For the last few years of my BT career I worked alongside a great young guy, another Paul, Paul S. He and I were chalk and cheese: he was young, slim, fresh-faced and always smiling and I was this fat, bald, old, grizzled dinosaur. We were often mistaken for twins. But we worked harmoniously and were a good team, always looking for another challenge in our specialist areas of sponsorship and hospitality, two things BT did pretty badly before we made sense of the whole structure. Paul and Paul, Do-it-All was our composite nickname.
One of the things we did a lot was travel, mostly around the UK. I’ve never been one to while away hours thinking of nothing, passively listenning to music. I need to be reading or talking or observing and noting but always actually doing something. I think I used to drive PS mad with this until the day I taught him how about the game lookie likey in some airport lounge where we were killing time till our flight. It’s a simple game and not of my invention but I love it. The idea is to spot people, quickly identify who they look like (the more famous the better) and invite your colleague to score your..looks like… out of 10.
I have to say that the day I described this to Paul I had spotted two people who looked for the whole world like Rod Stewart (in his Maggie May pomp) and Cher (whilst still with big nose and Sonny). Paul had to laugh and awarded me 9 points for each – a top score. Paul himself was rubbish at it for a while, earning no more than 4 maybe 5 points at best (but often only 2 or 3) but he quickly learned that the game is best played occasionally when a top dopelganger comes into view. Since then he’s had me with a killer Bill Oddie look alike, an uncannily accurate Richard Dreyfuss and a very good Sven G-E. He’s still searching to get me with a top female 9 or 10er but he is playing the master.
The heavy bonuses are scored when you actually spot a real famous person, nominate them for a lookie likey and your opponent scores you less than 10. Strictly speaking you get the balance of points from the low estimate added to a top score of 10 for that occurrence. But mostly you forget to be so anal as you’re usually arguing at this point over was it or wasn’t that person from Eastenders. I’ve had the real Jodie Marsh and Jon Snow in my sights before now and bamboozled the opponent on both occasions.
Other discretionary points can be added for really hopeless attempts, you know when someone nominates a person looking like Cameron Diaz but who looks more like the bloke Cameron who won BB4 or Kenneth Williams rather than Robbie. Again you’re more likely to be screaming with laughter than bothered about the points.
The good thing about this game is that you can play it anywhere, anytime. I’ve slipped Paul a scribbled note before now suggesting the guy across from us in such and such meeting is a dead ringer for Benny Hill. It’s a sure way to liven up a dullish meeting – try it. Paul’s great fun to play with (I could have phrased that better) as he’s got such a lively sense of humour. Stopping him from bursting out in the middle of a meeting usually induced the giggles until someone cracked a lame gag at which point Paul would howl with laughter. The gag-makers always thought Paul was great for being so appreciative of their wit. That always made me giggle then. The rest of the meeting was spent getting Benny Hill references into the conversation and trying not to corpse. Very silly but some of those meetings in BT could be tedious you know.
pp
Pasta Paulie 