Memorable moments: The lemonade trap

One of the absolute favorite jobs of my life was working for Volvo Construction Equipment. I was brought on board to help drive an ambitious Volvo Group web project, a role that saw me traveling across Europe, heading over to Brazil, and jetting into the United States. I loved the projects, the travel, and above all, the incredible people I worked with.

Yet the entire trajectory of that chapter could easily have never happened at all. In reality, it all hinged on a single, high-stakes split-second decision made over an empty table.

My interview was scheduled in a tiny town just outside Cambridge. I caught the morning train up from London and met with Mats and Caroline, two brilliant individuals who would go on to become cherished colleagues. The formal part of the interview went smoothly enough—the scope sounded exciting, I expressed enthusiastic interest, and we wrapped things up on a positive note.

Then came the unexpected second stage.

"Would you like to join us for lunch down the road?" they asked.

A few minutes later, we were settled into a gorgeous 1660 English pub called The John Barleycorn a few blocks away, joined by several other team members. The conversation was warm, relaxed, and full of lively banter. Then the waitress arrived at our table, notepad in hand.

"Can I get you all something to drink before lunch?" she asked.

Mats turned to me, fixed me with an attentive look, and said, "What would you like to drink, Graeme?"

In an instant, the lively chatter vanished. A sudden, palpable hush descended over the table as every set of eyes turned directly toward me.

My internal alarm bells started ringing. What is the protocol here? This was a middle-of-the-day corporate interview lunch. Was it a trap to see if I was overly casual during business hours, or a test of social ease? I wasn’t even a big beer drinker to begin with.

Caught in the crosshairs of professional etiquette and workplace ambiguity, I threw caution to the wind and said, "I'll have a beer, please."

Instantly, the tension broke like a snapped wire. A collective wave of relief swept across the table, the noise returned at full volume, and every single person promptly chimed in: "I'll have a pint as well!"

We had a fantastic meal, the rapport was effortless, and a few days later, the formal job offer arrived in my inbox.

Once I started, I quickly discovered that after-work pints and pub culture were central pillars of team life. As it turned out, that sudden hush in the pub wasn't an accident—Mats offering me the first drink order was very much the decisive final test of the interview. As qualified as I was on paper for the role, had I played it safe and answered with a polite "I'll just have a lemonade, thanks," I am fairly certain I would have caught the train back to London empty-handed.

The John Barleycorn where we had lunch

Related posts

• Working in Duxford

Memorable moments: From the Crossfire to Cairo

We all experience distinct highs and lows across our working lives—roles that light us up with purpose and ones we desperately wish away.

The absolute lowest point of my career came in London back in 2001. I was living with Ally when the dot-com bubble burst in dramatic fashion, taking my job at Siegelgale down with it. With the tech market frozen, finding another role proved impossible. As weeks stretched on, I found myself battling both a depleted bank account and deep, unrelenting boredom.

Desperate for an outlet, I spotted an advert in our local paper for a marshal at a nearby paintball range. Having always loved playing paintball, I applied on a whim and was hired.

It was nothing like the expansive, sunlit forests I had played in back in South Africa. The venue was a grim, dimly lit, dilapidated warehouse. My primary responsibility was to stand pressed against a concrete wall in the dangerous no-man's-land between two opposing teams, ensuring players followed the safety rules.

I quickly discovered a harsh workplace reality: as far as the players were concerned, the marshals were entirely fair game.

I spent shifts being relentlessly pelted by high-velocity paint pellets, winced through genuine physical bruising, and had paint constantly dripping from my overalls. When the battles finally ended, the misery didn't. The marshals then had to strip and clean the jammed guns. Nearly every marker had malfunctioned, filling the barrels with thick, sticky sludge that took endless scrubbing and rinsing in icy water to dislodge.

For this bruised ordeal, we were handed a paltry five pounds an hour—the lowest wage I had ever earned in my entire life. Trudging home through the freezing London dark, covered in drying paint, I felt completely grounded at rock bottom.

Needing a radical change of direction, I threw another application into the wind—this time to overland expedition companies. Through an extraordinary stroke of luck, despite having zero prior tour experience, I landed a role as an expedition leader running overland trips across the Middle East between Istanbul and Cairo.

The pay was a mere ten pounds a day—technically even less per hour than the warehouse—yet it was instantly the most exhilarating, life-affirming job I had ever known. In a single leap, I had gone from taking stray shots in a damp London basement to navigating desert crossings, ancient ruins, and unforgettable horizons.

After five months on the road, Ally called me home. I returned to the UK transformed: my confidence was sky-high and euphoric. With that renewed energy, I walked straight into a fantastic role as an e-business project manager for Volvo, traveling extensively across Europe.

Whenever life hits a difficult trough today, I cast my mind back to that cold London warehouse. It serves as an enduring reminder of how life actually moves: our greatest periods of reinvention and euphoria often lie waiting just on the other side of our lowest moments.

Memorable moments: The descriptive fallacy

I taught English for two years at an adult college in Sydney, and on the whole, I loved it. It was a wonderful break from the corporate world and a fantastic outlet for my creativity. But there was one specific incident that was deeply regrettable, incredibly challenging, and easily one of the most embarrassing moments of my professional life.

Every term, I would be assigned a new class of at least twenty students. Many of them had names that were difficult for me to pronounce or remember—particularly the Thai students—and remembering names has never been my strong suit. Since I was expected to know everyone's name within the first couple of lessons, I developed a mnemonic system. On the very first day, I would write quick, descriptive trigger words next to each name on my official roster to jog my memory: Bubbly Brazilian, Very Tall, Bright Red Glasses, and so on.

During one frantic first lesson, as I tried to quickly catalog twenty new faces, I hit a wall with one female student. I couldn't immediately spot a distinct clothing item or personality trait to lock onto, so in the heat of the moment, I hastily scribbled "fat face" next to her name.

Four days later, during a brief break in class, I stepped out to go to the toilet. In my haste, I stupidly left my folder sitting open on my desk.

One of the male students in the class was utterly obsessed with his attendance record, as his student visa strictly depended on it. Seeing his chance, he surreptitiously walked up to my desk, opened the folder, and began scanning the roster to check his marks. That was when his eyes landed on the handwritten note next to his classmate's name.

Instead of keeping quiet, he promptly blurted it out to the entire room. The class erupted into laughter, and the poor girl was understandably humiliated.

She immediately went down to the principal's office to lodge a formal complaint. When I found out what had happened, I felt absolutely sick to my stomach. I apologized profusely to both the student and the director, thoroughly horrified by the pain my careless shorthand had caused.

It was a brutal, unforgettable lesson. From that day onward, I made a strict rule never to write anything on my roster that wasn't overwhelmingly flattering. No student ever snooped in my folder again, but if they had, they would have been absolutely thrilled with what they found.

Memorable moments: The 5th floor summons

During my time at Old Mutual, I worked with a colleague named David. He was a friendly guy with a great sense of humor—sometimes bordering on the risqué—and he was incredibly laid back. Absolutely nothing flustered him. Except for one time, under an extraordinary set of circumstances.

David was trawling through the internet at work when he came across a highly questionable picture. It was titled "The Russian Spice Girls" and featured a graphic of four extremely large women in a state of near undress. For some reason, this completely caught his funny bone. Knowing a friend who shared his specific sense of humor, he promptly sent the image over using the office fax machine, thinking nothing more of it.

About three hours later, a directive came down from on high telling David to report immediately to the General Management office on the fifth floor. In our office, you generally only went to the fifth floor to get promoted or fired.

David walked up and was promptly hauled over the coals. It turned out he had entered a single digit incorrectly on the fax machine. Instead of going to his friend, the transmission had landed directly in the office of South Africa's premier, most militant activist feminist and anti-pornographer.

She had absolutely seen red. Spotting David's name printed in the tiny automated header at the top of the page, she immediately bypassed regular channels and called the Chairman's Office of Old Mutual to lodge a vociferous, furious complaint.

The sheer statistical improbability of that specific wrong number was mind-boggling. David managed to keep his job, but he was severely and memorably chastised. The rest of us walked away with an important lesson: it is best not to fax anything risqué from the office, but if you absolutely must, you had better check the number fastidiously.

Memorable moments: The 0.1 percent predicament

When Ally and I first arrived in Sydney, we stayed with our friends Doug and Claudia while we navigated the daunting task of finding a home and work. I soon spotted an opening at Agency Fusion—a firm specializing in web strategy and marketing. It felt like a perfect fit, but there was one hurdle: a mandatory online aptitude test.

I’ve never been a fan of the artificial pressure of these assessments, so I decided to level the playing field. I recruited a "dream team" to tackle the link. I handled the verbal sections, Ally—with her creative, visual eye—mastered the pattern recognition, and Doug, the engineer, tore through the numerical data. Working as a single unit, we were unstoppable.

A few days later, I sat down for an interview with the founders, Louise and Warren. We clicked immediately; the conversation flowed, the skills aligned, and the vibe was perfect. As the interview wound down, they looked at me with genuine awe.

"Well," they said, "we love your experience, and personality-wise you’re a great fit. But goodness gracious, Graeme—your aptitude test results came in the top 0.1 percent of the global population. You’re at a genius level."

I got the job on the spot. It was a triumph, but as I walked out of the office, the weight of the "Genius" tag began to settle on my shoulders. I realized I hadn't just secured a position; I had committed myself to an impossible standard. For the duration of my time there, I lived with the quiet, nagging stress of trying to live up to the combined brainpower of an engineer, a creative director, and a strategist. In retrospect, I probably should have just done the test myself—it would have been far less stressful to be "merely" competent than to spend every day pretending to be a one-in-a-thousand prodigy.

Memorable moments: The literal holiday

When I was an English teacher in Sydney, I taught young adults at a local college. Every lesson began with a high-stakes ritual: marking the attendance roster. For these students, those checkmarks weren't just about grades; they were the lifeline for their visas. If they weren't in their seats, their right to stay in Australia was at risk.

Because the subject matter could sometimes be dry, I prided myself on making my lessons as inventive and creative as possible. I wanted to pull them out of their textbooks and into the world.

One day, I launched into a particularly ambitious speaking exercise. "All right, everyone," I announced with a flourish, "let’s pretend you have all won a wonderful prize: an all-expenses-paid week-long holiday to anywhere in Australia! In your groups, I want you to discuss where you want to go."

I fanned out a collection of glossy brochures featuring the Great Barrier Reef, the Red Centre, and the rugged coastlines of Tasmania. "Get those creative juices flowing!"

The room buzzed with excitement—except for one girl. She sat perfectly still, looking deeply concerned. As I moved around the classroom, monitoring the "trips" being planned, I passed her desk. She leaned in and whispered urgently, "Teacher, when we go on this trip for a week, will we still get marked off on the attendance roster?"

I stopped in my tracks. I realized in that moment that she hadn't seen the brochures as a prompt for a fantasy; she had seen them as a travel itinerary. To her, this wasn't an exercise in speaking—it was a looming logistical crisis.

Memorable moments: Automated aggression

During my time at Volvo in Duxford, I made frequent business trips to the corporate heartland of Gothenburg. I usually stayed at the Radisson, a hotel that catered to the brisk, efficient schedules of visiting executives. Because our meetings often started at the crack of dawn, I relied heavily on the hotel’s wake-up call service.

It was a standard, automated system: you’d speak your requested time into the phone, and the next morning, a computerized voice would chime, "This is your wake-up call." It was cold, functional, and perfectly Swedish.

One morning, after a particularly early set-up and a night of restless, fragmented sleep, the phone rang at 5:00 AM. I was in a foul mood—irritable, exhausted, and ready to lash out at the inanimate technology that was dragging me into the light.

I snatched up the receiver and, before the "machine" could even get a word out, I snarled into the mouthpiece: "Fuck off!!"

There was a long, horrifying silence. Then, instead of the expected robotic tone, a very small, very shocked female voice whispered back:

"Oh... I am so sorry, sir. I hope I didn't get your wake-up call wrong!"

I felt the blood drain from my face as I sat bolt upright in the dark. It turned out the automated system had gone on the blink overnight, and the front desk staff were manually calling every room to ensure the guests weren't late.

I spent the next several minutes in a state of profuse, stuttering apology, trying to explain that I wasn't actually a monster—just a man who had mistakenly declared war on a computer.

Memorable moments: The fifty-hour silence

Between 2010 and 2012, I taught English at an adult college in Sydney. My classrooms were a vibrant, global crossroads, and I was always fascinated by the predictable "nationalities" of conversation. The Brazilians were the life of the party—outgoing, loud, and happy to butcher every rule of grammar as long as the story was moving. The Koreans, by contrast, were the quiet architects; they were masters of the written rule but notoriously reserved when it came to speaking.

When the school asked if I’d take on a private Korean student for fifty hours of one-on-one conversation, I thought, Why not? I’ll never forget our first meeting. Merry was twenty, bright-eyed, and painfully shy. I arrived armed with an arsenal of conversation starters, "ice-breakers," and deep philosophical prompts. I leaned in and asked a simple, gentle question about her life.

She whispered a single monosyllable in a voice so tiny it barely disturbed the air.

A cold wave of "imposter panic" washed over me. I looked at the clock. There were forty-nine hours and fifty-nine minutes left. In that moment, I wished with all my heart for a boisterous Brazilian—someone who would talk over me, ignore my corrections, and fill the silence with a thousand cheerful errors. Trying to get a sentence out of this girl felt like trying to draw blood from a stone.

Slowly, however, things began to shift. Over the first few hours, I stopped pushing and started simply being the aware space for her silence. Bit by bit, the stone cracked. She began to trust the environment, her confidence grew, and the monosyllables turned into sentences, then stories, then profound insights into her culture.

By the end of the fifty hours, we weren't just practicing English; we were having some of the most amazing conversations of my teaching career. It was a powerful reminder that while some students lead with an immediate, exuberant energy, the quietest ones often hold the deepest truths—if you are willing to provide the space and patience for them to finally emerge.

Me and Merry

Memorable moments: The vowels of doom

During my time at Volvo’s UK headquarters in Duxford, I was part of a high-pressure team tasked with redesigning the global corporate website. One morning, in our hushed, open-plan office, I prepared to pull up the live site at volvo.com for a quick reference check. My fingers flew across the keys, but just as I hit "Enter," a phone call distracted me.

I looked away to answer, leaving the page to load in full view of the room. A few seconds later, my colleague Andre Pocock leaned over, his eyes nearly popping out of his head.

"My goodness, Graeme," he hissed, "what on earth are you looking at?"

I turned back to my screen and felt a jolt of pure, corporate-grade horror. Instead of the safe, Swedish lines of a family station wagon, I was staring at a giant, high-definition, and very explicit anatomical image. 

In my distracted state, my fingers had betrayed me. I hadn't typed the home of the "Iron Mark"; I had swapped the two vowels in volvo with other letters and navigated directly to a site that was much more "biological" than "automotive."

The contrast between Volvo’s brand values and the screen in front of me was absolute. I managed to kill the window before the rest of the department could wander over, but for the rest of my tenure, I never hit the "Enter" key again without the realization that you can't navigate life—or the internet—without a great deal of care.

Memorable moments: The Tel Aviv revelation

I have spent much of my life accompanied by a quiet, persistent shadow: Imposter Syndrome. Even when I was at the top of my class at school, I dismissed it as a lack of innate ability; I convinced myself I was simply working harder than the other kids. The anxiety was a constant hum during exams—the terrifying certainty that this was the time I’d finally bomb out and be "found out."

This pattern followed me into my professional life. At Old Mutual, I was singled out as a high-potential trainee, yet I waited daily for the mask to slip. By 2001, I was in the UK, working for a renowned branding agency with a vibrant culture and iconic clients. Despite excellent feedback, the syndrome was stronger than ever. Branding wasn't my specialty, and I felt like a guest who had snuck into a high-society party.

Then came the Israeli bank project.

Our team of three—including the Managing Director and our colleague Anita—flew from London to Tel Aviv every week. The MD was a powerhouse, a charismatic genius who had single-handedly formulated the brand identities for some of the world’s most iconic companies, including Apple. Watching him work was like watching a master conductor; I was in absolute awe of his confidence.

One night, after a long day of strategy, the three of us met in a hotel bar in Tel Aviv. After a few drinks, I finally confessed my admiration. I told the MD how much I respected his genius and, more than anything, his unshakable confidence.

He looked at me and said something that shifted my entire world view.

"You know," he said quietly, "I have a huge imposter syndrome. Every time I stand up in front of a board, I feel totally nervous. I think, 'Oh no, they’re going to find me out this time.'"

I was stunned. If the man who branded Apple felt like a fraud, what hope was there for us mere mortals?

It was a moment of profound self-compassion. I realized then that Imposter Syndrome isn't a sign of inadequacy; it’s a nearly universal human experience. It might even be the very thing that makes us a driven species. It’s the friction that motivates us to be better, to prepare more deeply, and to reach further.

The goal isn't to kill the imposter; it's to understand him, be kind to him, and then—like the MD in Tel Aviv—stand up in front of the board anyway.

Memorable moments: The sexy beast of Old Mutual

One morning, I walked through the Old Mutual marketing floor on the way to my desk, sensing a shift in the atmospheric pressure. As I moved past the cubicles, I noticed a series of amused, knowing smiles from colleagues, as if the entire floor was in on a secret I hadn't been invited to.

I wondered if I was imagining things until I passed David from Agency Marketing. He gave me a supportive nod and a wink.

"You go, stud," he chirped. "We're all rooting for you."

I reached my desk, confused and increasingly wary. Sitting there, face-up for the world to see, was a thermal-paper fax. It didn't contain a marketing brief or a strategy update. Instead, it was a bold, typed declaration:

"I can't wait to get my hands on you later, you sexy beast."

It was from Ally. In an era before private messaging, she had mistakenly assumed that the office fax machine was a private, direct line to my desk. Instead, it had spent the morning sitting in the communal tray, being enjoyed by every "gregarious" marketer and agency staffer who had wandered by to collect their own documents.

In that single moment, I discovered a profound new psychological state: the ability for immense pride and agonizing embarrassment to coexist in the exact same heartbeat.

I walked in a "high-potential trainee" and left the "Marketing Stud" of the building. It turns out, no matter how hard you work on your professional brand, all it takes is one misplaced fax to permanently rebrand you as a "Sexy Beast."

Memorable moments: The Ryanair descent

They say airline travel is hours of boredom interrupted by moments of stark terror. In 2004, while working for Volvo, I learned exactly how "stark" that terror could be. I was on a Ryanair flight from Stansted to Gothenburg—the kind of extreme low-cost experience where you half-expect to be charged for the air you breathe.

Suddenly, the air decided to leave us.

The plane didn't just dip; it plummeted. We fell a staggering 1,000 metres in a matter of seconds. There was a violent, bone-shaking thump that sent luggage cascading out of the overhead lockers like plastic hail. Then, the nightmare trifecta: smoke began to coil through the cabin, the oxygen masks dropped from the ceiling with a synchronized snap, and the screaming started.

Even the flight attendants, usually the stoic guardians of "tea or coffee," were white-faced with genuine panic. The man sitting next to me broke down completely. He whipped out a photograph of his wife and twin girls, staring at it with the haunted intensity of a man saying his final goodbye.

And me?

I have no idea why. Perhaps it’s some prehistoric, hard-wired glitch in the Myburgh DNA. Amidst the smoke, the screams, and the falling luggage, I got the giggles.

I tried to suppress it, knowing that a full-blown guffaw would be the height of social impropriety while my neighbor was mourning his own life, but I couldn't stop. I sat there, strapped into my seat, giggling uncontrollably into my yellow oxygen mask. It was as if my brain had decided that if we were going down, we might as well go down finding the whole thing ridiculous.

Eventually, the plane stabilized. The smoke cleared, the screaming subsided, and we landed without a word of explanation from the captain. That’s low-cost travel for you: you pay for the seat, but the life-altering trauma is complimentary.

For weeks afterward, I walked around in a state of pure, shimmering euphoria. I had stared into the abyss through a plastic mask while laughing like a maniac, and coming out the other side made the world seem impossibly bright. It turns out that a near-death experience is the ultimate "reset" button—even if your specific reaction to it is enough to make a grieving father think he's seated next to a psychopath.

Memorable moments: The fountain of marketing

In 1999, during my final year at Old Mutual, we embarked on the annual Christmas pilgrimage—a high-stakes event where free beer and corporate hierarchies rarely mix well. The plan was sophisticated enough: a bus trip to Darling to watch the legendary Pieter-Dirk Uys perform, followed by a lunch where the booze flowed with alarming frequency.

By the time we boarded the bus for the hour-long journey back to Cape Town, the "festive spirit" had taken a firm hold of the passengers. Rodney, from Agency Marketing, was particularly well-lubricated. Finding the seats full, he decided to improvise, perched precariously on a ledge at the very front of the bus, facing the crowd like a weary king on a makeshift throne.

Halfway home, the unexpected happened. Without warning, and seemingly without moving a muscle, Rodney began to pee.

It wasn't a subtle leak; it was a high-velocity event. The stream was so powerful it acted like a literal fountain, erupting from his trousers and spraying the first four rows of the bus in a golden arc. The transition from "drunken commute" to "waterpark nightmare" was instantaneous.

Pandemonium erupted. People screamed, dove for cover, and tried to use their gift bags as shields, but the bus was a confined space and Rodney’s "marketing strategy" was remarkably wide-reaching.

Rodney didn't lose his job that day, but he did achieve a form of immortality. He became a legend of the infamous kind—the man who literally "poured" his heart and soul into the front row. While he remained on the payroll, it’s safe to say that whenever a promotion was discussed, the conversation probably ended with a very specific, damp memory of the Darling bus.

Memorable moments: The lift fiasco

Fresh out of university and armed with a brand-new suit and a "Trainee Marketing Consultant" title, I arrived for my first day at Old Mutual. I was a ball of nerves, ready to conquer the corporate world—or at least find the reception desk.

I stepped into the lift and pressed '1'. The car hummed upward and came to a smooth halt.

The doors didn't budge.

Panic set in immediately. Stuck. On my first day. I’m going to be late. I’m going to die in a life assurance building before my policy even kicks in. I began frantically eyeing the alarm button, bracing for a morning of claustrophobic humiliation.

Then, a calm voice drifted in from behind me.

"Can we help you?"

I spun around. It turns out the lift had doors on both sides. The "wall" behind me had slid open seconds ago, revealing the entire office—who were now silently enjoying the view of a terrified trainee staring intensely at a solid metal panel.

Needless to say, I made quite an entrance.

My Antarctic photos being used for art lessons

Nic's Hypnotherapy site

I helped a dear friend, Nic, create a web site for his new hypnotherapy business.  

See innerpeachypnotherapy.com.au

Email a few months after launch

Nic

The website is working great. I have a steadily growing number of clients. My supervisor (who knows a lot of starting practitioners) said I'm doing amazingly well, I'd say mostly thanks to you! The guys doing my SEO all commented on how good the website look and how much better that all the other hypnotherapy sites are!

Graeme

That warms my heart to hear. I’m so glad.  The web site was very much a joint effort and many of the best ideas were yours. But it was wonderful to be able to help.  If you decide you want to add functionality, just shout. 

Launch of Wisdom Trove

It's been a lot of work but every minute has been worth it. I've learned so much from this project, in terms of both life wisdom and web development skills. Hopefully others will also find the site useful.

View site

Branding suggestion for Nic's new business

I'm building a web site for my friend, Nic. Here is my suggested brand concept.

Aimee's web site

I helped Aimee create a simple but effective site to sell her book. I took all the photos, including the book cover.

https://aimeedavies.com

Site for Christina

I created a web site for my artist friend, Christina, to advertise her art lessons.

View site