An annecdote ....

I'd finally come through the sausage-machine and I was on a maybee three-year contract at Loughborough and they let me interview ...

So I was interviewing Mike Anderson.

Mike was a total fucking dead-head. He was a plumber, left school at fifteen, and was a con-man. We spent the interview batting around Dostoevesky.

Well ... par for the course.

Then, next day, we started horse-trading. I wasn't paying much attention, but in the backgound there was this running joke, "Who'd give HIM an offer?"

Amazingly enough, and this really does take +some+ doing, Mike had managed to insult absolutely bloody EVERYONE.

So after the laughter died down, they said: "Well, Robin you're first choice for an offer."

Ho, hum ... "Michael Anderson".

Well, to cut a story (and I'd been trained in Glasgow Student Politics) I got Mike a place at Loughborough.

Paid at the gate on that, and given i was on the bloody edge of tenture, the last thing i wanted to do was stir waves.

So (the trade-off was)"If you want him here, you teach him."

So I got lumbered with Mike.

First bloody thing he said to me was, "Robin, that was the most piss-awful lecture I've ever heard."

Well ...

It wouldn't have been that difficult to cut Mike down to size.

Thing was, he really didn't know how fucking offensive he could be.

Easy would be to chop him down.

I bloody TRAINED Mike, so when he was offensive, he was offensive deliberate, rather than accidental

[Ho boy, Mike on a bad day ...]

There were a lot of things, but Mike exited with a good 2:1 (surprise, surprise).

The one thing they'd never let me do was interview Head Girls of a Public School.

Well, I suppose this made sense, given that by the time I had mild tenure ...

The only applicants I liked were the ones who had this killer-reference: "This student is a Disruptive Influence." I had this odd assumption that any student who could manage to piss off their teachers enough ...

The only reason I got away with this was that the students, either mad public school or illiterate, who I picked, Did Well.

Wish I could work out how I did it ...

But there was this thing -- mostly, I couldn't give a flying fuck at the moon where they were coming from, all I cared about was where they were going to.

NOT how to get ahead in acedeme.

Robin