Work
It has been a weird work week for me. I have been traveling more than I normally do -- two trips in one week, once to Detroit and once to Raleigh. Projects have been converging, beginning and otherwise keeping me on my toes. Which is actually, the way I like it -- I have long since known that idleness is my prelude to depression.
(I have always wondered about that. There are lots of possible explanations, but I figure it is just the outcome of having demanding parents and being part of an educational track that used the word "special" far too often. You see, being active leads to things getting done, and that, is the source of my ego. Work product is the fulfillment of my purpose in life. Even though I have read my Weber, it doesn't mean that I can change it.)
Anyway, this week has been the realization that cheeriness is a very powerful. Shockingly so. I performed my meeting version of a double-blind study: one meeting I actively tried to put a zing in my voice. Actually use exclamation points. Use the same exclimation points in my e-mail to set up the meeting. And in weird, freakish way, it worked. The client loved it.
Not two days earlier, almost the exact same meeting was a dud when I was low key and taciturn. Same arguments, same structure, same screens.
Which is a little sad - I am not an effervescent person by nature, so to muster that up for clients all the time is not going to be easy. But good lord, if it greases the wheels this way always, then I will be beaming like Mary-Friggin-Sunshine. Kathy Lee, lookout.
*thinks about that a little more*
Eh.
Me thinks I will look like Nicholson in the first Batman movie - freakish and creepy.
I am just not perky.
1 Comments:
Isn't it terrifying how close the common sense of everyday corporate social relations is to becoming a Stepford Wife?
On Monday you're smiling and putting zing into your presentations; by Wednesday you feel you don't have the right to be merely professional and brisk; by Friday you're baking cookies for the surgeons who are performing your lobotomy.
I think Nicholson has my favorite line in the whole first Batman movie: after his joy buzzer has burnt his henchman to a crisp and the rest of the people around the boardroom have fled in terror, The Joker beams at the corpse and says, "I'm glad you're dead!" Something those Raleigh Regis Philbins had better think about the next time they see you grinning in a boardroom, Kathie Lee Roughgroove, although I expect that you can find more flattering colors than purple and chalk white (although it can't hurt to think about dyeing your hair green).
Alas, Patitos identifies more with the best line from the second Batman movie, in which sad Selina Kyle routinely enters her apartment with, "Hi, Honey, I'm home! [Ironic pause] Oh, I forgot, I'm not married." Perhaps I should have been putting more zing into my argument, structures, and screens at the gay bars of New York these last twenty years--
11:59 AM
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