Transcript

Interviewer:

I’d like to turn to professional culture and get your insights, Nigel, into working as a broker in the City, and ask you the extent to which you were subsumed into a particular culture when you were working there?

Nigel White: 

Ah ha … yeah, it was a culture shock and there was a feeling that if you didn’t adapt and adjust to this culture you weren’t gonna succeed, and one of, one aspect of it, I don’t know how much I can repeat on this interview because it includes lots of words beginning with ‘F’ and ending in ‘K’, and that was the standard kind of communication in the office, and if you, if you didn’t use that kind of language you were clearly not a player. So, if you asked politely for a foreign exchange quote, people would laugh and you would become very quickly a sort of joke, you know. Um, again, it’s very difficult to give examples because I don’t want to fill the interview with lots of bad language, and yet moving, let’s say, to pharmaceutical industry where a word beginning with ‘S’ and ending in ‘T’ would still be considered risqué. Um, quite clearly very different things and I think you need, we need to be aware that different professions, if you work in a website company the language changes, the tone changes, the speed changes.