Father P Clip 

In the unpredictable world of office supplies, Father P reflects on the importance of conferences and camaraderie 

Read the full article below or on page 34 in our March magazine

This week I had a visit from the accountant and the bank on the same day, and it was the perfect storm. Panic set in days before, even though the business was perfectly healthy, and it felt as if they would both be followed by a team of undertakers and a brass band playing the death march. 

Perhaps they had heard on the grapevine that we were laughing too much and decided to launch a pincer movement to calm everyone down to make sure we were miserable again – the way office suppliers are supposed to be. You don’t spend the number of years we have in the office supplies industry without being miserable quite a lot. 

Of course, it has its ups and downs. Today we were miserable about a big customer ordering too many boxes of paper where we made 15p per box, but tomorrow we could be celebrating an order where the goods get to a customer in one delivery on the right day! You just never know what’s round the corner in the crazy world of office supplies, and that’s what makes it so exciting.

Maybe that’s why, whenever there’s an office supplies conference, there is so much laughter and merriment. All of a sudden we have strength in numbers, and a room full of people like ourselves, so we no longer feel like the poor relation in the business meeting, selling paperclips whilst everyone else is involved in high stakes finance, property and software. It’s a room full of people who suddenly don’t have a care in the world, where you might find yourself dancing with the competitor who, only last week, stole one of our biggest customers, and hugging the salesman from the big corporate who almost put us out of business twice last year.

It is also a place to congratulate the suppliers who have let us down so much recently because, here, we are all in it together – all for one, and one for all, as we drink and dance ourselves into oblivion. 

The suppliers are our new mates. They make promises we know they can’t keep, but we are more than willing to believe so that we can stay in the mood we haven’t been in since the last conference – or the last drink.