‘Team Leader’ had asked us to get into the office a bit earlier yesterday for retraining. We’ve been working on behalf of a number of children’s charities but now we were to work for a cancer research charity. “It’s easier”, began one of the hard-bitten veteren fund-raisers, “… the punters always know somebody who’s had cancer and that means they’re more likely to donate”, he continued in a mildy Schindler-esque sort of way.

It’s funny how within a few short weeks in the job I’d got to the stage where I didn’t think a statement like that was at all callous, afterall, the ends justify the means here dont they? .. Don’t they!? I would approach each new door with the intention of making a ‘good pitch’, reading the body language and, assuming they hadn’t slammed the door, meeting objections with a number of well honed responses and ‘closing the deal’. But it was hardly a ‘hard-sell’ and no one was conning anybody so I was settling into the job without any huge crisis of conscience.

So it came as a bit of shocker at this ‘retraining’ to find that we’d all been sacked!

Various explanations were given, something to do with the married couple who ran the company going through a divorce and the structure of the company changing … blah … blah … blah. But it sounded like bullshit, I mean there are ways to tell your staff that they’ve lost their jobs and inviting them to a bogus training session isn’t the best.

To cap it all we were told that another fundraising company had been formed by one of the divorcing pair which would be taking over the operations and that we could all work for it … but only after going through a job interview … bloody cheek and not bloody likely!

Well, at least I won my bet — I said I wouldn’t last more than three weeks.