Gulf Air management

[Sandy Swan]

cuckoo

It has to be said that Dosh and Nuff hit the deck, writing. But they seem to be beating into the stiff headwinds of staff scepticism and suspicion without enough linguistic keel, making their progress appear sideways at best, even backwards. It's not just their handling of the major concerns like pay and retrenchment where they invariably seem to say one thing and mean another, or mean one thing and say another. It's their second-hand and unnatural command of the English language which seems to be causing some problems. Judging by the speed with which they ditched the familiar and established title of VPO for the peculiar and rather horologically quaint COO, they are obviously concerned with how things sound and look.

But take their first plunge into the dangerous shallows of written English, the preliminary fighting talk of how we all had now to 'Get Gulfair Well'. A pathetic fallacy, this one slogan referred to a diseased organism and overnight undid 55 years of costly advertising campaigns. Overnight, the punters (forget the ones who could still recall the glory days of the Tristars and their tinkling bars), had their lavish Hogan rebranded images of Plump and Golden Falcons and Sky Chefs Serving Daily Schedules to Distant Destinations whipped from their minds and replaced by terrifying, spectral shapes of The Sick Airline Of The Gulf, on life support, haemorrhaging fast. But is it not self evident? Punters want well-trained crew flying brand new aircraft, daily and hopefully empty so they get three seats each, to all parts of the world with tiptop service as cheap as possible. Here, on many of these counts, GF was an obliging beast. Shareholders, on the other hand, want returns, profits. Here, GF wasn't.( The sliced salami in this unlikely sandwich , of course, is us, the staff, but on this occasion, let's not go there, as Oprah would say).To satisfy both is an enormous challenge, achieved rarely and only by the best of investors and management. So, if you're going to use the (pathetic fallacy) analogy of an organism to describe the fortunes of a medium-sized airline, at least keep the two perspectives of the organism seperated. Sure, the shareholders have been compromised, to put it mildly, and they now have a carcasse on their hands. But in this case there was absolutely no need to terrify the public with images of a sick donkey. The transition to satisfy punters and shareholders needs to be done delicately, with pruning shears not a clockwork bulldozer. And with a measured, firm command of the English language.

Then we got 'Help is on the Way'. Presumably the message here was that, although the company is overburdened with 6000 employees, none of these 6000 had sufficient calibre or experience or professional qualifications to solve the company's problems. Whither Company Resource Management?

Following a few days of some technical delays we were advised that the management had gone into 'crisis mode'. Perhaps these new managers should recall that there are still many employees in Gulfair who once had to evacuate their families off the island, leave home with the windows taped up, drive to work at the airport past makeshift military field hospitals and sit at the holding point of RWY 30 waiting for the sirens of a scud attack to end. In other words GF has gone though many, very real crises where the expression 'crisis mode' would have been more applicable, although I cannot recall previous managements having felt the need to use it.

Recently we have been advised that they are going to give us ' a heads up ' on the compensation packages. This disingenuous neologism has yet to make it into my Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable but you can bet your bottom dinar that the writer has got his head down trying to conceal something.

We have also been given 'in addition the reinsurance of the PCE' to believe something they've told us. I know that they know that we are all worried about whether our indemnities are adequately protected in their new hands but the term they meant to use in the context was 'reassurance'.

Finally, of course, there is We Can Do It. Borrowed from a shoe manufacturer this simple and declarative sentence , with its pitiful indefinite object begging hopelessly for some semantic significance, achieves only in going the way of most things insubstantial in the company’s jetblast.