, I think, the left side of her nose, and her skin was curiously good, creamy, smooth. Her teeth were good too, very white, I saw a lot of them as she smiled a lot. It was not until years later when I saw that smile again on someone else, and realised that it denoted not pleasure, but intense and tightly controlled fury.

Miss H and I found ourselves, probably equally reluctantly, in a war of nerves. In those days, there was no chance of getting into university without a maths qualification, and it was taken for granted that I would go to university (I was quite brainy, I say modestly). But, to cut a long and distressing story short, after five years of Miss H, there was no way that I could pass my exams. My fear and hatred of maths spilled over into Physics and Chemistry and when I left school, it was as someone who could spout Latin and endless tags from "Hamlet" (having studied it for three years), who could immediately say that the Nile was the longest river in Africa (though that was more through reading Aldous Huxley than actually learning any geography). I crashed with maths, and with the resit, and only passed it several years later when I was just starting university (yes, the regulations had changed then, if you were sufficiently ingenious).

There had been one moment when I thought I might learn something: after perhaps 500 visits from my mother to school, I had been given the chance to move to the married maths teacher's class. Except that if I did that, it meant that someone had to transfer to Miss H's class, and someone had very influential parents. I was away from Miss H for about thirty glorious seconds.

And so began the years of wandering. There was plenty of travelling and lots of seeing more of the seedy underbelly of life than I was really happy with. Through a series of bizarre and what would be totally unbelievable coincidences if they weren't actually true, I found myself in an enginering company. Now, I am a lot of things, but being an engineer is not one of them. I don't think like an engineer - which was, and, to some extent, still is, one of my major strengths. But my mentor at the company put his thinking cap on, and put me into the quality department. My boss at the time found this out about a minute before I did, and we looked at each other and, silently, decided to make the best of it.

And now? As a woman working in a predominantly male environment, my natural reaction to maths would not be appropriate - besides, there are calculators now. Maths and I now have a twisted relationship, by which I fight to remain dominant and keep the maths as a tool to be kept in its proper place which is firmly under my very high, painfully sharp heels. Statistics are slightly more tolerable, it's the analysis which interests me and the struggle to keep some form of neutrality amidst the managerial politics. But thoughts of Miss H still bring me out into a cold sweat. She wasn't the right teacher for me, though I guess she might have had similar thoughts about my suitability as a pupil. That school was the wrong school for me, but my parents, with good intentions, decided that it was. I got screwed there and it took many years to get back onto track. I was invited to a school reunion last month: I sat on the edge of the bed and shuddered silently for five minutes before deciding that the past should be left where it belongs - in the past. Miss H had problems: I had problems. But I've got over most of them. I don't know if she has - and I don't care, either.

  posted by Dovya R @ 9:30 PM : 


Saturday, April 27, 2002  
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