Bottoms Up

What do you do when you work for a director who won't describe his glass as half full but instead tells you that since it isn't full it might as well be completely empty? In reality his grail is well over half full and the waiter is heading towards us with an amphora of the best, but there is absolutely no way he will raise his glass to celebrate.

If we, the minions, raise our glasses now it is to drown our unrecognised sorrows rather than to toast a year of record sales and orders. We can drink to the memories of the talented colleagues who have left for more optimistic climates. We can marinate ourselves in the bitter knowledge of failure - failure to reach an unreachable goal.

I can look back on that project now with the benefit of panoramic hindsight. There were more problems to solve than most of the engineers expected, so even had the engineers' original estimates been used to set the goal it would have been difficult to meet. As it was, the director's insistance that the goal be 6 months earlier than any reasonable prediction was a ludicrous call. His visions of flying pigs wasn't a shared vision. Maybe he drank the first half of his glass too quickly.

How is my glass? It's half full at the moment. This business unit has been successful for a lot longer than the current managing director's span of management. The gears of administration are turning and the software engineering manager production line is producing a replacement. Soon I shall be a redundant manager but a functional engineer again.

Cheers!