Musings of an HR Guy…Connecting the Dots
The sight of a plane coming in to land almost always sends chills down my spine. Though it’s one of the most common sights, and the world has been blasé about air travel for over a century now, I still find the idea of hundreds of tons of metal, materials and people floating in the... Continue Reading →
Settling in is a long and painstaking process. Here I was thinking that once our container gets delivered and the boxes get opened we’ll just be a hop, skip and jump away from getting back into gear, after five months of floating in transit. It’s now six weeks in the new place, and there’s still... Continue Reading →
1. The artist I'd commissioned to do a sketch for B's farewell in 2000 coming charging down the passage in my office to deliver the drawing which he had delayed. At first I could hear his regular tread from afar, but as he realized he was within earshot of my office he literally started sprinting,... Continue Reading →
I’m hiding in the sewing machine cabinet – in that little “room” you get when its top panel folds open sideways - like the cover of a giant book - to form a work surface, resting on the cabinet door opened at 180 degrees. Through the gap at the top edge of my little chamber,... Continue Reading →
Citizen Kane's dying word stands for security, hope and the innocence of childhood, which a man can spend a lifetime trying to regain...like the green light at the end of Tom Buchanan's pier in The Great Gatsby, or that yearning for a home that never was, which the Portugese have a beautiful term for -... Continue Reading →
The bane of a truly meaningful conversation is the irrepressible impulse to respond with the conditioned reflex of a professional Chinese table-tennis player. So many opportunities to deepen contact and create insight are lost to the compulsive terror many have of silence in the midst of a dialog, resulting in florid and feckless conversational patterns... Continue Reading →
In our pitiful band of gawky, maladroit, poorly coordinated mediocrities back in the day, there used to be this guy who used to make a lot of noise on the field, but was an authentic dud like the rest of us when it came to any kind of physical contact between foot and ball. The... Continue Reading →
Tripping blithely over the yawning inaction of recent times, let me attempt to slide back into rhythm with relatively less effort, by simply capturing some bits of observation lying about in my notes from the last few years: Winks: Struck by the glaring departure from the exemplary compliance culture of the Swiss, implied by the... Continue Reading →
I have a theory about alumni message boards. While everyone who joins up is at first motivated by the same desire to reconnect, catch-up and reminisce, over time the population gets divided into three broad categories, whose hallmarks I think have learned to identify in the tone and content of their posts. The first type (often the majority)... Continue Reading →
Sitting in the main hall of the Brussels Commune - 3rd hour of an interminable wait, only to tell them that I'm changing address. Of course this will be followed by a police visit to verify the address change, and finally yet another eternal morning at the commune to make the change on our cards.... Continue Reading →
Notes to Self 