4 April 2016
I av être en France. Eating ze baguette and ze cheese and drinking ze cidre. Brittany is to France as the Wess Curntry is to England: not the most sophisticated of regions, but good at making hallucinogenic beverages out of windfalls. The Bretons have the edge over the Wess Curntry folk, however, in having also learned (a) to make an entire main meal out of a teaspoon of flour by spreading it very, very thinly and calling it a crêpe and (b) to fashion a hundred and one “produits régionaux” out of salt and seaweed. You have to admit it is clever, making things that tourists will pay good money for out of little more than can be scraped up at the tideline, although the occasional splinter of driftwood and a bouquet of marine oil mar the achievement somewhat. Anyway, je suis retournée quelques pounds heavier parce que even though crêpes are spread very thinly you can still eat too many of them. Mais sur le plus side, je suis très bien rested parce qu’il n’y avait pas de Wi-Fi dans ma maison. Donc, il y a now deux cents emails dans mon Box de In. Je spend le entire après-midi avec mon Box de In. Aussi je put quelques emails dans mon Box de Out. Mais je ne send pas ces emails, otherwise people will know que je suis back home. It is interesting to see how email conversations evolve if you ignore them. What begins as an urgent request either peters out in a barrage of “reply to all” messages or gets dealt with by some other suckers who couldn’t resist telling the world they were still working at 11 pm. I will bear this in mind in future email correspondence, and not just while I’m en vacances. There is a lot to be said for accidentally not being there when people need you, and letting them find out that in fact they don’t need you at all. There is also a lot to be said, when you are supposed to be in charge but not really up to the job, for allowing everyone else to have their say first, and then agreeing with the best-expressed and most popular views. In management bollocks, this is referred to as “drawing out a consensus”. Crucially, it prevents you spouting your own stupid view first and subsequently being denounced as a total idiot and/or ethically suspect, especially among patent attorneys, who are genetically programmed to argue with anything that emanates from a position of authority. Perhaps I should write a book of all these gems of management wisdom. Except, I am generally too busy dealing with mon Box de In and fending off denunciations.
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