This past work week has been manic.  Deadlines, deadlines and more deadlines.  Unfortunately for me, all of these deadlines are beyond my control.  In the deadline scenario, I am the enforcer.  So, my week has been one of ‘enforce, scramble, enforce, threaten, enforce, scramble, threaten’…you get the gist!

Due to the manic nature of this week, I was hardly at my own desk for more than 5 minutes at a time.  Instead I was pounding the corridors in my well practised ‘heels’ strut’, barking at the office manager about the unacceptable state of all things that do not work, all whilst trying to meet a missed deadline with an acceptable amount of tardiness.

The missed deadline morning arrived.  I popped to the office at 7:30AM to sort a few things out before heading off for the day.  I noticed a note from a partner on my desk regarding a meeting he had attended the previous day.  Partners are like doctors: their handwriting deteriorates with each year of practice.  Other than ‘please discuss’, I couldn’t make out all of the message (i.e., the most important part of the message).  Time was my enemy. I didn’t have a spare minute to run to that partner’s secretary to enlist help to decode the message!

My understanding of the scrawled note was ‘Make contact with these guys.  We should send them some ‘boobs”!  Really?????  ‘Boobs’???????  What would your wife think????  But I got to thinking – if we sent all potential clients some ‘boobs’, we’d be overrun and my work would be soooooo easy.  Just how could we do that????

Once the mayhem settled and I returned to the office, I spoke to the scrawling writing partner in question.

‘Books’……he drawled in his unimpressed, humourless accent.  ‘It says ‘books”.

Aaahhh.

Noted.