The Diary of a Reluctant Management Consultant

"The weather was fantastic!"

The first week back at the office can, quite possibly, be the most frustrating of the year. The reasons are many and varied but can usually be traced to the clash of the idiots (like me) who worked over the festive season and the lucky schmucks who took leave and went on holiday. As the holiday-makers pour back into the office with their relaxed demeanours, golden tans and childlike, optimistic attitudes, they are met by a small group of disgruntled, envious, aggravated and pale pessimists.

Everywhere you go in the office a shiny, happy person wants to tell you what they did over the holidays and those who lurked around the office over this time are eager to justify why the chose to work while the rest of the country was at the coast trying to get sand out of their nether regions. The result is the same, numbingly dull and repetitive conversation had at the vending machine, in the lift and even at the urinal, despite the unwritten urinal “absolutely no conversation unless you’re absolutely drunk” rule. But there’s very little straight talk in these conversations; the truth is carefully hidden from view. Take for example some of the things that the vacationers regularly sprout forth:

And here’s a little sample of what the poor, unfortunate, self-appointed martyrs have to say:

That’s right; the first week back at the office is filled with boring people telling you boring stories of the boring things they did on their boring holidays. And when you eventually make it back to the office, you’re met with some idiot parking in your parking spot; your access card doesn’t work because Security re-set them on 1 January and you can’t log on because you’ve forgotten your password.

But it’s good to be back at the office – I was running low on Post-It notes and besides, I was cut-off by a dunce in an Audi this morning, so at least things are back to normal.

Oh crap, don't look now, but it's 2010!

This week is probably the most boring week of the year. Unless you’re lazing at home or are on holiday and have managed to escape the office, overcoming a potential British Airways strike, grounded flights because of snow storms or a Nigerian trying to blow up your plane, then sadly, like me, you’re stuck in the office. Yes, we could be relaxing on a beach somewhere, sipping fruity drinks with little umbrellas in them but instead we’re drinking lukewarm, vending machine coffee with a slight rubbery aftertaste and a mini tongue depressant masquerading as a stirrer.

But whether you’re holidaying in Spain with binge-drinking Brits, freezing your nuts off in New York waiting for the ball to drop (it’s not what you think) or quietly re-organising the stationery cupboard at work, we can all look forward to New Year’s Eve this Thursday. That’s right, whether you’re Tiger Woods, Ben Bernanke or Susan Boyle’s make-up artist, we can all hope to usher in a new year, full of the promise of new beginnings, grand successes and safe in the knowledge that Land Rovers are now made by Tata and Volvos will soon be made by Geely.

Unfortunately, like the much anticipated new Guns ‘n Roses album “Chinese Democracy”, New Year’s Eve parties are generally disappointing and a bit of an anti-climax. There’s much expectation in the air; you’ve already decided which party you’re going to go to, at the expense of all the other lesser parties you’ve been invited to. You’ve decided which group of super-cool people you’re going to be partying with even if you don’t know their names. You’ve even memorised the lyrics to Europe’s “The Final Countdown”… just in case.

But no matter how hard you try, you always seem to be chasing the party. Somebody’s always at a better party, having a better time, dancing to better music with far more attractive people than you’re with! You may decide that the party you’re at is dull and boring, so you leave in a rush, desperately trying to get to another cooler party before midnight, failing miserably and ending up celebrating  the new year in the back of a car, stuck in traffic with other disappointed people all trying to get to another more entertaining party.

The alternative to a night out on the town is a night in the home. You and a couple of friends that also have nothing to do and are equally afraid of crowds, cover charges and clubbing might band together to bring in the new year in a very domesticated fashion. The evening’s entertainment might be overly competitive couples who insist on playing 30 Seconds or Charades.  Music’s courtesy of the radio or whatever’s on VH1. For added enjoyment, the host will have supplied everyone with party hats, kazoos, streamers and glasses in the shape of ’2010′. I know, it is difficult to contain your excitement.

Five minutes before midnight, you’re forced to don the hat, put on the 2010 glasses and blow your kazoo, which fortunately interrupts the couple fighting over why she couldn’t guess “Love in the Time of Cholera” from his heart hand gestures and pooping sound effects. And before you know it, The Final Countdown’s playing, champagne’s flowing and the awkward hugging of people you’ve just met that evening begins. At 00:30 the most boring couple of the evening will leave, followed steadily by everyone else, leaving you to make your way home wondering if 2010 will bring another gripping season of Gossip Girl, a Lady Gaga outfit that looks like a dress and finally reaching closure that Lost makes absolutely no sense at all!

Happy New Year everyone!

Parking as easy as a walk in the park during the holidays...

Working over the holidays can be a bit of a pain. While all of your colleagues are off having a great time with their family and friends at some exotic destination, you’re stuck in the cube farm, thinking of new and exciting ways to format your budget spreadsheets (mine are looking particularly spectacular this year). Still, there are some benefits to being in the office at this time of year – less traffic being my favourite. So, here’s my list of pros and cons to working over the holiday season:

Got any other suggestions? Let me know at diary@jeetesh.net

Party like it's Financial Year End...

Christmas is a fantastic time of the year. People are full of joy, love and the spirit of giving. In my experience, the ‘joy’ is the result of the tequila, the ‘love’ is what some colleagues have for each other as they stumble back to the function whilst adjusting their clothes and the ‘giving’ mostly involves providing your colleagues with something to talk about for years to come. That’s right; the Christmas party season is well and truly underway! Big or small, low budget or lavish, fancy dress or black tie, employees all over the world are throwing their names away like Amy Winehouse at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting chaired by Lindsay Lohan.

The Christmas party is a great way to end the year. The year has usually been a very long one, full of stress, frustration and indigestion… and that’s just the vending machines. And of course, if I’m in your building, chances are, someone’s been or is about to be asked to pursue their career objectives at an alternate organisation. But the Christmas party is a little bit of solace, a chance to relax, let your hair down (unless you’re Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer) and celebrate your successes (singular in the case of General Motors).

Apart from having a great time at a Christmas party, watching your colleagues is the real highlight of the event. During the course of the year, most people are well behaved, controlled and shy, but invite them to the Christmas party and everyone’s inner-Courtney-Love comes out. Who knew that Sharon in accounting knows all the dance steps from Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies” music video? After a display like that, you can guarantee no one’s rushing to “put a ring on it”! I’ve had to help a colleague get home safely because he parked in the wrong driveway and wondered why his remote control wouldn’t open “his” garage door. I’ve also been fortunate enough to witness fellow team members spank each other on the dance floor. Great at the time, but resulted in far too many awkward stares in the canteen the next day. And speaking of being a witness, I was once asked to be one at a colleague’s disciplinary hearing following a project Christmas party. Don’t ask.

The saddest Christmas party that I’m thankful not to have attended was one held by a client’s sister company in London. The “party” was held in the foyer, after hours. It had a not-so-joyous fixed end time because “the cleaning staff will start cleaning promptly at 19:30″. Entertainment consisted of a laptop connected to tiny speakers. Catering was care of the local fast food restaurant, with the invitation encouraging that “Orders must be in by 16:00, at the very latest or you will not eat” and drinks consisted of whatever came with your Big Mac. To add insult to injury, partygoers were charged £10 to attend! Talk about being filled with the spirit of giving!

You may have already thrown your name away this year, but here are a few quick tips for your Christmas party:

• Don’t use a bus as landmark to remember where you parked your car… you know, in case it drives away
• Don’t eat the chicken or the fish
• You may be speaking to God via the big, white, porcelain telephone if you’ve ingested more Jägermeister than it’s meant to digest
• Check to see if you’re the only guy dancing to the Weather Girls’ “It’s Raining Men”
• Silk ties are not meant to be used as headbands
• Beware of these two words: Stroh Rum
• Find the nearest bathroom if people are complimenting you on your cute boxer shorts
• It’s time to go home when someone says “Dude you’re a tequila monster”

PMBOK and Prince II approved method for tracking the number of days to Christmas

My attempt to ignore the festive season is proving to be as unsuccessful as my attempt to ignore a midget I saw at McDonalds. He insisted on standing on his tip-toes to order, even though McDonalds kindly provides a small, yellow, “little people’s” staircase for just such a purpose. I offered to pick him up and put him on the counter, but he rudely turned down this considerate suggestion. So much for trying to help your fellow man! He also didn’t see the irony in ordering a Big Mac…

Now, back to why I find the festive season irritating… For starters, I can’t stand the crowds in the malls, the gaudy Christmas decorations, the creepy Santa Claus in the shops and most annoying, the Boney M Christmas Carol CD playing incessantly everywhere you go! As exciting as retrenching people is, the best job I’ve ever had is still working at a Häagen Dazs in London. The only blemish on this otherwise joyous working experience is the fact that the manager insisted on playing the Boney M Christmas Carol CD all day. “It’s evokes all that’s good about Christmas”, he said, not realising how quickly you want to smash the little drummer boy’s drum over his head after you’ve heard the CD repeat for the third time!

Some companies take Christmas quite seriously. From about now, Christmas decorations start going up around the office, stockings get hung up on cubicles in the vain hope that someone might put something of value in them… like an AIG bonus and tiny Christmas trees are sprouting on people’s desks. Not wanting to feel left out, I’ve put some tinsel on my probably dead pot plant Adam Smith. Invisible Hand high five!

Two years ago, our team bought a whole heap of Christmas decorations to add some artificial Christmas spirit to the drab, dungeon-like floor we were working on. The procurement process was quick (only four people needed to sign-off) and much to our surprise (and the surprise of the people we retrenched a little later that month), our Christmas Decoration budget was approved. We contacted the companies’ preferred, BEE-approved (black economic empowerment, for non-South African readers) Christmas decoration vendor and promptly bought the decorations we requested.

Included in our stash were ten advent calendars. Advent calendars are a great way of introducing disciplined project management techniques to tracking the number of days to Christmas. Plus, there’s a chocolate coin to eat everyday until Christmas (Microsoft Project offers no such benefit). We thought this was an excellent bonus to purchasing these particular advent calendars, until the following morning when we realised that the cleaners had eaten all our chocolates! It seems the Invisible Hand was hard at work the previous evening. Festive externalities – what can do?

I’m beginning to think that I was a little patronising to the midget I met at McDonalds. Maybe I should have gone the extra mile by referring him to an ad I’d seen asking for “little” people to apply for jobs as elves at a local shopping mall. There I go again, just trying to help my fellow man!

Office Superman, you will get noticed!

A strange sense of giddiness overcame offices across the country this week. Women prancing round the office in shocking pink dresses, garnished with flowers in their hair, men wearing goofy ties over t-shirts and even one brave individual sporting a Superman outfit! I’m told the latter is an engineer, which explains so much. He probably wears his underwear on the outside regularly. The reason for all this frivolity is Spring Day, the 1^st of September for us lucky Southern Hemisphere residents. And later in the week came Casual Day, a fairly recent and pointless invention, if it wasn’t raising money for charity.

I find invented holidays and celebrations very annoying. There’s really no need for Secretaries Day. Why celebrate only one thankless but necessary profession? Surely then we also need to celebrate Uninformed Call Centre Agent Day, Random Guy Who Fixes the Photocopier Day and Lazy Canteen Cashier Day? Then there’s National Braai (barbeque, if you’re not South African) Day, the patron of which is rather unexpectedly and incongruously, Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu. Who would have thought that one the side benefits of winning a Nobel Peace Prize is getting to champion the cause of grilled meat? Gandhi was a shoe in if wasn’t for the hunger strikes…

Spring Day sees the company cheerleaders dash around the office the night before draping streamers over desks, balancing balloons on credenzas and leaving party hats on your desk – the cheap kind with the flimsy staples and elastic that will graze your chin when it snaps (blame the global economic crisis for this too). When you walk in the next morning it looks like someone had a children’s party the night before and didn’t clean-up. All that’s missing is the clown… until of course the engineer in the Superman outfit arrives.

Now, Casual Day is very different proposition and requires more crowd participation. Basically, you donate some money to charity, get a sticker proving your benevolence and in return you get to wear casual clothes to work. Genius… if you work for a company that still dresses up formally. The last few companies that I worked for have all had fairly relaxed dress codes, thereby negating any desire to dress up casually on a particular day because a poster in the canteen told you to. If you still wear suits and ties to work, then I see the benefit, but this is becoming rarer in companies today. I wore a suit and tie on my first day at one company a couple of years ago and they asked me to stop that because it was intimidating the staff. Lucky they didn’t see my 10MB Excel “people off payroll” spreadsheet…

I guess Casual Day reminds me of school where we called it Civvies Day. Same concept, you bring some money and a can of food for the poor and you get the privilege of not having to wear your school uniform. The money and food went to a good cause, although one year we were asked to bring cans of more basic food stuff. Seems the poor had very little need for John West’s canned mussels, asparagus spears or artichoke hearts. Think of it as canned food re-gifting. Private school, go figure. Civvies Day was entertaining, especially the one year when we managed to convince two new boys that it involves a ‘best dressed’ competition, causing them wear tuxedos the next day, much to our amusement and their distress and no doubt, long term trauma. It was very funny though… An idea perhaps for when your next intake of graduates start?

Tomorrow, I’ll go to work where the Spring Day decorations are probably still up, limply adorning my cubicle. For entertainment value, I think I’m going to dress up as Desmond Tutu next year…