The boss is dead, but doesn’t let that stop him from scheduling online meetings at inconvenient hours, Zooming in from the afterlife to update us all on aims and strategies. There is, he says with remarkable clarity for someone who’s little more than articulated bone, a need for clear communication, in line with our values; a need for information sharing and gathering feedback. He’s chosen a background showing his old office, with framed certificates and a couple of prominent awards for unspecified achievements in a past life, and I always wonder if he’s in Heaven, Hell, Limbo, or some hitherto unimagined state of material being. It’s 4am, the cat’s awake and wanting food, but the boss wants to take this opportunity to look at the Strategic Plan and its direction, with updates on changes. This is a safe space in which we can make challenges, while respecting each other’s opinions, he assures us, with just the faintest clack of an impossibly suspended hyoid bone: What we are doing and how we are doing. There is, of course, no plan, and all other voices are muted. Meanwhile, the cat hisses, its fur at attention, like the guard of honour at a despot’s state funeral.
.
Oz Hardwick
Thanks to Eugen Bacon
Picture Nick Victor
.