Guides, Covers and Other Unexpected Journeys - this week's best bits

Here's a surprise for you, a post about work that is not a rant, complaint or beautifully worded, savagely critical takedown of office politics.

My job requires me to meet customers who face any number of challenges in their life.

My job is to move them forward, which is a very useful phrase, mainly because it's completely meaningless and I can interpret it however I want.

With one customer in particular, I have a very simple goal, which is to ensure that the night before we have an appointment, he actually sleeps rather than staying awake, sick with worry.

One day, the poor chap was in such a state, he was actually incapable of speech.

Luckily, he was wearing a Pink Floyd t-shirt, so rather than sitting in awkward silence and making him feel even worse, I paddled on non-stop about music.

If you're a regular reader of my blog, you will find that previous sentence totally unsurprising.

Fast forward, if you will, a few months, and at our next appointment, the customer produced a piece of A4 paper ripped from a notepad with the title, Great Covers.

For a brief moment, I wondered if I was about to read about award-winning quilts, duvets and tea cozies, but no. Underneath, he'd written the name of a song and a band, 10 on each side.

But showing a remarkable attention to detail, the bands were in blue ink and the songs in black.

He gave me the list and said he'd love to hear which versions I liked the best.

I solemnly promised him that by the time of our next meeting, I would have listened to all 20 and ranked them in a suitable manner.

I carefully took the list home and placed it on the music stand on my piano, and that is where things went wrong.

For example, at this precise moment, the music stand on my piano has on it one of my notepads, the introduction and solo for Piano Man, transposed to B-flat, the lyric sheet from Randy Newman's Harps and Angels record, Billy Joel's Turnstiles album with the lyric sheet outside so it's readable, my old copy of Elton John's Breaking Hearts, a book of classical music so old it's actually in two separate halves and my old ipad and its cover which is now so battered it doesn't actually fit to put it another way and perhaps a much simpler one the list of songs got hidden behind a pile of other music related material and i completely forgot about it until last friday when the customer sent a message asking to postpone his afternoon appointment to this week because his father had been taken quite ill I immediately felt the sort of sinking feeling surgeons get when they realise the tonsure patient was lying the wrong way round.

I hadn't listened to a single song.

Fortunately, I had been given a get-out-of-jail-free card in the form of this weekend.

Therefore, I retrieved the song sheet, using a similar process to that used by the team who raised the Mary Rose from the Solent, put all the songs onto a Deezer playlist and ranked them.

I then made doubly sure the list was in my work pad in readiness for this morning's meeting.

I think it's fair to say the customer was not expecting the level of feedback I offered, nor the number of related stories I could tell about the songs.

For example, I said the High Woman's version of The Chain sounded, to my ears, completely identical to the original, which made me wonder why they bothered.

That said, if you have such an iconic song, you would be foolish to change it, an argument which was completely undermined by Wilson Pickett's version of Hey Jude.

later on gunn's and rose's version of live and let die came under the spotlight leading me to explain that when i was in a covers band we used the latter as the middle eight of the former I then realised that I'd spoken for 20 minutes of our half-hour meeting and apologised profusely.

Fortunately, the customer said that not only did he find what I said fascinating – clearly doesn't get out much – but he took my level of interest as a huge compliment.

To continue this moment of mutual admiration, I said that I was actually genuinely touched that he put so much time and effort into the list.

And then I confessed all, and said it very nearly didn't happen, explaining the issue of the overcrowded music stand, and that the postponed appointment had been a very necessary prompt.