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    Licking A Tramp: The Diary of a Bank Marketing Executive
    Licking A Tramp: The Diary of a Bank Marketing Executive
    Licking A Tramp: The Diary of a Bank Marketing Executive
    Ebook219 pages2 hours

    Licking A Tramp: The Diary of a Bank Marketing Executive

    By Paul McNamara

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    About this ebook

    A satirical diary of a marketing executive working in a bank. Phteven is everything you could hope for in a marketing executive who works for a bank. His light familiarity with the English language dovetails majestically with his robust command of jargon. But this published diary is more than that: it is the chronicle of a naïf coming of age. A hard-working, well-intentioned student becomes a disingenuous slacker with a knack of passing the buck. Life has never passed someone by as quickly as it does Phteven.

    This book is sure to become a modern day classic and a best-seller. Early reactions have veered from warm to rapturous and from inscrutable to scrutable.

    Ombudsman Pearson Slackshin had this to say, "A very funny book. All the Bangs and Whistles you would expect from a master of his craft."

    Magistrate Nature Witherspoon said, "Without wishing to Bang My Own Trumpet, this is a revelatory work, every page lightly marbled with the scent of Ambergris and Guillemot.'

    Alderman Nutmeg Chuff-Heartly said, "A good family book. No rudeness or naughty words. No low thoughts, just good, wholesome roughage. Kept me and my puppies regular as clockwork."

    See what all the fuss is about for yourself and step aboard the crazy, laugh-a-minute rollercoaster that is Licking A Tramp. You very likely won't regret it.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPaul McNamara
    Release dateJan 20, 2015
    ISBN9781310430640
    Licking A Tramp: The Diary of a Bank Marketing Executive
    Author

    Paul McNamara

    Mr Paul McNamara is a journalist, editor, author and biographer with extensive experience in Asia, the UK, the Arabian Gulf and Australia covering the wholesale financial markets. Over the years he has worked for the Financial Times Group, Fairfax Media, Euromoney Institutional Investor, CPI Financial, Yasaar Media and Eaglemont Media.  His areas of specialisation include insurance, reinsurance, risk, Islamic finance, investment banking, project finance, trade finance, wealth management, private equity, hedge funds and alternative investments, the Middle East banking and finance industry, GCC capital markets and the world of interest rate securities.  Over the years he has launched numerous publications that have gone on to define their markets, including Shares Magazine in Australia, Banker Middle East Magazine and Private Equity and Hedge Funds Middle East in the UAE and The Islamic Globe newspaper in London. He is also the author of numerous books including Qatar Takes Off, The History of Banking in the UAE, The History of the National Bank of Abu Dhabi, Dubai Islamic Bank: 35 Glorious Years, Understanding Interest Rate Securities, Business Doha, Uttar Pradesh: Modern Business Hub, Abu Dhabi and Dubai: Young and Rich and many others. He has a BA (Hons) in politics, philosophy and economics from Christ Church, Oxford University.

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      Book preview

      Licking A Tramp - Paul McNamara

      Licking a Tramp:

      The Diary of a Bank Marketing Executive

      By P. Q. McNamara

      Copyright © 2014 by P. Q. McNamara

      Smashwords Edition

      All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law.

      Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty: While the publisher and author have used their best efforts in preparing this book, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this book and specifically disclaim any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales representatives or written sales materials. Neither the publisher nor the author shall be liable for any damages arising herefrom.

      Published by

      Eaglemont Books

      www.eaglemontbooks.com

      tmp_59f5aa414c18f15f6353773c0bb96feb_vOHiKZ_html_m2b362980.jpg

      The Eaglemont Books publishes books written specifically for finance and investment professionals as well as more general works for a broader audience. For a list of available titles, visit our website.

      Cover image: © Pamula MacRan

      A Word in Your Ear from Phteven

      My name is Phteven. That’s Steven spelled with a ‘ph’.

      When I first told my mother than I had a job she seemed unimpressed. That’s because she thought I was talking about my old job, rather than a new job. My new job is as marketing manager for an Islamic bank. Quite a step up from manning the customer complaints desk of the local shopping centre, I know, but I had always dared to dream.

      When I say manning the customer complaints desk of the local shopping centre I really mean helping out when the manager was on lunch breaks and toilet breaks. Not that he had lunch in the toilet. Or at least not often.

      I did find a full pizza box in the toilet once, piping hot too, but I have no reason to believe that it was left there by my boss. He is not really a pizza kind of guy. More of a falafel or noodle type. The pizza was delicious, by the way, if a little doughy.

      True, my old job gave me many useful insights into how customers behave when things don’t go right. True, many of the customers were quite unhinged and true, many of them resorted either to verbal abuse or threats of physical harm to my body when their complaints were not sorted instantly.

      But I pressed the point with my mother and suddenly she understood what I was driving at and seemed impressed. She is not an easy woman to impress, my mother. If you were to imagine a swarthy and quite muscular version of Bob Geldof you would have a sense of what she looks like but if you could imagine trying to impress a swarthy and quite muscular version of Bob Geldof driving at high speed in icy conditions, then you would have a sense of the size of the task I had ahead of me.

      Anyway, my mother suggested that I should keep a diary of my experiences on my new job since people would be interested to read it. I couldn’t see why. The thought of keeping a diary did not appeal at all. I would rather lick a tramp. And the thought of reading someone else’s work diary? I would rather let a tramp lick me all over. Why should anyone want to read my diary? It’s not like I can even write. I am not good with words unless they relate to food or cartoons. Although I am quite good at spelling, as you will discover as you read on.

      But how wrong I was. And how right my mother was.

      She is generally right about these things and always has been. Even way back when I was little and fell over a lot and before she became blowsy and started smelling of bleach. I think it was her hair that smelled of bleach rather than anything else. I don’t think she was drinking bleach at that stage. That would have been quite out of character for her. And quite dangerous, I imagine, not that I have researched the subject in any depth. More common sense than hard fact.

      But I digress. I had decided to apply for a new job because my old job was causing me health problems or at least mental health problems. After a day at work my brain felt like a piece of wet cake or a very, very wet doughnut. Wet cake or a very, very wet doughnut that was sliding off a shiny-topped table because the table was on a slant, perhaps because one of the legs was shorter than the others. Or perhaps because the floor itself was uneven? It doesn’t really matter for the purposes of this allusion, since the effect would be the same in either event. Needless to say, I had to get out of that work environment before the wet cake or very, very wet doughnut finally fell to the floor. Or into the cat’s water dish that was underneath the table. At the end of each day my thinking would be quite muddy and it was a bit of a struggle to focus on anything other than what was for dinner. Spending time with people who complain all day long will do that to a person.

      I simply had to quit the old job, since it was turning me into a bad person, a real meanie. I come from a long line of quitters so it was not a big challenge for me to quit but I just couldn’t take the routine anymore. I’m not superhuman. I’m not the Green Lantern. I’m not Wonder Woman.

      Anyway, I saw the job advertised for a marketing executive at an Islamic bank and I thought: why not give it a go? I mean, how hard can it be? It had to be easier than what I was doing and I didn’t want to end up like some jaded old soak of a detective inspector by the time I had reached my mid-twenties. I realised that to fulfil my dreams I would have to reach for the stars because the only thing holding me back from becoming everything I ever wanted to be or dreamed of being or even considered wanting or dreaming of being was me. If that makes any kind of sense at all. I had often fancied the idea of working in a bank since the offices seem to have plenty of light and they were generally clean and that was important to me since I have a love of light. The more light the better. Except at night of course when I find it tough to get to sleep if there is too much light. Like the opposite of a bat or an owl, I suppose, although I haven’t given it a very great deal of thought at least until now.

      I thought that working in the marketing department of an Islamic bank would give me the chance to use my spelling skills, which are pretty hot and the fact that banks close at 3pm is good too since it meant that I would still be home in time to watch Danger Mouse, which is on at 3.30pm every day. I am very fond of Danger Mouse and view him as something of an icon. I would like to be more like him if I could, although clearly I would not want to have to lose an eye the way he did in order to be able to be more like him.

      Even with his missing eye, I like to think that Danger Mouse could handle himself pretty well if it came to a serious fight with someone like the Green Lantern. Or Wonder Woman. I am pretty sure that he could ‘take them both out’. Individually, that is. I am less sure that he could beat them if they teamed up in some kind of Super Alliance, which they might form if they thought that Danger Mouse was a threat to the stable order of things in the universe, world peace, the future of mankind, that type of thing.

      Naturally I would hope that it didn’t come to that and that they could all of them work something out, something amicable before it got down to using Super Powers and such. I always thought that Wonder Woman’s Lasso of Truth was a bit rubbish, I have to say and I don’t think that Danger Mouse would have much cause to fear anything on that front unless there was a Dark Secret behind his missing eye? As for Green Lantern’s magic ring, well, that’s a different ball game although from memory it doesn’t work on objects made of wood, for what that’s worth.

      Anyway, I digress. It was only when I got the job that I found out that I wouldn’t be allowed home until 5pm at the earliest and that was a bit of a blow. And before you say that I could set my VCR and tape Danger Mouse then I have to point out:

      I don’t have a VCR

      I don’t know how to operate a VCR

      In fact they haven’t made VCRs for almost 10 years and it has all been replaced by digital technologies and I don’t understand that stuff either

      That really misses the point that I think leaving work at 3pm would be much more fun than being a slave to capitalism and working until 5pm shackled to a desk

      For the sake of clarity, I should point out that I never at any point expected to be shackled in any literal sense to a desk when working at the bank.

      The pages of the diary that follow were written with a private audience of one in mind. I never for one moment thought that they would become the freak hit book of the year that resonated with young and old, rich and poor, black and blue, women and men alike. I didn’t predict that people would start Facebook pages about my diary or that it would become the subject of water cooler chatter as well as the gossip behind the school bike sheds.

      I also had no idea that publishing these pages would bring me untold riches or that I would be approached by a series of TV and movie producers wanting to turn the narrative variously into a television series and a blockbuster movie. I am humbled by all of this although I still turn up to work every day and go through the motions of doing my job, not letting fame and fortune get in the way of the way I live.

      How do I live? I am living the dream. Yes, the fan tee-shirts are embarrassing, as are the coffee mugs with my picture on them. But people these days need a hero, someone they can admire and look up to as well as envy and that is simply the burden I have to carry with me every day as I strap on my fluoro bicycle clips and pedal steadily over the sandy expanse of terrain between where I live and the bank HQ down on the Corniche a mere 24 kilometres away.

      Think of me as a latter day James Bond. Or Danger Mouse. Just don’t think of me as Wonder Woman. That would be a fate worse than a fate worse than death.

      Thanks for reading.

      Phteven

      (It’s Steven spelled with a ‘ph’)

      The Diary of a Bank Marketing Executive

      Week 1 - The Baffling Car Park Case

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