Free What You See Is What You Get: My Autobiography by Alan Sugar Page A

the IBM and ICL episodes, but intent on finding a job, I started to look in the vacancies columns of the national newspapers. I spotted an advert from the Ministry of Education and Science who required applicants with GCE passes to join their statistics division. Naively, the word 'science' attracted me. I had visions of being involved in scientific experiments - missiles, rockets and the like.
    I went to the Ministry's Curzon Street building and was interviewed by a very high-ranking civil servant, Miss Mayer, HEO (Higher Executive Officer), a middle-aged lady with silver hair and a very posh accent. I'll never forget that interview because while we were talking she was fiddling around with a large pearl necklace. It broke, and suddenly all the pearls fell to the floor. She was terribly embarrassed, as was I. We scrambled around picking up pearls all over the place.
    During the interview I'd thrown in a few buzzwords like 'digits' and 'data, which made me look like I knew what I was talking about, and I got the job. And because I had six GCE passes, I was given the level of CO (Clerical Officer) - one up on the pecking order from the ordinary plebs in the department.
    The job paid PS32 per month - PS8 a week in East End terms - and they wanted to pay it directly into my bank account. We'd never had bank accounts in my family, but my sister Shirley explained to me what I needed to do. So, shortly after joining the Ministry, I walked out of Curzon Street into Berkeley Square and looked for a bank. There was one on the right-hand side - Lloyds. In I walked, armed with a letter confirming my employment at the Ministry, and asked to open a bank account. I've been with Lloyds ever since that day in 1963.
    Remember the famous advert with Maureen Lipman as a Jewish grandmother on the phone to her grandson, telling him how clever he was with his 'ology'? Well, having reported to my mother and father that I was now working at the Ministry of Education and Science as a clerical officer, I was hailed as the first person in the family to have what was deemed a professional job. 'My son, the clerical officer in the Ministry.'
    If they only knew!

3
The Man at The Ministry
    And Leaving To Be 'A Bloody Salesman'
    1963-6
    Even though I was only sixteen, I wasn't at all nervous turning up on the first day. I was all suited and booted and raring to go. The Curzon Street office was in the heart of Mayfair. It was a very large and ugly block of grey concrete - exactly what you'd expect a government building to look like. I entered the building, stepped into the lift and the operator greeted me with 'Good morning, sir,' and took me up to my floor. I reported to an EO (Executive Officer), a woman in her thirties who showed me to my desk in a large open-plan office while the other people glanced up for a moment to suss out the new boy.
    In a weak moment, I reported the lift operator calling me 'sir' to my family one Friday night. They were so proud. 'Sir, they call him! Can you believe that?'
    Anyway, this job turned out to be double brain damage. On the first day, a pile of papers was plonked in front of me and I was informed by my EO that I was working on something called the Plowden Report on Junior Education.
    In case you care, Lord Plowden had promised to come up with a report on primary school education and the pile of papers was the result of manual surveys on individual pupils across a whole section of the country. My job was to go through each form and code the answers to enable the data to be entered into an IBM punch-card computer system. This would result in a print-out telling you how many little Johnnies drank their quarter-pints of milk every day at school. If that wasn't bad enough, many of the people surrounding me were a breed of robot, the likes of which I'd never come across before. To say they were boring would be too kind. The highlight of their day came during the tea break, when they'd debate the virtues of using Marvel