BACKCHAT

Conference was the best, bars none

Hob-nobbing with the great and the good of Airmic last week, Backchat particularly enjoyed a comment from Mark Butterworth about the copious amount of alcohol available to delegates. There were four bars, you see, each with a musical theme.

The Aon bar had both types of music – country and western, the Alexander Forbes bar had African beats, there was a disco at the Cunningham Lindsey bar and "naturally", as Butterworth put it, there was classical music at the Airmic bar.

Butterworth warned imbibers against excess and pointed out that the exhibition stand for Resolve was for the firm of loss adjusters and not for the hangover cure of the same name. Resolve boss and Chartered Institute of Loss Adjusters' luminary Paul May was delighted with the publicity.

Derry the life and plimsole of the party

Many managers would say they'd walk on water for their chairmen (to their faces anyway) but Clinicare's Derry Andrews decided to take it one step further last week.

While chatting to his boss on the phone abroad the Clinicare sponsored BT Challenge yacht, he gave a new meaning to the words “kicking your heels” when he ended up flicking his shoe into the middle of the Solent.

Amid much giggling, the frazzled skipper had to attempt to align the 60ft boat and fish out the shoe, helped only by the vague directions of the rest of her makeshift crew – Backchat and a host of healthcare intermediaries on the corporate freebie.

After nearly being run aground as the shoe floated into shallow waters, the crew finally gave up only to return to the port to find 11 other yachts waiting patiently to dock – having pre-arranged that the Clinicare yacht would be the first in the queue.
If anyone based in Southampton finds a deck shoe on the shore you know where to send it.

Prize leaves Slack in the driving seat

When Mike Slack, erstwhile head honcho at the AIIB, is not running his trade association, he has a day job running his motor schemes intermediary, Roadrunner. So it comes as little surprise that he should pick up the editor in his chauffer-driven car and drive him to lunch, even if lunch was only a few hundred yards away.

But Backchat understands there will be no slacking for the Roadrunner boss soon. The company has a regular staff prize draw and the winner gets a chauffer-driven night out on the company's expense.
The only problem is that this month the winner was the chauffer himself. Backchat understand the boss, Slack, will be donning the grey suit and chauffer's hat and driving his driver for the evening.

It's only words, as CGU labours

CGNU, doncha just luv 'em? Backchat heard a lovely story the other day about a broker who had to chase up the old CGU for a policy document for nine months.

Eventually, CGU explained that it hadn't sent out the document to the petrol station owner because it was waiting for a new policy wording. And what was the policy wording that had been delayed? It was none other than CGU's own new wording covering the service standards it would guarantee to the policyholder.

Backchat's chum pointed out that having not received the policy for nine months, the customer was hardly likely to believe a single word of a service standard statement. He asked that CGU send the policy without the new wording, which it did. It arrived the next day.

Errors sent to try us

Backchat is constantly amazed at his own ability to cock things up.
Last week an editing error managed to take two piece of fine rugby prose and blend them into nonsense. Johnny Wilkinson's crunching tackle and Lawrence Dallaglio's power-drive try were edited into one and the same thing. Still, at least it wasn't as inaccurate as the caricature.