This blog is having something of an identity crisis at the moment. I've decided to continue it, at least for now, but it needs a new focus. Writing about Sri Lanka was great, but as I am no longer in Sri Lanka, that subject matter is getting less and less relevant. And the trials and tribulations of a college student bumming around Philadelphia suburbs don't make for good reading. Fortunately, I'll be leaving for Pittsburgh again in a few days, and then things should get more interesting.
In the mean time, I'll procrastinate and share a few Sri Lanka stories that didn't make the first cut.
The Great Tea Plantation Story
I alluded to this a few weeks back, but discretion and pity kept me from sharing it until now. It's a great story though, and I'm sure you'll all get a good laugh. Names have been changed to protect the innocent.One of my colleagues at YEF, S., is in his last year of college and he was working on a capstone project all summer. He was studying tea refinement processes and he had close ties with a tea plantation. Early in the partnership, he had mentioned that he really wanted to arrange a visit to a tea plantation, and I thought that sounded great. So a few days later, we discussed potential dates. I thought the best time would be the weekend right before I was supposed to spend time with my parents. I was fairly sure we agreed on this.
And I didn't think anything more of it until one night when I was in CRC doing work. I was supposed to have a rather important meeting with a supervisor M., the next day, at CRC. This was a Saturday night, and although I was supposed to be at YPF on Sunday, the arrangement was that Meg and I would meet with M. Sunday morning at CRC and we would all travel to YPF together. M.'s orders supersede pretty much everyone's at both locations, so if he tells me I'm getting into work late, I don't question him.
So Saturday night, as I said, I was at CRC. I think G. was around, and everyone else had run off to other places. I received a call from S. that went something like this:
S. - "Where are you?"
Me - "Hambantota"
S. - "When will you be back in Weligama?"
Me - "Tomorrow afternoon. Meg and I are meeting M. in the morning, and then we'll all meet you."
S. - "I have made plans for us to go to the tea plantation tomorrow. We must leave very early."
Me - "Tomorrow? What happened to next week?"
S. - "The arrangements are for tomorrow."
"But I'm not around tomorrow."
"You can catch a bus at 6 a.m. and be here by 9."
"No. I meet with M. tomorrow. I can't get out of that."
"But I have made all of these arrangements."
"I'm sorry. We did not understand each other. But I can't go with you tomorrow. I have a meeting with your boss and mine."
...and so on. This sort of back-and-forth went on for 20 minutes and in the end, I agreed to call M. and ask if I could get out of my meeting in order to visit a tea plantation. I didn't want to do this, you understand, but otherwise I was never going to get off the phone.
I was now faced with the prospect of calling my boss to ask permission to leave a scheduled meeting in order to goof off at a tea plantation. M. is a super nice guy, but I really didn't want to make that call. However, I'd said that I would, so reluctantly I called M. and explained the situation.
"Well, Hallie, you can go if you want, but you should ask how many people are going on that trip. Because I'll bet it's just you and him walking through the tea fields, and you know it will probably be awkward. There will be...expectations. Bollywood and all that."
What?!?!?!
I can just picture the commentators now....
"Well Bob, three very important things happened in this exchange. Hallie got the permission to go on the trip, which she didn't think she would get, and M. is being really understanding about the whole thing, which she also wasn't expecting. But the real surprise here is that Hallie's employer, her boss is warning her about other employees of his. And he's laughing about it."
"Well that's right Jim. Hallie's in a tough situation here. I don't think she was ready to hear that this was a 2 person trip -- I think she was expecting Meg to come too. And she just came from a week in Colombo and a long bus ride, and she hasn't slept much recently. She's really not at the top of her game right now, and I... well, I just don't think she's really up to this kind of challenge."
"You're right there Bob. If she's going to go into this, she needs to be 100%. She can't hesitate, and she can't falter, and above all, she absolutely cannot allow a weak defense. In these situations, there's a huge risk of losing yardage, and there's really not much to gain."
Insert the bitter-Philadelphia-sports-fan joke here. Anyway, I wholeheartedly agreed with Jim and Bob's assessment, and so I declined the invitation.
It occurred to me after this series of conversations that Meg hadn't been mentioned much when plans for this trip were being formed. Five weeks later, I'm still floored that my boss would ever be that open with me regarding his employees. I'm glad he was, and I like that attitude. M. had a very frank, down-to-earth manner about the whole thing, and I appreciated that. And he still gives me grief about breaking all of his employees' hearts. Though I hear he still gives them grief for falling for me in the first place.
No comments:
Post a Comment