Merv - a study in intense irritation - by Leon the Huguenot:

I don’t know if Merv actually set out to be the most irritating person in my experience but there is no doubt he achieved this.  I sometimes wonder just how he did this.  It was not a matter of class hatred since he had no class.  I think it was that, in spite of the things he did, he seemed to fool a lot of people and get on.

It is an interesting phenomenon that, once you start to dislike a person, even trivial things they do add to the dislike.  Things that you would have forgiven or even thought quaint in an admired person become hanging crimes and more evidence of the thoroughgoing dastardliness of the disliked one.  And it is also true that those who you have admired, when you come to dislike them, are more disliked than those you know immediately are no good.  Perhaps there is a bit of self-loathing - loathing for ever having been taken in by the person.

It was that way with Merv.  He was a moderately handsome, bearded individual running to fat.  He was articulate in a blustery sort of way.  He and I were Public Servants; I was a newcomer and a little idealistic.  He helped me a lot in understanding the administrative system.  I thought what a paragon of virtue this is; could I ever understand the system as well as he did? 

It did not take me long to realise that, not only did he understand the system very well, he systematically abused it.  My first inkling probably related to travel expenses for, as we saw in 1996, Public Service methods of dealing with travel are seemingly designed to allow untrammelled abuse.  He showed me how a simple inspection trip to the country could provide untold financial benefits - and all within the rules.  As I was still an idealist I found this horrifying but my admiration for him was only a little tarnished. 

I think Merv might have done one of those courses which is laughingly called a communication course.  He had learned a set of techniques which were supposed to influence people.  In meetings he would judge his tone precisely.  He would laugh in a well-controlled and respectful way at any witticisms from the chairman but could instantly switch to a sober face and tone if he were called upon to give a report.  Any witticisms he made during his report would be, again, carefully judged.  It was all so utterly sickening but he was not sycophantic.  He made it clear often that he was not a ‘yes man’.  But the whole was so artificial, non-spontaneous.  And his superiors, being the feeble-brained creatures they were, lapped it up.  He was really a ‘yes man’ in disguise; a non-thinker purporting to be a free-thinker.

One thing he prided himself on was his use of jargon and cliches.  He would be the first, to my knowledge to use any new piece of jargon or expression - usually imported straight from the U.S.A.  As part of his work he would give frequent presentations.  I found these almost uniformly illogical, ungrammatical, and without value.  Of course I hesitate to mention grammar these days since it is valued so little.  We all are free to express ourselves without regard to proper arrangement of noun, verb, etc. Shortly we will all be addressing each other in grunts and snorts again.

One day, during a presentation, he mentioned that he was going to ‘share’ something with us.  Was it going to be a cake; a bottle of scotch; a glass of Grange Hermitage?  No such luck.  I realised, with a shock, that he merely meant that he was going to tell us something - something rather boring.  Throughout that presentation, and in all further presentations, he would ‘share’ information with us.  Indeed, where ‘tell’ would have done perfectly - since all he was doing was telling us - he would always ‘share’. 

When the expression was first used it had the advantage of novelty and perhaps you think, for a moment, what an interesting way of looking at things,  He really does mean that he is sharing something - giving us part of something he has for us to keep.  But it became obvious that there was no novelty here.  It was just dreary sameness.  And there was nothing of worth to keep.  If I might use a cliche it was all ‘mutton shared as lamb’.

Where did this awful sharing expression come from?  I imagine it originated with evangelists.  They were supposed to be good communicators but the communication was really just one-way.  The communication was largely one-way with Merv.  He could not deal properly with questions - with any departure from his poorly-prepared text.  He really had no deep knowledge of his subject-matter at all.

Among the material he was ‘sharing’ he would scatter such gems as “at the sharp end”; “at the coal face”.  Again these would have novelty for the first hearing and then immediately lose it.  It confirmed in my mind that he was dressing up boring material with these stupid cliches just to make it appear slightly less boring than it was.  I wished I could get him down to the coal face and present him with the sharp end of something - perhaps a bayonet.  

To my horror again he succeeded with some people.  I was pleased to see that the more intelligent - that is, those who agreed with me - of our number were beginning to have some concerns about our Merv.

Because I was now loathing him his grammar started to irritate me.  He was what is called a ‘self-made’ man but he had used very poor tools.  I gathered that his education had been elementary but not because he did not have access to better.  He had a mind as lazy as it was cunning.

It is interesting that you can be driven to thoughts of murder because someone uses ‘phenomena’ as the singular instead of the correct ‘phenomenon’.  I realise justifying homicide on this basis would be difficult.  But it was the combination of things that brought unseemly thoughts of ritual execution to my mind.  He would be ‘sharing’ with us a ‘phenomena’ which he had experienced when ‘at the sharp end’.  Surely that would be enough to reduce a charge from murder to at least manslaughter.

Well, what became of Merv you might ask?  Eventually his superiors saw through him; they realised what an incredibly superficial and lazy person he was; and the knives were out.  But, being a person of cunning as I said, he saw that he could make his way anew in another place - another country.  He chose Uzbekistan - one of the few original decisions he ever made.  There he wowed them with his ‘sharing’ and his store of other cliches.  Just how they translated into Uzbek I do not know.  But, for them, these instantly tired imported cliches were exotic and wonderful.

It took my countrymen - the executive types - about five years to see through the transparent windbag that Merv was.  Strangely enough, despite the language gap, the Uzbeks saw through him in three.  That says a lot about our executives.  I always used to think they advanced through the ranks according to the blast furnace principle - the slag floats to the top.  The biggest piece of slag was, of course, the chairman and he (always a ‘he’) fitted the model exactly.

Of course, it could be that the people in power never saw through Merv at all but he had been caught out playing the system.  I never heard the full story but there was a suspicion of that.  If it was a breach of the system then it must have been a pretty gross one since it was not designed to detect breaches unless they were staring everyone in the face.  Perhaps he just became too confident; confident of his ability to win people over with his ‘sharing’ and cess pool of cliches.  Who cares?  He eventually fell from grace in a big way and I am no longer interested enough in him to find out just how.