There were six of us, sitting in the board room, each in front of a computer on which accounting software was running. We were not working, yet. We were just anxiously awaiting the arrival of our course instructor; the one who’d teach us the ins and outs of the software package we recently purchased. She was late. We didn’t know if she was still coming, no-one has heard from her. As the minutes ticked by, my excitement, at possibly learning something new, started to dwindle.
Five minutes into the waiting game, 5% of my excitement slinked out the door. It was standing wide open. Three minutes later another 5% decided to go look for that missing piece, and I thought; I have a lot of work waiting in my office. A couple of minutes later I could feel one corner of my mouth starting on a downward slide. The other corner followed at a slower rate. Another 20% of my excitement set off in search of the now missing 10%. The door was still wide open! It was getting harder, by the second, to stay motivated and open-minded. I was already bored.
I decided to go to my office, half hoping that I might find my missing excite-bits along the way. I didn’t have any luck, it must have gone into hiding. I did find a twist tie in my office, though: This might come in handy; and went back to see if the training has started yet. Nope. By the time the instructor finally breezed in, my excitement was looking like a doggie blanket after it’s been used in one too many tests of ferocious strength, and just about 15% there. Lady, you had better be better than good to make up for this.
My twist tie waited patiently during the first twenty or so minutes of the training, and then it reached out to me. It wanted to tell me something. It thought it wanted to imitate an EKG wave thingy. With a few twists here, and a couple of turns there, it turned out looking like a mongrel wave. Wait! What was the class talking about? Oh, okay, I knew that. And again the twist tie demanded my attention. It challenged me to find its true purpose, because it just wasn’t happy as a plain old tie. I was getting bored again, so why not? The class was led by the ‘students’ and not by the instructor – the whole thing evolved into a Q&A session with the instructor sometimes unable to give a good answer.
Four (it was supposed to be eight) hours later we filed out of the temporary training room. Some of my colleagues looked a bit glum. I breathed a sigh of relief. At least my twist tie seemed happy enough with its new purpose in life.
clouded marbles 