James Proclaims!

Recently I decided to up my style game by wearing a suit jacket to work. I generally manage a shirt and tie most days, occasionally supplemented by a v-neck jumper on colder days. I always meet the requirements of the dress-code policy, but my appearance is nonetheless a little scruffier than the ideals stated in that document. The suit jacket is generally held in reserve for job interviews and other occasions when making a good impression seems like a wise move. But from time-to-time I have been known to don the jacket for no other reason than I feel like looking a bit smarter. I find it good for my self-esteem to remind myself that I can, if I choose to, scrub up quite well. Such occasions often draw comments from my colleagues, usually in the form of back-handed compliments. There is generally an acknowledgement from them that I do look quite good in a suit, but an air of suspicion as to why I am wearing the jacket when I normally content myself with a scruffier, less polished, appearance.

So I wasn’t surprised to draw the odd comment or two on this latest foray into sartorial elegance. But I was surprised at how many of my colleagues addressed me as ‘Nick’.

Because my name is not Nick. It is James, as indicated by the title of my blog. Ok, before one or both of my regular readers contradict me in the comments section, James is actually my middle name, but it is the name that everyone calls me. And my first name is not Nick. I have never been known as Nick.

Except on this day, when it seemed like everyone was calling me Nick.

The first time I heard the comment, I wasn’t all that surprised. I work in a school and like many schools in the UK, mine is part of a multi-academy trust (often referred to as a MAT). And like all MATs, ours has a CEO. And his name is Nick.

So I naturally assumed that the first comment was a weak attempt at suggesting that my choice of attire was me having delusions of grandeur and attempting to dress like our, admittedly very dapper, CEO. The second time I was referred to as ‘Nick’, I was slightly thrown, because it wasn’t really a good enough joke for two people to have thought of it. Even in a suit jacket I look nothing like our CEO, and it’s not like I’ve never worn a suit to work before. The third time I was referred to as ‘Nick’ I realised something else was going on.

And indeed it was. For it just so happened that on the day I decided to wear a suit jacket to work, there was an article about me in the local paper. And the local paper had managed to get my name wrong. The local paper had decided to call me ‘Nick’.

To explain why I was featured in the local paper, we have to go back in time a few months. To July in fact, when, a few days into the summer holidays, a time when I was looking forward to largely forgetting about work for the best part of six weeks (or at least the interactions with colleagues and students – I don’t quite get away from the paperwork sadly), my phone started buzzing with messages from colleagues congratulating me on my nomination for the ‘School of the Year’. award. This was a strange accolade, because although I do work in a school, I am not, in and of myself, a school. Or even someone who identifies as a school. So I couldn’t possibly have been nominated for a ‘School of the Year’ award.

Indeed, I had not.

What had happened was that the school I work in had been nominated for the aforementioned award, as part of a local initiative that celebrates lots of achievements of people and institutions that are based in and around the town my school is in. But the reason my school had been nominated was because some very nice parents of students that I work with were very enthusiastic about my ability to do my job. Now I don’t think I’m especially bad at my job. I’d even get on board with the notion that I’m quite good at it. But it’s quite hard to take seriously the idea that I’m the single most important reason that my school might be considered to be better than other local schools. So it was all quite surreal. Particularly the fact that my image appeared to be ‘trending’ on local social media accounts. No-one had asked my permission to use my image incidentally. I suppose the fact that nice things were being written about me made the local press feel that it was ok to just take my picture from the school website without checking how I felt about it. Which I’m not sure is ok really, although I wasn’t all that bothered. I resigned myself to my five minutes of local notoriety with as much grace as I could manage. It was a weird couple of days but it blew over and I pretty much forgot about it.

So, in fact, did everyone else. When I returned to work in September, most of the talk was about who had and who hadn’t managed to secure tickets to see Oasis. A couple of people mentioned the nomination to me, in a semi-mocking way, referring to me as the ‘golden boy’ etc, but it was really not a major talking point.

And then I got an email saying that the school had not just been nominated, we had in fact been shortlisted. As a result we were invited to the upcoming awards ceremony. This is when I got a bit stressed. Because it was all well and good being in the local media for a few minutes and having people say nice things about me, but now there was a chance we might win the award. Which also meant that there was a chance we’d go to the ceremony expecting to win and then ‘not win’. Which would be a bit of a let-down. And I’m nothing if not ‘glass half-empty’. The ceremony wasn’t until the end of October, so I had to endure six weeks of worrying about whether any of this actually meant anything or whether it was going to be the ultimate in anticlimaxes.

At one point the organisers of the awards came out to film me and my colleagues, which seemed like a fairly good portent, but no-one was giving anything away. The invitation to the awards ceremony was for two people. I wouldn’t normally be senior enough to be one of the invitees, but my boss (my boss being the head teacher, rather than Nick the CEO) realised it would be a bit weird to not take me, given that mine had, to date, been the face of it all.

I don’t ‘not get on’ with my boss, but no-one would describe us as friends. We generally tolerate each other pretty well, but I think he has always viewed me as being someone who is quite good at something that he has no particular interest in. He knows that someone has to do my job and it might as well be me, but that’s as far as his curiosity goes. I generally quite like his indifference because I prefer to work autonomously and I’m generally allowed to do that. In spite of this mutual tolerance we would never knowingly seek out each other’s company, and so it was with some trepidation that I attended the ceremony, with a five hour stint of making pleasantries ahead of me, and my continuing uncertainty about whether we would win and by extension whether or not any of this was actually worth it.

The ceremony may have been a local affair, but it was no less ostentatious for that. There was a three-course meal, there were gift bags and there were celebrities (mostly local but at least one person of national fame was present). And there was alcohol. Quite a lot of alcohol. Some of it in the form of free wine on the tables, but my boss and I drank beer from the bar, which he mainly paid for (I did buy him one back at the end, but his salary is quite a lot higher than mine, so I felt no guilt in accepting his generosity). Beer definitely eased the tension. And the meal was really very good.

My worries about whether or not we had won were over more or less as soon as we sat down. Each award (and there were a lot of awards alongside ‘School of the Year’ ) had its own corporate sponsor. And we were sat on the same table as the representatives of the sponsor of our potential award. And we were the only people at the table who worked in a school, so it seemed likely that we probably had won. I wasn’t quite taking it for granted but it seemed a cruel set-up if the award was to go to a different educational establishment.

Some of the local celebrities circled the tables and spoke to us, including one that I had met some twelve years previously at a different event. He actually pretended to remember me, when I told him, which I thought was quite a nice touch.

I checked the programme and ‘School of the Year’ was due to be the third award announced, which meant we weren’t in for too long a wait. I can’t remember what the first two awards were, but then our moment came. The video of the winning school was played and it was the familiar face of my line-manager that loomed large on the screen. Then I appeared, looking significantly less composed than I thought I had been when I was filmed. It wasn’t a particularly flattering clip of me, but it mattered not. We had won. We had actually bloody won. And suddenly all my cynicism disappeared. This suddenly seemed like quite a big deal. My boss was ecstatic. We practically danced to the stage where we accepted a quite impressive looking gong and had our picture taken.

We were then ushered away to speak to the press. It was all very heady stuff. More beer was consumed. I started to enjoy myself. My boss was very good company. I couldn’t honestly tell you what any of the subsequent awards were for, but we cheered them all. And then it was over. My boss and I left together, both eschewing the invitation from our sponsors to the, apparently traditional, after party, on the basis that, despite having consumed a fair few beers, we were clearly a lot more sober than everyone else and going anywhere with these people was unlikely to end well.

We shared a taxi to the train station, where we embraced. We actually embraced. The word bromance was used. He hinted at, but in fairness, never actually promised, a pay rise and promotion. And then we went our separate ways, both feeling pretty good about life.

The following week was half-term so there was something of an interlude before I saw the rest of my colleagues. But a fuss was made this time around, and, in our Monday staff briefing, I had a genuine moment of triumph as I stood in front of my fellow educators and held aloft the trophy as if I were lifting the world cup.

It was a serendipitous coincidence that that same afternoon I was scheduled to lead a training session to all staff. Of course I made reference to the original nomination, which had suggested that I was a ‘real-life superhero’. I reassured everyone that I was not, under any circumstances, going to let this go to my head, and then took off my glasses and unzipped my jacket to reveal that I was wearing a t-shirt with the Superman logo on underneath. This did, fortunately, get a laugh. The rest of my training was a little more sensible, although I like to think I am one of the less dull people who leads training sessions in my workplace.

And then we all moved on. The trophy sits in pride of place in a cabinet in the school reception and people still joke with me from time to time. My boss is back to ignoring me for the most part, but his indifference seems slightly friendlier and he does occasionally refer to our ‘bromance’. There has been no offer of a promotion or a pay rise to date and I’m not holding my breath for one any time soon.

But if I had, in anyway, acquired an inflated sense of self-importance, then that bubble would have been burst the other day I wore my suit jacket to work and everyone called me Nick.