Reality Bites

I was out with Ziggy the Ginger Wonder Pup on our local mountain on Saturday. He loves it up there because a lack of sheep and nesting birds mean that he can stay off the lead.

Tramping through the majestic remoteness I had Monday’s blog all written in my head. It was all about how we are never alone now except in our heads. We have constant physical proximity to people now even on fairly distant Scottish hills (I’d met around 20 other walkers, runners, dogs and some mountain bikers – it was like Oxford Street on the Saturday before Christmas I tell ya’).

Then the clouds rolled in and it started to rain. Now, I’ve been able to use a map and compass pretty well since I was an 11-year-old Scout. However, I’d forgotten that Ziggy can’t read and, because he doesn’t have opposable thumbs, he can’t use a compass either. In short, I knew where I was going but the (leadless) Ziggy had buggered off into the fog about 800 metres up a cold Scottish hill. Because it was windy he couldn’t hear me, let alone see me.

Great – I had thoughts of Ziggy living in the wild through the winter and returning home wolf-sized and angry to demand answers to difficult questions of abandonment in April next year.

Then, through the murk, appeared a lone and bedraggled fellow traveller moving with a hunted look. He was moving with a hunted look because a wet orange dog had smelled a sandwich in the poor chap’s rucksack and was working out a strategy to capture it. One Gravy Bone bribe later Ziggy was on the lead and the sandwich and its owner had moved gratefully on.

I got home to discover that my fellow director (and wife) had lost her mobile phone and had thus been unable to complete her mission of completing her new website as all her unbacked up pictures were on it. This pain was eventually dulled somewhat by gin and finding the spare phone in #1 Son’s “floordrobe”.

On Sunday, I had to pick #2 Son up from the airport. His plane was two hours late and we had to go home via a three-hour wait at the Forth Valley Hospital. He’d fallen on a wet floor that morning and had decided whilst on his delayed plane that as it had swollen to tennis ball size and was agony that it might actually be broken. It was in fact badly sprained the x-rays showed, Ah, well. Where there’s blame there’s a claim huh?

So I write this stuff not as a metaphor but as reality. In the perfect world of the Thought Leader problems (or challenges as we must learn to call them) are easily solved by a tough meeting with Bob or a conversation around the water cooler with Janice. At worst a quick platitude works – “turn up on time for your meeting and make sure that you’ve done your tie up”.

However, life isn’t like that family, business or otherwise. Dogs wander off into the fog. Mobile phones fall out of badly designed pockets and cleaners leave wet marble floors with no warning signs.

So, would you rather work with the guy who deals with the world as they’d like it to be or with the guy who has practical experience of providing practical answers in the messy old reality of life?