Read Diary of a Somebody online

Chapters (30)

That’s what Wikipedia tells me anyway, having had very little chance to explore the town since I arrived at the Royal Oak Hotel five hours ago. For me, this Warwickshire spa town comprises of no more than this: a room which smells of mothballs, a migraine-inducing floral carpet which must have felt dated back when Charles and Di were getting hitched, the compulsory Corby trouser press and packet of stale custard creams, a shower that drips metronomically and these slides, these endless PowerPoint slides.

I have now managed to cut thirty-six of them, creating thirty-two new ones in the process. In spite of this, I’m not sure they reveal much about how we might leverage the power of social media to brand-manage our value proposition. After all this time I still don’t know what that means.

Tuesday February 20th

The Onboarded

We have been here before.
We who slouch at formica tables
and fish adeptly in sea-green bowls
for cellophaned sweets to the music of fizzy water.	For
We who drowse in PowerPointed twilight,
as time slides slowly past, fearful of break-outs
and the tyranny of role play.	For we
We who doodle on hotel-headed notepaper
and listen distractedly to the motorway’s distant hum
which leads to other places.	For we are
We who leave money so carelessly on the table
and grab greedily at the pendulous fruit
that hangs so low.	For we are the
We who wait in shabby expectation
of the all-too-brief respite of bourbons
and tepid coffee.	For we are the awayday
We who nurse feelings of envy
towards the red marker pens that run out
before we ourselves can.	For we are the awayday trippers. The brainstorm troopers. The boiled sweet hoarders. The bored onboarders. The project deep-divers. The flipchart survivors.

I’ve read somewhere that for those people who, by nature, are rather introverted and uncomfortable with the prospect of public speaking, the strategy of imagining your audience naked is a popular one.

For me, this was where things began to go wrong; the thought of Janice unclothed was problematic enough but by the time I’d summoned the strength to conjure up a vision of the exposed paunch and unsheltered nether-parts of Head of Customer Engagement, David Stentley, I was a gibbering, stammering wreck.

The phrases which had seemed so compelling when copying and pasting them from the Harvard Business Review website – ‘peeling the onion’, ‘lipstick on a pig’, ‘where the rubber meets the road’ – frankensteined into something awkward and insincere the moment that they tumbled from my mouth. In corporate parlance, I had become a Meanderthal. A Great Big DisaPowerPointment. A Nontrepreneurial Nonentity. Janice finally put us all out of our collective misery a mere ninety minutes into my thirty-minute presentation.

I sought solace in a shortbread finger.