Have you heard of the "I/You/He" sequence? It's a sort of jokey way of expressing the perils of subjectivity and self-justification. Thus: I am a conoisseur of fine wines, You like a drink or two, He is a howling alcoholic.
And it was this sequence which occurred to me this week when a client company conspired to blow its own delivery schedule apart by expanding the workload it had assigned me. In this case, it went something like: I am focussed, You are single-minded, He is a stubborn uncooperative hack who won't amend his schedule.
Well, it wasn't a question of "wouldn't", it was a question of "couldn't". As in, there's no way you can stick two extra days' work into a five-day schedule on Monday and still expect to get everything you wanted on Friday. Asking every five minutes whether I'd made any progress yet didn't, by some mysterious process, seem to make it any better.
As it happens, I did get the work done on time, by the skin of my teeth, after working late every night.
But will I get paid on time?
Well, you've read this blog before. You guess. Grrrrrr....
