Question of the day...

shoes blah blah blah, who cares?  What they really meant was: Porkette, have you a story that you wish to relate to the internet about shoes?  And indeed I do.

Many years ago I managed to fool an interview panel into giving me a job that involved some sort of responsibility and part of this meant that I had to attend the direst, most boring monthly management meeting which mostly revolved around keeping awake long enough to make sure that when the budget was being divied up you had your begging bowl stretched out in front of you.  There was an element of 'singing for your supper' in that you were expected to come up with highlights from the previous month and glamourise how you were saving the organisation huge amounts of money. 

My department was seen as being nothing more than a sponge that sucked most of the other departments resources and didn't actually bring any money into the organisation.  Actually, when I say it was seen as that, that is exactly what it did do, but that's not the point.  The monthly management meeting was fundamentally an opportunity for the rest of the university to harrumph loudly about what we cost and how there would probably be at least three Nobel prize winners every week if the other departments weren't subsidising us.  This was my first meeting and I'd spent hours on my presentation and imagined all the various questions I'd be asked to justify my existence and was pretty confident that I was going to change attitudes regarding what we did.  Which is why after a silence that went on for about 3 weeks I realised that I was expected to say something so I told them all that I'd just noticed that Carol and I were wearing the same shoes. 

You'd think that this was really embarrassing for me but it wasn't because the person who ended up looking even more stupid than me was the guy who was chairing it and told us all that he'd already noticed that.  Then he realised that that wasn't what he was expected to say.