Yes Man Cometh

Crisis was once the other side of the world, bankruptcy was for banks, austerity was for emerging nations and suddenly, as fast as a man with diarhoea searching for the nearest toilet and  a compulsory gravity-assisted weight loss diet plan is  a GO, suddenly  the Big Bad Wolf is at the office door. We are facing the wrong side of the equation in a red-line world.

Austerity is amongst us like a medieaval plague. A Black death in shades of grey.

And I am in a strange twilight world,  an unwell man of losing-a-changing beliefs, a mix of a diabetic seaching for the insulin syringe waiting for a necessary pain and a heretic praying to a God that was long neglected. Beliefs are gone and a lesser life is accepted.

Austerity breeds a survival trigger that the young bucks are ready for.
I may be growing old, I am, its called life. I may be growing jealous, it is not necessarily called life.

Today I am jealous. I am seeing greatness in degrees.

He says "Great" when he means "Really?". We could be team players, a happy consensus decision-making entity; but we are not. We are evolutionary survivors in the maelstrom of corporate inter departmental empire building while Rome burns.

He is the greater evil. I am fighting not for glory but for peer group survival and a pension. He fights to be my boss and my bosses' boss. My bosses listen. They see a Boss, they see themselves. Rotten apples rot.

The Company was the greatest and now the Empire may fall in the real world that cares not for the inter departmental games we play.

I am a sadder person of the person I once was,  a man feel unwilling not to become bitter and twisted, as bitter words are twisted to my disadvantage.

He tells it like it should be, not as it is. Telling it as it is, will not please the listeners who prefer things like it should be. Bosses like it. And if bosses like it, he likes it. Rose tinted spectacles are de rigeur. Things will be allright as long as we say its so.
Critical appraisal is left for the peer group review coffee break.
I tell it like it is, from experience and its called lack of ambition and he is ambitious.

He was seen to be the future at the team building appraisal where a skill in building egg-carrying, paper towers turns heads and brings promotion.
The reality check of the Big-bad, Real-world Wolf, that is called "Egg eater", will huff and puff and bring the house of cards down, but that is for next week's reality.
At the team building appraisal contest he is king. The Big Bad Wolf was not there.

I built slowly in brick for I was older and I knew of the metaphorical Wolf  knocking at the door.
Perhaps I was thick as a brick. I expected praise for my craftmanship, my aesthetic fitness for purpose of tower magnificence, et voila,.......... it is old school, it is built for yesterday and may serve tomorrow, but paper is the "new black" and was in for today.

The corporate empire falls as Fiddlers roam the coffee areas, that were once Bosses, looking at the paper trail, looking to lay blame, looking over shoulders and wondering why.

Am I lauded for my forethought, am I turned to, to raise the phoenix from the ashes.

I am applauded as a fool. Brick building is the future now, but brick building was not the future back then.
Being from "Back Then" is Bad, because being right from 'back then' proves that the  bosses were wrong 'back then' when paper was good. They said paper was good. A guilty finger could point that they were misguided, and if no-one knows then no-one knows. No-one knows the Fiddlers were wrong.
The Fiddlers can  be Bosses still, and he moves on with an egg, paper dreams and a ready Yes.

I sit afraid the Company Pension is my paper dream. I sit with my metaphorical phoenix. I still have the fire to make the ashes part..

1% mutually assured destruction

Mr Pareto invented a theorem that most of the time, 80% is good enough, because doing that extra 20%  to get to the magic 100% takes twice as long and by that time the horse has left the barn, the boat has left the harbour and the train has left the station or any other saying that means you're walking.

I am probably not quite a Mr Pareto in that my comfort zone is 90% and I hope the pony is still in the barn and is not called Shank.

But sometimes....

I am being re-assured that something is 99% good. "Good" you may say, best foot forward, you may say, not bloody likely, I say. My local colleague is telling me the site, our site for a new mega project is 99% free of mines. Call me a cowardly custard, but a 1% minefield is still a minefield and the paralympics does not need another hero,
Mr Pareto's 80% can go to pot, Mr Pryce's 90% is old hat, I am a 100% man today. I want to walk away.