Today, my colleagues and I are told to "keep the momentum going" yet also "find time to stop and smell the roses." Dueling directives issued by the same uninspired team leader during a pointless meeting of his apathetic team.
If we were landscape gardeners in the English style, I suppose this contradictory advice might make at least a little sense. But our labors occur exclusively indoors and involve the transportation of digital information from one place to another, an activity in which momentum depends entirely upon the capricious whim of networked computers. There is no odor of any kind, as far as I'm aware, floral or otherwise, unless there should be an electrical fire in the mainframe, and I very much doubt our boss would suggest we "stop and smell the burning data."
So we sit in the meeting wondering what to do. Maintain current workflow velocity, which certainly sounds like an acceptable management-speak agenda; or purchase a rose-scented air freshener for the office from the nearest pharmacy. Obviously, once an air freshener is successfully installed we can keep pace with required momentum while simultaneously inhaling its roseate bouquet. But the initial acquisition of an air freshener from the nearest pharmacy, a chore which will retard daily momentum by about twenty minutes assuming they have one in stock, leaves us in an existential quandary. Do we take the momentum hit now in order to smell roses today, or put off the rose smelling until tomorrow to maintain momentum today? Optimistically, I present a Venn diagram of concentric circles illustrating what I call "Work-Sniff Balance for the 21st century." Fortunately for me, no-one asks why no two circles intersect.
The meeting ends with the team leader passing out a productivity chart displaying a prominent downward trend, the trajectory not dissimilar to that of a bird hit by a pellet in midflight and plummeting violently to earth. Apparently, our momentum, if we are to keep going in the same direction, will eventually see us fall so far vertically that we'll end up underground. And deep in the bowels of the planet, instead of roses, we can finally stop and smell the rotting core of all dead things.
No-one mentions this, of course. We return to our desks as if we have renewed purpose: momentum-o-meters to be synchronized, purchase orders for air fresheners to be printed. But we must check our emails first. Perhaps some charitable client has thrown us a bone, however meatless it might be, while we were in the team meeting. We can only hope.
