The decision to make Amanda Line a school prefect was not exactly popular among her peers.
Walking into the student monitor room for the first time, she came under a barrage of blue plastic coffee cups.
Yet as one of just 20 girls in the former all-boys boarding school, Rugby, the act was nothing against her personally. But her time at the exclusive English public school did turn out to be rather good training for her future career.
Ms Line, now the regional director for the chartered accountants association ICAEW, says her time at Rugby gave her an insight into how to succeed in a man's world.
"I have always worked in a predominantly male world, and I think I got used to it at the ages of 16, 17 and 18," she says. "You had to survive. You had to be as good as the boys. You had to not let the fact that you were a girl influence you in any way."
Knowing she wanted to be in business, and seeing accountancy as the best route in, she set off for London after school and joined Stoy Hayward, now BDO.
Ms Line remained with the firm for about six years before setting up a small audit practice of her own. It was during this time that a firm contracted her to deliver finance training for employees.
Her first contract, training Unilever graduates who were young, "lovely" and keen to learn, was a dream, she recalls.
Then she landed a gig with a UK utility company. At the time the company, which was state-owned but in the process of going private, wanted its engineers to have an understanding of how to manage a profit-and-loss account.
At first the engineers assumed she was merely there to serve the coffee or introduce the trainer. But as soon as she started to talk, it dawned on them that Ms Line, just 28 at the time, was the trainer.
"The body language, leaning back in the chair and looking round to each other to go 'is this really happening? She's not serious. She's the same age as our daughter. What on earth is she going to tell us?'" she adds, mirroring the actions and looks that used to flash across the engineers' faces.
Had the trainer been a balding, middle-aged man, the engineers' expectations would have been entirely met, she says. But this way, at least Ms Line was able to get their attention - even if it was only because they believed she could not teach them anything new.
"By the morning break, I would have them, and occasionally I didn't because it would just take one and they all [followed] … But that would happen very rarely," she says.
Ms Line's privileged upbringing could have been another barrier in dealing with the engineers. But people who know her will be entirely unsurprised to learn of her success in the role.
"Whoever she's talking to she will pitch it right," says her friend Kit James.
"She can pitch it as well to my 11-year-old as she could to the chief executive of PricewaterhouseCoopers, you know. It's a huge skill set," he adds.
Yet she never quite embraced her unwanted talent for teaching finance to northern middle-aged engineers and spent many sleepless nights in motorway hotels before the sessions.
It was while she was sitting in one of the grotty hotels that she received a call from her husband, a pilot, to say he had been offered a job with Singapore Airlines.
"I remember thinking, another day with the engineers at Yorkshire Water, or Singapore … I didn't have to think too long about that," she says.
Ms Line spotted an advertisement in a British accountancy magazine for a Singapore-based finance lecturer before the move. She was interviewed over the phone and subsequently offered the job teaching graduates professional accountancy.
The students were diligent and a delight to teach, but the school took its money and did not deliver value in return, she says. Electricity would go off during class and there were never enough chairs or notes to go around. She "whinged and whinged" about the situation until her husband suggested that she leave and set up a school of her own.
"I thought that's exactly what I should do," she says.
Ms Line established the school with financial backing from the UK institution which trained her.
Building the business was stressful at times. Take for example the time she was served a writ while she was in labour with her second son, warning her not to employ a lecturer who was still on a contract with another school.
But after seven years, the school had become the biggest of its kind in Singapore, with branches in Hong Kong and China, and had 60 lecturers who trained 5,000 students at any one time.
The fact that she made such a success as an entrepreneur would have come as no surprise to her siblings, to whom she used to sell her junk as a child.
"All the stuff I didn't want any more I put it out on my bed with a price tag on it and I put a notice on my bedroom door saying sale will start in 10 minutes," she recalls with a grin.
"I would make them stand outside and at the last minute they would come in and they would be so desperate they would buy everything. My brother once bought my broken Timex watch for £5. My mum was so horrified she made me give him a refund, which I was furious about," says Ms Line.
True to form, Ms Line sold her stake in the Singapore education company for a tidy profit after her British backer was bought out. And after 11 years in Singapore, Ms Line and her husband decided to move to be closer to the United Kingdom, where their sons went to school.
They chose to move to Dubai because it had a good airline for her husband to work for, and Ms Line's sister and husband - also a former Rugby pupil - live here.
For the first time in her adult life, Ms Line took time off after moving to the emirate. But she soon became bored and started scouting around for investment opportunities. She identified two, including Dante, a sandwich delivery company.
Initially intending to be only an angel investor, Ms Line quickly became more involved. But being forced to deal with day-to-day crisis management issues made her realise she was more suited to professional services.
Staffing problems were high up on Ms Line's list of concerns. She used to get up at 3am to check the CCTV cameras to make sure everything was as it should be in the kitchen.
"I would call them up and say 'I just saw you come into the kitchen and didn't see you wash your hands.' It was so stressful, for what? I mean, we made a bit of money, a bit," she adds.
Ms Line, another investor and the founder sold the business in 2009. After that she decided to take some time out, but the very next day she received a call from her own professional membership body, ICAEW, to see if she was interested in setting up a Dubai office.
The opportunity to build the regional reputation and profile of the institute would become the latest in a long line of varied careers.
"I have been a teacher, I have been a businesswoman, I have been a sandwich maker. I have done all sorts of things, but at the end of the day, every day, I have a choice," she adds.
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