FATHER P CLIP

Bringing hope, peace and unity to the good brethren of business supplies

The good Father is back on the road but finds himself longing for the days of Zoom calls again.

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ost-lockdown in the office products industry is a very strange time; it’s full of apprehension over whether to wear a mask, or shake hands, or to allow the customer to spray your face as you walk in their premises. It’s a lot of faffing around and I’m thinking of going back to the old days and setting up some Zoom meetings.

All this driving around and calling on people is really getting on my nerves at the minute. I’m just not used to it and the customers don’t know what to say anymore when I arrive. We’ve lost the art of conversation; people have got used to Zoom meetings so much that some of them are turning up for work still in their underpants. It is embarrassing, to say the least, and not conducive to selling our products.

Of course, there are lots of advantages to seeing people again. The sense of freedom is enormous; we can pop in and out of shops and restaurants without having to be sprayed all over and it’s also giving us a chance to do a stock take on our PPE equipment and sell it off at half the price we bought it for, which is still a bigger profit than we made on it during the pandemic.

I’ve also noticed that, just now, lots of people seem to be moving around in the industry, probably due to businesses taking stock and refreshing their ideas – but office supplies people can’t just move on quietly can they? They have to post something on social media and give their life stories and their aspirations for the future.

We all know that once you are in our industry you can never get out again; you are trapped like an office products spider in a clear stud wallet. It used to be that people just slipped out the back door with their box of photos and their coffee mug; now it gets announced to the world and they go on about ‘overcoming prejudices in their life’ and ‘moving on to fulfil their dreams’ in an office supplies world fraught with difficulties.

I guess we should be thankful that our particular trade seems to be moving on and growing, even though changes have had to be made, and we can look to the future while selling all sorts of new ideas, as well as keeping a lot of the old ones.