Twenty years ago I started work as the FT’s most junior employee. I was on the foreign desk. Every day I had to phone an angry middle-aged foreign correspondent, based in a faraway city that he hated. I was straight out of university, didn’t know how to talk to adults, and swiftly got up this man’s nose. He’d shout at me. One day, when he was telling me again how stupid I was, I said, “Yes, but you needn’t shout.” He shouted some more, then told me to put him through to my boss, where he really let go.
Now middle-aged myself, I often recall the middle-aged colleagues I encountered back then. Some were awful, some wonderful, and combined they taught me the essential art of being an older colleague. The secret: treat ignorant junior employees as humans.
Juniors have loads to learn. At 5.30pm on my first day in the office, it dawned on me that nobody was even getting ready to go home. This is how grown-ups live, I suddenly realised, in offices where the windows don’t open. I was equally green about financial news. Once, excruciatingly, I asked on the internal messaging system whether anyone had heard of some ancient event called “the Guinness scandal”. Everyone had. It was the defining British corporate scandal of the 1980s. No matter that I was at school then.