Eye-gouging class at 13:00 sharp, then at 15:30 we’ll all take a quick break so everyone can go downstairs and grab some coffee

Rather grim story in today’s FT. The setting is Slough, best-known as the backdrop for the BBC’s The Office:

Five women and 70 men clad in jeans and T-shirts are throwing each other on to the floor of a stark white room whose windows look out on to corrugated roofs and electricity pylons. After 10 minutes, Tim Larkin, a broad-shouldered man dressed entirely in black and with a Celtic tattoo on one arm, steps to the front, stops the proceedings and demands the room’s attention so he can demonstrate the next move: how to gouge a man’s eye out.

Mr. Larkin is a former “military intelligence instructor” who’s taught Navy Seals. Now he gives seminars in incapacitating violent attackers to business people who travel a lot for work and are nervous about safety. “I have a martial arts background but felt it wasn’t going to help me in violent situations. I wanted to make sure I could protect myself,” seminar participant Krista Waddell explains. She lives in Las Vegas but travels regularly to London and Australia. A lot of companies focus on kidnappings or carjackings, chimed in Tareq Sholi. “No one prepares you for what to do if someone gets into your hotel room late at night.”

Other seminar attendees appreciated how combat training, because it helped them, per the FT reporter, “assess whether situations could result in violence,” had given them skills they could also use in bars, or around the office. Says Andreas, a tall South African real estate developer:

“In meetings, if someone is overly aggressive I don’t feel intimidated. My reaction to someone slamming their hand on a meeting-room table would be patience rather than confrontation. If someone behaved like that to me now I’d probably re-schedule the meeting for another time.”

Interesting how knowing that one COULD, technically, knock the lights out of someone seems to slacken the desire to actually do so. Then again I wonder if meeting attendance wouldn’t go up, and people use their time more wisely, if they thought a slugfest might erupt any minute.

The Unlearning

Lucy Kellaway has an amusing riff on the difference between school and work in today’s Financial Times. From the blandly philosophical:

First, it teaches you that there is a fairly straightforward relationship between effort and result. In exams, if you work very, very hard in the evenings you are going to do an awful lot better than if you spend your evenings in the pub. In most office life, this is not true. The relationship between effort and reward is much more complicated. Read the rest of this entry »