Hidey ho, neighbors. It’s Monday morning and I’m back in New York with several thoughts in my head. One: Domestic Coach class really stinks. I mean, low-cost seating is one thing, but I don’t expect a piece of cheese to be wedged in my headrest.
And yes, there WAS cheese. Old cheese. Seat hadn’t been vacuumed for weeks.
My ancestors came over on a boat from Europe about a hundred years ago. The part of the boat they were on must have pretty much felt like I did before I got my very late, unexpected upgrade to the last seat in Business yesterday. Come on, dudes. Guys who fly on their own dime are people too. Attention must be paid! Thanks.
Two: Be it ever so mired in tension, politics and tedium, there’s no place like your office. As you know, I’ve been away for a bit. I got back to find a desktop (the real one) full of mail and my computer crashed from some incident that happened over the last few days. I rebooted and threw away a bunch of analog paper. It’s amazing how — now that everything of value is done electronically — there is not one single piece of snail mail that’s anything but useless. What a pile of mung! Note to Chase Bank: Stop sending me solicitations! I have enough credit cards! Haven’t you guys gotten tired of supplying credit to people? Save a tree!
Anyhow, here we are. In a few minutes, I’ll have some coffee. If I’m very lucky, nothing at all will happen in the next several hours before lunch. All of this while a beehive of activity goes on around me. Know why I can crank my yanker this way? Because I’m the boss.
This brings me to my request of you today. That’s right. Because my brain is almost utterly empty at this moment, I thought I would shift the work to you and ask you to do something. Know why I am allowed to gather wool in this particular fashion? Right again. Because… I’m the boss.
In case you haven’t noticed, bosses get away with a huge raft of behavior that normal people can’t. The bigger the boss, the greater latitude the individual has for work stoppage, labor shifting, on-the-job snoozage, feeding on company time, vague perambulation, digital invisibility, inexplicable vacuity, manipulation of time as a solid/liquid object that retains the properties of both a particle and a wave, that kind of thing.
I’m doing some research on the subject and would like anybody within the sound of my voice to consider the matter and then send along something bosses actually do to 1) have more fun, 2) do less “work” and 3) enjoy the “work” they do more, than the average person. I want real stories about real people. Bosses, send in your tactics and strategems. Employees, report on the ones you’ve personally experienced or even heard about. How does being a boss replicate the experience of actually being a retired person? Lots of golf? Mentoring the young? Sleeping during the day? Think about it. And lemme know.
Oh, and one last thing, vis-a-vis a certain recent controversy in this space: I write this blog. Nobody else does. There are no interns. There are no mini-Bings. What there are, of course, are people who are doing all the things I should be doing while I write this blog. Thanks to them. And to you guys, of course.
And hey, don’t get me wrong. If you want to toss a Bing Blog over the transom for my use, please feel free to do so, as long as it doesn’t get in the way of today’s real assignment. I’ll use it if I feel like it and ignore it if I don’t. I’ll take the credit if I like it and forget to say thank you. After a while, I’ll convince myself I actually thought it up in the first place. Know why I can do all these things?
Correctamundo!
