Bored to Death

I had the joyous fun of a two-day managers meet-up to contend with this week. I was looking forward to it about as much as someone with photosensitive epilepsy looks forward to a strobe light convention. My expectations were that it would be mind-numbingly tedious and unbelievably unhelpful, and even setting my standards that low I was still stunned by how pointless and how painful it was.
We learnt that senior management want the filling stations to be more profitable (big surprise!) and that there may be the possibilities of staff cutbacks in a couple of months time (big surprise!) We also had to sit through a three-hour presentation by an external consultant who has been visiting various garages and, as far as I can tell, has spent his entire time compiling a powerpoint show containing dozens of indecipherable graphs. As ever, I was tempted to fill the air with snarky comments and risk discipline from my superiors due to my lack of commitment and bad attitude, but in the end I just sat back and doodled while everybody else in the room expressed my inner feelings by verbalising their own. After 15 minutes or so, every slide in the slideshow was being greeted by groans, tuts or the good old-fashioned ‘shaking of the head while huffing.’ No-one wanted to be there, no-one gained anything positive from it, and we all agreed our time would have been better spent going paintballing with each other and then swapping ideas in a pub.  
I feel like I need a big shower now to wash off all the mental scarring. Then I shall have a nice bit of grub, then I shall attack the drums for a while. 
Tomorrow, thank God, I’m back to my little office.

RC 21-2-18