Her problem is one of upbringing. I don’t mean her parents never told her how to use a knife and fork or anything like that. She is, if anything, overly polite. It is her commercial education that is at fault, and it is not entirely what she got at school.

The joke is one of her GCSEs is in Business Studies. I asked her what this consisted of, but as far as I can make out it seems to have been more office organisation than anything to do with actual commerce. The appearance of knowledge is there but there is no foundation. I am finding it very hard to get into her head what we are all about.

I feel as if I have bought a tin of soup and found nothing but coloured water inside. It looks like tomato soup but it isn’t. She goes through the motions without knowing why she is doing them.

I began to suspect something was amiss on her second day with us when I had a little time to devote to training her. I took her into what I laughingly call my office, sat

her down and went into my lecture about how a shoe is made. I was going through the various ways of attaching a sole, with illustrations, when I got the feeling she was not taking it in, confirmed when I said something quite absurd which produced no reaction from her.

I ploughed on and she only brightened up when I got to the last item – polishing the uppers. She remarked how you could tell what people were like from the state of their shoes. I agreed, saying how I always checked out the shoes on a customer’s feet as soon as they came through the door.

She looked blank. Why would anyone do that? I reminded her that she had just said the very opposite. In tones that implied that I was a bit simple or hard of hearing she explained she was talking about people, not customers.

That was when I realised we had a problem.

Her previous employers, one a supermarket and the other a DIY chain, were both highly systemised businesses. There the Little Britiain joke about "Computer says No." was not a joke. There were no doubt people in Head Office who used the data she unconsciously produced to good effect, but down at her lowly level you did as you were told and asked no questions. You went by the book,, even if the book was daft. The Barcode ruled everything. Nothing happened without a barcode reading. If the barcode said cod when it was yellow and self-evidently smoked haddock, you sold it as cod. In fact most of the time you did not know what you were selling. You just scanned the product, looked at the total and asked for payment, in the prescribed manner, told the customer to have a nice day and went on to the next one.

As far as she was concerned, the customers could have been black, white, yellow or blue. She might have noticed if they had had two heads but I would not be sure. They were reduced to the same level as the goods they were buying.

I only came to this conclusion when I got to the second bit of what I laughingly call the training programme, about materials. Again she didn’t seem to be taking it in, so I asked her point blank what was wrong. Her, on the face of it, quite sensible reply was that the label on the shoe or the box would tell her all she needed to know, so why was I telling her all this stuff? I explained that not everything we need to know is on the shoe or the box and we feel that if customers sense that we know our business they are more likely to come back.

I also think it is good for staff morale if they are more knowledgeable than the customer. It allows them to feel professional. I believe the psychiatrists might use the term self-esteem.

But that is by the way, what disturbs me is to think that here is a bright young person who has done business studies at school and has on the face of it commercial

experience who hasn’t a clue what the hell it is all about. She doesn’t realise it, but she is almost a robot.

She has been brought up in the world of systems, where it is almost obscene to think for yourself, which unfortunately is a quality we at Misfit Shoes value highly. I can’t see how you can survive in shoe retailing unless you can make the connection between client and shoe, which means having a pretty clear understanding of both.

One thing neither school nor her former employers have taught her is the reason we are here – to make money. In the first case I would not expect teachers, whose salary comes into their bank accounts come rain or shine, to know about profit and loss, but I would have thought a supermarket and a DIY chain would have thought it important. But again, perhaps there is an ethos that the foot soldiers on the floor and at the till are not paid to think, just to do as they are told. Theirs not to reason why. They are only cogs in the great machine, to keep quiet and obey orders.

Now where have I heard that before?

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