5 minute read
It's what you know about who you know
One of my granddaughters asked what I did for a living. The Oxford English dictionary translates the French word ‘chauffeur’ (which simply means ‘driver’) into English using the following vague description: “Someone hired to drive a car for, usually, rich and/or famous people”.
There never has been, and probably never will be, a standard in the UK to which people looking to enter the chauffeur profession must attain. The French have a rigorous training schedule for their drivers but we Brits don’t even demand a minimum standard aptitude test.
All we need to do is put on a shirt and tie, plant a bluetooth ear piece into our lug-hole and, once we’ve printed up 500 business cards at the local Printy-Print, declare ourself a chauffeur.
Six simple rules
Through word of mouth teaching, a good chauffeur should follow these six simple rules:
1 Always be suited and booted
2 Speak when spoken too and possess a little knowledge on a wide range of subjects
3 Always, but always, arrive to your first pick up fifteen minutes early.
4 Know where you are going.
5 Eat, drink and toilet whenever you can.
6 Never but never, ‘card up’ a client that doesn’t belong to you.
Choosing chauffeuring as a career promises incredibly long hours. Where lorry and coach drivers are required, by law, to carry a spy in the cab to ensure they work within permitted hours, take regular breaks and days off in rest, a chauffeur is not protected by any such rules and can work 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and 356 days a year. No one gives a riding shite until one of us crashes out at the wheel with a massive heart attack and only then if a client also dies in the crash.
High blood pressure, heart attacks or strokes finally do for humans who work the kind of hours a driver puts in. Brutal hours are compounded by a sedentary lifestyle that has us eating fast food at all hours, not drinking enough water (because we never know when we might next find a toilet) irregular sleep patterns and the artery-bursting traffic of London. Chauffeurs are a ticking time bomb.
What the Oxford English Dictionary fails to mention in their less than concise definition of ‘chauffeur’ is that we need to add ticket tout, pimp, babysitter, bodyguard, nanny, shopper, concierge, psychologist, psychiatrist and even dog walker to the endless list of expected tasks. Oh, and occasionally, drug mule. Though these are only rumours and I declare that I have never walked anyone’s dog during my career.
Many drivers enter the chauffeur world because the job gets them behind the wheel of vehicles they couldn’t ordinarily afford to drive or for the chance to be up close and personal with celebrity punters. Now, having chauffeured for more than 25 years, I cottoned on early in my career that the celebrity was not the one to impress.
Taking care of 'the talent'
The ‘talent’, as they are referred to in the game, regardless of them possessing any actual talent, are never the ones in charge of booking a hotel room, a flight or car. It is the movie production company or the record label who are the paymasters.
Talent rarely puts a hand in their pocket, not even to tip, and will more often than not be thinking about the next red carpet before ‘cabin crew to seats for take-off’ gets announced on their flight out. The talent is simply a means to an end for the chauffeur. They bring much-needed connections and the kudos to enable us to service the more important ‘powerful’ set.
I’ll give you an example, when a Nigerian Chief’s wife wanted Shaggy to deliver a personal performance at her daughter’s 16th birthday party, I put a call into into Mr Boombastic’s people. This connection was made possible some years earlier when I had got on to the contacts list of Shaggy’s manager’s cell phone after offering a complimentary airport transfer for his family holiday to Ibiza. Plant the seed and watch the flowers grow.
Strategic connections
This business is about who you know, what you know, and what you know about who you know. You need many strategic connections. Some would kill to get a table at London’s hipster hangout, Zuma.
It is futile for someone as lowly as myself to think I could be on the ear of the restaurant owner or the self-important Maitre d’, so, instead, I befriended the close protection guys responsible for the safety of the main man. All favours are reciprocal, so he finds my client a table and I pass him two hospitality tickets for Chelsea v Man City that I happened to hold for a Russian client of mine (no, not him) who was more often than not out of the country.
The British, unlike the Americans, are embarrassed to admit being in a service industry. We find it belittling, I suppose, so a high proportion of drivers enter our industry only as a stop gap. Once they’ve been made redundant from their lucrative job in the City and used their severance pay to buy a Merc, they’ll look to do a bit of chauffeuring while waiting for that friend, who owes him a favour, to get back to him with a ‘blinding little offer’ based out in Hong Kong’. Except that was 12 years ago.
Oh, and please excuse my constant reference to him/he when talking about drivers but there really is a dearth of women doing the job. There are a few, but not nearly enough. It is an incredibly male dominated industry. That said, I’m not sure I want my granddaughter to follow me into the industry!
