In my former life, after I matriculated, my first job was as a shipping clerk for Ellerman & Bucknall in East London – for a very short while before I was drafted to the army.
We also acted as agents for Mitsui OSK Lines. (By the way, the army put me in the choir, probably figuring my voice would do more damage to the enemy than would a weapon.) Anyway, my duties as the most unqualified person in the firm meant me, in my grey safari suit, going down to the harbour at the crack of dawn each time we had an incoming vessel, as in those days the ports closed at night.
I would be weighed down with ships’ manifests, bills of lading and whatever other documents were necessary, which I duly handed over to the vessel’s purser after being kept waiting for ages.
Invariably, the said purser was a sullen-looking individual who obviously believed it was below his dignity to afford me the courtesy of a smile or a ‘good morning’. Added to that was the language barrier, my Filipino and Japanese vocabulary almost non-existent. There are only so many times you can say ‘Toyota’.
Nevertheless, on returning to the office after one such encounter, I threw my toyota’s out the cot and said something to this effect: ‘This is so stupid, to keep loading and unloading cargo from warehouses and docksides onto ships. Why not put it all in a big container and lift that onto the ship?’ Nobody seemed the least bit interested.
A few years later, containerisation was the worldwide way to go. I’ve often wondered if someone in the office reported my words to head office…. Could I have become the local Onassis shipping magnate? After all, I do have a Greek surname. But it got me thinking about good ideas – especially those that were rejected or ridiculed at first: telephones, radios, copy machines, talking movies, motor cars, aspirins, computers, light bulbs, airplanes, umbrellas, cell phones, spacecraft, even online shopping.
You name it – it was first met with rejection. Some, of course, deserved to be precluded outright, like the parachute that opens on impact.
The moral of the story is: don’t ask people’s opinions and advice on your ideas – just go out and do it. Likewise: never give advice… sell it.
