Mini Chapter 1
No day was the same at Totally, Totally, Global Incorporated: the date on the schedule changed. And yet all days were identical: meetings, conference calls, e-mail fire-fighting and staring at screens which changed in size during the day; pretty small when you rolled out of bed; a little bigger on the train. Bigger still in the cubicle. And even bigger in ‘The War Room’.
Times staring at a screen were interspersed with standing in the queue for ‘barista’ coffee. In the queue we longed for the simplicity of their job: perfecting a piccino and learning the names and drinks of those directors who jumped the queue. And we knew the baristas longed for the spoils of our job: salaries, bonuses, job titles and gym membership; but perhaps not our actual job. In the queue was also where you processed texts from your partner about trivial issues (compared to Q2 Vital Indicators or Q2VI) such as your child’s school trip to the Air Museum, discovered what friends were pretending to do on a variety of social media and scanned the feeds and world of false news.
We spent a lot of time in the War Room these days as sales figures were never where they ought to be. Hemel Hempstead was the high-flyer brought in from the Munich office to ‘change the sales space’ as CEO Tim Wrangling had proclaimed at last year’s kick-off. Hemel’s main tactic was Trance by PPT; it was impossible to survive beyond slide 2. But today’s meeting was a crunch one.
TBC...