After the City: Office politics is child's play

Now that I am cheerfully removed from the 15-hour days and various hassles that go with being a stockbroker and manager, I sometimes find that my new life has grown immeasurably more complicated.

Not least when I am confronted with the utterly indecipherable world of playground politics.

My first major stumble came at the end of last term when my husband told me he had been accosted by an enthusiastic mother, raising funds for number two child's class teacher.

He mentioned this only in the context that his pockets were empty and that he'd made a lucky escape.

As it happens, we were both of the view that this particular teacher had been a full blown disaster and hubby remarked to me what a good job it was that she was leaving the school (this being just his assumption, as it turned out).

I agreed and thought little more about it, my thoughts being more on a pending decamp to France, to try the place out before taking the plunge of moving there.

A week or so later, I was putting in one of my first ever appearances at a school concert (a painful but necessary experience that always takes place during the working day and whose invitation to attend, which never failed to make my blood boil in its assumption that all mothers didn't work, would always bear an apology to working fathers for the time of day.)

Before I even had a chance to grab a miniature seat on which uncomfortably to endure the caterwauling, I too was buttonholed by the very same mother, shaking her collection tin.

Still living mentally in an environment where performance is rewarded and lack thereof is not, I politely declined. When pressed, I simply told the enthusiast that I thought the teacher in question was useless and I was delighted she was leaving. Aghast looks from all directions!

Suddenly I was conscious of having committed an error so heinous, I might never live it down. Worse was to follow: she wasn't leaving at all, simply getting married, and would be around to haunt my every step as long as we remained at the school.

Life in the City was so much easier. If you had a useless employee, you paid them no bonus and waited for them to leave.

One seldom needed recourse to the tedious step-by-step removal process decreed by employment law. I had one such person working for me in my last job. Had we not all been made redundant last year in collective harmony, I would shortly have had to take steps to engineer his departure, the lack of bonus not apparently having done the trick.

I shall not share with you his real name but sadly, and unkindly, he was known to all but himself on my (mixed sex) team as Numbnuts.

Numbnuts was really quite extraordinarily inept. Not just in terms of his ability to carry out his duties, which was marginal, but also in terms of his social skills which were so non-existent that, on our frequent team nights out, they made Basil Fawlty look positively charming.

He is the only person I have ever employed (and yes, hands up, I did hire him!) who so upset other members of my team that a deputation came to me requesting a private meeting, in which I was harangued for not having sacked him.

Actually, I had a very good reason for not sacking poor Numbnuts. At the time, my bank had imposed a headcount freeze that was to be adhered to rigidly, without exception.

Any inadvertent or otherwise slippage in a team's headcount would result in an almost instant contraction of the allocated count, to prevent new hires.

A rival firm had just made our equivalent team redundant and there was one particular salesman I was very keen to hire, both because I knew him well and because I knew also that he did fantastic business with a range of clients whom we had failed to breach.

We were in negotiations - him from a position of relative weakness through being jobless, but unaware of how little ability I actually had to hire him.

My plan was that as soon as I had a pretty good idea that he would take the plunge, I would get Numbnuts out and the target in before the headcount people noticed either that I had lost a head or that I was replacing a clerk with a salesman.

All best plans etc....we all got binned within three weeks of the sack-Numbnuts deputation and both he and I joined my target, who subsequently engineered a very nice position for himself, on the streets.

I have heard occasionally, when the most Machiavellian thing on my mind is how to avoid giving fivers to useless teachers, that Numbnuts' CV continues to do the rounds. I have not been asked to supply a reference.

As for playground politics, I don't think I've got it together yet. Not long ago a fellow Mum who happened to have been a colleague some 18 years ago but has been at the playground game for far longer than me, bounced up to me and suggested that I host the next Mums' coffee morning.

My response is probably unprintable but I did remember, mid-flight, to turn towards her receding form and yell back that I'd love to come to hers if she wanted to ask me.

candiapeterson@hotmail.com