Dialogue
Background: Before being acquired by MegaCo (fictitious name), the company where I work was based in Geneva, and much of the core operation was based there. After the acquisition, much of the Geneva workforce was moved to Houston.
So, today I think I gained some insight on the Euro mentality towards "dialogue."
Apparently, one of the Swiss guys is using a machine that's a couple of years old, and had some hard drive problems. Not good, because he manipulates a LOT of data.
The IT person finally got him up and running, and actually went beyond the normal call to work with him on a strategy for backing up his data (in an effort to head off future problems).
But he had a better idea how to do it.
Never mind that it was an EXPENSIVE idea, and that he has no budget authority to implement said idea.
That's not important. What was important was for him politely to tell the IT person over and over and over how much better it would be to do it his way, and how shortsighted it was of the company not to want to do it that way, and how much work (and productivity) could be lost because of the inadequacy of the IT approach. Blah blah blah.
And the IT person kept telling him that yes, his idea was not a bad one, and he might want to discuss implementing it with his senior management, BUT RIGHT NOW IT WAS IMPORTANT AT LEAST TO HAVE AN INTERIM SOLUTION TO THE PROBLEM, WHATEVER THE WEAKNESSES OF SAID SOLUTION.
And this repeated itself. Over and over and over.... at least 20 times. But good gawd, it was drawn out. I've only reproduced the condensed version. I wished I had the MiniDisc at one point, so I could do a stealth bootleg of the whole thing.
Because for those of us who probably will never see a meeting of the EU or UN, I think this was a fairly decent approximation of the "dialogue" that takes place in those places much of the time.
Blar!
[Posted at 20:47 CST on 02/20/03] [Link]
