Previous Supplier Drain
Scenes You Seldom See
— Private Eye Magazine (@PrivateEyeNews) January 11, 2026
From the Private Eye archive.
Issue 1120, November 2004. pic.twitter.com/ofozfen94R
'well, your previous [insert trader of choice] did a brilliant job'
Scenes you seldom see for sure.
When I first heard this in the field, it was referred to as Hairdresser Syndrome.
Ahead of the 'where you off on holidays this year' guff, was the immediate wince as you beseated had the cloths placed around you.
'Oh my', or exclamation a touch stronger, they began. 'Where on earth did you go last time? They really butchered you, hey...'
Plumbers were a tricky call a few decades back. Then one man in London (let's say Pimlico, although by then decamped to just around the corner from Waterloo) decided to change the frame. And was a runaway success. Even though a quarter-century back I recall the dazzling ninety-quid-an-hour charge, the work was not just a thing of beauty, but on time and conducted with aplomb.
It was a mystery no other trades caught on.
Around that time London was in the midst of a 'great switch'. Antipodeans no longer welcome, in favour of Eastern Europeans by govt diktat. Bar service and cultural embedding gone, but Polish electricians did become prized.
A year or so on I had one sparky visit. English, strangely. Yet was a shambles.
The wiring just did not look right. All shonky. Having spent far too long in big cable-strewn computer rooms, from the ol' mainframe dungeons to modern-day data centres, I knew what was messy or well-tended. And his work was certainly shoddy. As you can imagine, no culpability was ever accepted by him.
Later, I heard uber-historian Niall Ferguson, when assessing how the West 'beat' the Rest, describe the decline of the Ottoman Empire.
His example that stuck with me was the most dramatic because it was so mundane.
When clearly on the up, Ottoman bookkeeping resembled a work of art. Once Europeans had discovered for themselves the printing press, they (eventually) did what the Chinese had failed to do. And spread its wonders. The Ottoman's too suppressed it. Preferring to keep their calligraphers scribing [note these Luddites successfully lobbied to keep the threatening tech at bay] and, as in monolithic, oppressed and ultimately stagnant China, preventing the masses from access to the new tech. Consequently, as they remained sluggish and uncompetitive, their accounting records were akin to uncoordinated childlike scrawls.
As Ferguson remarks;
“I don't read Ottoman, but I know what good penmanship is."
Likewise I don't read wiring diagrams, but I know how neat and safe wiring normally looks.
As with his observation that this was a physical symptom of an institutional disease, the calibre of our work lingers.
Not just long after the sale either. But well before too.
Think also of any written submission to our prospects.
Imagine this thought experiment. Whoever you're selling to has their own, if not salespeople, then at least someone tasked with a version of selling, whether inside or out. Would they react in a way to your collateral like the cartoon plumber above?