I’ve had a cock of a day.
I had a lie-in, I’ve not set foot in the office and I’ve not done a stroke of work, but I’ve had a cock of a day.
Today, I was one of 160 “senior managers” (sic) forced to attend my business’s Annual Senior Management Conference. The experience was what I suspect it must be like for an atheist to sit in on an Alpha Course session when they’ve had a few beers, an E and a kebab.
Instead of lunch we had a finger buffet and a “speed networking” event, where we had to spend three interminable minutes getting to know people we hadn’t met before. Every Stepford Cunt I ended up with worked in either IT or Finance, so you can imagine how much fun I had.
Our instructions for this farce said that we had to tell each other (along with name, rank and serial number) what our “ambition” is. One of the Cro-Magnons from IT explained how his team was one of a series of IT teams “delivering change” within our business (no, I’ve not got a clue and I didn’t want to ask) and it was his ambition “to lead my team to be recognized within our business as the best deliverers of IT change and then to lead it to similar recognition externally, too.” And he meant every fucking word.
“What about you?” he asked.
“My ambition is to make it to the end of today.”
“I couldn’t agree more!” he exclaimed. “We must live every day as though it is our last and embrace every opportunity it brings!”
No salary on Earth could ever turn me into that kind of gimp.
In fact, I don’t even think a lifetime of polygamy with Nathalie Portman, Winona Ryder, Michelle Pfeiffer, Claire Danes, Naomi Watts, Anna Friel, Heather Graham, Halle Berry, Emmanuelle Beart, Kylie, a pre-Cruise Katie Holmes, Kate Moss and Keira Knightley could turn me into that kind of gimp.
The conclusion of the afternoon’s proceedings was to split the 160 into 16 groups of 10 and have each group “workshop” what we “feel” the “culture” of our business “is”. Each group then had to nominate a spokesperson to present the group’s results to the Venerable Chief Exec. Each spokesperson proceed to read identical lists of words off their flip chart…
GREAT PEOPLE
FUN
WORK HARD, PLAY HARD
TEAMWORK
RESPONSIVE
ENTHUSIASTIC
STRONG LEADERSHIP
CHALLENGING
…while naturally emphasising to the beaming Venerable Chief Exec in ever more obsequious terms just how important his Strong Leadership is and how we couldn’t possibly do anything – get out of bed, wipe our bottoms, think for ourselves – were it not for him. The only surprise was that someone didn’t actually get down on their knees and gobble him off in the middle of the room.
Kill me now. I beg you, give me my stapler and let me beat myself over the head with it until I no longer exist.
And in the highly unlikely event I find myself working for this bunch of evangelical zealots in twelve months’ time, remind me that I MUST arrange to take a holiday to avoid having to live through this debasement again.
Hahaha! This is priceless stuff. It proves that all the pisstakes we see on comedy shows like the Office don’t go nearly far enough. Zealots all deserve the Chris Morris treatment (from his days on Radio 1 after midnight when he had Cliff Richard on the end of a phone line and screamed “CHRIST’S FAT COCK” over Cliff’s meanderings).