“How It WILL Be”

I have had an absolute show-down with Travesty Of All Things Gay.

Working with him is like trying to do your job, while at home there is a girlfriend who keeps phoning to say “I’m going to slit my wrists”, following up fifteen minutes later with “I’m going to take an overdose”. I think he doesn’t like how smoothly everything is going (we’ve had a series of excellent meetings, the common theme of which has been that he wasn’t THERE) without him, and so takes revenge by throwing in little bombs of “I want to have a 7am breakfast meeting!”, “I want to talk about Masterbrand. At MIDNIGHT!”, “I don’t agree with the proposition!” whenever he can.

My coping strategy has been pretty straightforward: “Ignore Him” – but unfortunately, that isn’t tenable in the long-term, so we had a conversation, which I think he thought was going to be about how he wanted to run things, but which was actually run more on the lines of “This is what you will be doing, Travesty Of All Things Gay”. Once he saw the way that things were going, he started nodding along and saying “I think that sounds absolutely great.” – but I can’t pretend that the way I was talking really gave him much alternative.

We’ll have to see how things go – but I don’t expect a Christmas card…

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Exhaustion and Champagne

This has been an absolute shitter of a week, with so much to do that I have started workdays at 5am, and finished at 11pm on three occasions. Add to that a trip to Milan, and it’s no surprise that I’ve just had 14 hours’ sleep, and am looking forward to this Bank Holiday Weekend like a man looking forward to the end of his gaol sentence.

Tuesday sees me going up to Port Sunlight for a meting, and then to Paris on Wednesday and Thursday for research groups. On the decided plus side, I’m staying at Le Crillon and Wife is coming with me, while the children are looked after by my parents – so she is currently planning an itinerary that would make the Bank Manager blench…

I went out for drinks with Old Friend At Work after we finished up (now that she has been elevated to the Worldwide planning group, her office is opposite mine, so we can do semaphore for “Let Us Leave This Place In Search of Champagne” through the glass walls), and with pleasing predictability, we ended up sobbing about Shakespeare and comparing different plays, as we shouted out iambic pentameters.

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