If it's Tuesday, it must be Slough: the lows and further lows of sales conferences

Days away from the coalface, snug in an all-expenses-paid hotel. It sounds like the ideal break from work. But too many of us have been caught out by the annual sales conference before and won’t be getting too excited.

Of course you do hear of colleagues whisked off to Teneriffe for a long weekend of sun, sea and a little light presentation over the Sangria. But for most of us the destinations are closer to home: usually a hotel in a place where you’d never dream of staying, with traffic islands next to motorways a firm favourite. Yes, Grays Thurrock, Slough and Croydon are all hot spots in the sales conference pantheon.

Essential hotel ingredients include a ‘Conference Special’ package (share a room with an emo fan from Distribution and bring your own UHT milk) with food that was freeze-dried in Taiwan in the Nineties. And this is probably the high point. Although the hotel claims to have extensive bar facilities, a sport complex and Jacuzzi, these are not for the likes of you.

You barely have time to check out how many miniature executive hair gels you can remove from your room, when the punishing schedule whisks you away to your first meeting. Your unconscious can’t understand why you are drawing people with bubble perms on a hotel blotter when you should be flat out in the sauna. Most people in the NormanTebbit Conference Room are either tense (they’ve got to do something) or asleep (they haven’t). Considerately, the hotel management provides Mint Imperials, which enable at least one person (probably you) to have a serious choking fit and wake up the somnolent.

The lights go down and there’s an audible yawn as sales figures appear and company forecasts appear on screen. Your MD then proceeds with the most ecstatic speech you are likely to hear this side of the Mount of Olives. Is this really the company you work for or is there some mistake?The VIPs are now escorted out - on one of any importance stays at a sales conference in Grays Thurrock longer than they can help it - the lights come on and the MD takes his jacket off. Then it begins. Employees are berated for their failings as if personally responsible for the state of the British economy. Reps are informed that if sales don’t improve they’ll be back in Toyotas.

Once this ritual is over a feeling of nausea overtakes you. It isn’t just the effect of having drunk 16 glasses of Perrier, but the thought that it’s your turn next. A sales conference isn’t worth its name if unsuitable introverted members of staff aren’t required to perform in front of everyone. Don’t cheer yourself up by thinking about dinner. In order to promote networking management will sit you between a sanitary engineer and someone who cleans the telephones and make sure there is no escape by banning alcohol.

But do expect exemplary politeness and restraint from colleagues as the evening proceeds. Everyone is so aware of the possible tacky implications of a sales conference on a traffic island in outer London that there must be no errant body language. People walk along the hotel’s corridors as if welded to the walls. Keys are fumbled with at record speed. No one says good night lest they be accused of sexual harassment. All you have to look forward to is a choice between Emmanuelle 38 or Lassie Comes Home on the TV.

At least this close to the M25 no one can hear you scream.

Training Daze

Recent research has turned up the surprising fact that during the working week, one in 20 people may be found in a room with a person called Geoff or Pam, several hundred Magic Markers and an over-heated lap top. Love them or leave them (and many of us would) you can't ignore corporate training courses.

Of course there are probably excellent courses, but few of us seem to get them. What we do get is either a size-disadvantaged room in an 'executive' hotel or a training centre's Portakabin (usually for public sector employees as this makes them feel at home). And there is little point hanging around the hotel foyer examining displays of model vintage cars or John Grisham novels. You can't escape your fate. Geoff and Pam are waiting.

The first rule of training courses is that no-one should be called by their full name. If the course leaders lost their annoying suffixes years ago, why shouldn't you? But there is hardly time for a friendly 'hi!' from our team before the dreaded name badges are produced. Complete strangers are suddenly metamorphosed into chummy sounding Daves, Jans, Mikes and Sues.

Not that this is sufficient. You might be a Dave but what do the rest of the group really know about Dave's psyche? A warm-up exercise is therefore de-riguer. One current favourite is to ask members which vegetable or fruit they would most like to be identified with - and why. Soon unknown junior executives are nervously introducing themselves as Cox's Orange Pippins and beetroots. What years of British rectitude have kept at bay is destroyed in seconds as Cath from Chelmsford reveals she has definite banana tendencies.

All barriers safely down, people sit in a post-embarrassment situation wondering if anything worse can happen. It can and does.

Once Geoff or Pam have explained how to break out of your huddled group at the other side of the room, you are finally ready for business. Your trainer (who may prefer to call themselves a facilitator so that they can't be blamed for what is to happen) will spend some time 'framesetting' ie explaining what comes next. It little matters that you have already been sent course details. Given your new mental age, how can you possibly be expected to remember?And if at this stage you are not also over-provided with felt-tips, sugar paper, Pritt Sticks and other nursery stationery, complain loudly.

Already, of course, some jargon has been introduced and more will follow. Your company or organisation has, after all, paid a considerable sum for you to be present here today. Participants and paymasters may as well feel they are getting something our of it, even if you're not. Most important, however, is that you feel intimidated. Experienced course-goers know to fall asleep during 'framesetting'. Newcomers are in a state of high anexiety, lest they are asked to reveal anything further about their real Desiree potato identity. Old timers know the day has been carefully arranged so that no-one can escape the brain-storming session to come.

Whether you're doing assertiveness training, 'learning to say no in middle management', or finding out how to prioritise tasks, it'll be hard to avoid a brainstorming session. Time stands still as you're encouraged to indulge in an endless stream-of-consciousness. Who would have thought 20 adults could spend six hours on 'Making the Most of Meeting Situations' - and then decide the most important thing is to communicate? The uninitiated might feel flattered initially at the Einsteinian connotations of the exercise but soon come to realise the profound truth of the term 'a pool of ignorance'. That is your brain, that is, up there on the screen. The over-enthusiastic ask if they can possibly keep their sugar paper (the use of two or more Magic Markers is always a dead giveaway). Other people's 'ideas' are collected up for future recycling.

The truly unlucky will be shanghaied into role playing games involving lying on the floor or revealing their dreams. If you find everybody apart from you is wearing shoes accept that you will soon have to stand on a chair and pretend you are a tree.

Recently I took part in a day-long role play that involved groups 'creating their own built environments' using, yes, sugar paper and cardboard and acting out 'silent tableaux' inside them. It was noticeable how we were split down the middle: those of us who didn't mind pretending we were four years old as long as we could sit in our 'houses' and read the Guardian, and those who did a runner. Quite what the point of the exercise was nobody knew but then, as somebody in my group said, at least it kept the facilitator out of the community a bit longer.

Surprisingly it's quite rare for course members to admit publicly to dissatisfaction. One must make do with strained expressions, the merest flicker of dissent. We assume instead that our intransigence is a personal failing. And who wants to admit to being anti-social, incapable of working in groups and lacking in team spirit? For Geoff and Pam the future looks rosy, as more of us have multiple careers and there are even more training courses. There's not a lot we can do about it. Apart from brainstorming our feelings about it on sugar paper.

Because You're Worth It

When did you last read a novel that properly described your real working world? Of course you could say when did you last want to read a novel about the fear, loathing and black comedy of the weekly grind. But when most of us spend too much of our waking (and non-waking) life at the corporate coalface, it’s odd that so few novels ever truly hit the spot.

Of course by ‘real working world’ I think we mean the kind of jobs most of us have that we’d prefer not to talk about outside our cubicle. If you’ve ever sat next to a knowledge manager at a dinner party you’ll know the problem. It’s interesting that when novelists deign to dip their toes into our murky world they always seem to make a bee-line for the glam or semi-glam occupation. Thus we had Bridget Jones as a TV researcher, a recent Marion Keyes heroine was a wedding organiser, while Jenny Turner’s The Brain Storm was set in a broadsheet newspaper office and Joshua Ferris’s Then We Came to the End takes place in an ad agency.

It’s interesting that the first two characters are semi-peripatetic (ie don’t have to sit with dribbling colleagues in too many evening meetings) while the others probably have more autonomy than the rest of us. It has to be said that Turner and Ferris would claim to be offering a more serious examination of workplace culture. But while The Brain Storm certainly has its iconic office moments reading Then We Came to the End is quite like being stuck in an office on an endless Tuesday afternoon and thinking for this you had essay crises at university.

Perhaps The Office TV series has just raised the bar so high that no one can possibly come near it. Or perhaps the workplace is just too depressing or complex for most contemporary writers to deal with. It’s also probably the case that many writers just don’t have that kind of ‘hey, I’m going to be spending forty years of my life wondering what a quality circle is in a size-restricted work space surrounded by people who watch Bargain Hunt’ experience of most of us.

It’s hardly surprising then how often writers get things wrong when they dip their toes into our naff world. Tim Lott, for example, referred to ‘typing pools’ in a recent book and we all know these went out with Lucky Strikes. Rachel Cusk’s drippy temp in The Temporary wouldn’t have lasted a minute in a real office. Editors, who’ve probably gone straight from college into the media and publishing, often don’t get it either. An editor at Metro just couldn’t believe such a thing as a learning log existed. As someone who had to fill one in for an entire year to satisfy an obsessive line manager I had to assure her they unfortunately did.

The Great American Novel. The Richard and Judy Novel. Sorry, some of us are still waiting for the Great Have You Stolen My Stapler Novel.