The coworkers that I like and I found ourselves with a few extra moments to gab yesterday. This doesn’t happen much because our schedules are not synched together very well. Also, since the start of the union drive and subsequent negotiations, the nature of the workplace has changed considerably. Nonetheless, yesterday was a throwback to that. That in itself could be considered a Perfect Moment.
We were talking about Christmas presents and whether there was, in fact, a trend towards a greener, more sustainable Christmas. Since some people are being laid-off due to a decline in enrolment numbers, the question as to whether there was a trend towards a less expensive Christmas also existed.
Of course we had no answers. We can do a lot with verbs, adjectives, adverbs, and even some nouns, but solving the financial problems of the even the immediate around us seems quite hard. For those who are tackling world problems it must be doubly so. Have to say I really do admire Greta right now.
Once, one of the big bosses came to visit work and she related a story about how some team won the Henley Regatta by only working on things that made the boat go faster–kind of like those incremental gains over at Team Sky. Her goal was to unite us in a common cause. Sadly, what most of us got out of the speech was that the company brass was enjoying the Henley Regatta while we were teaching over privileged kids with bad attitudes and adults who had been sold a lot of unreal expectations–fluent in two months? Absolutely. What makes the boat go faster? Less jet travel and four star hotels and more video conferencing for one thing.
As for the my coworkers and I, at least we’ve decided on a gathering for Misfits’ Christmas. There might be photos worth sharing.