The word on the street

It’s a fascinating experience here on the street.  Trying to find a coffee shop that doesn’t disrupt the Mycroftian sense of peace.  Or rather where the patrons don’t annoy me.  The one I’m in now has people yelling at each other to make sure everyone sees them.  One person in here has an actual steel supermarket shopping trolley, which I presume will end up dumped on the street outside her house.  At least it won’t be in the coffee shop then. 

Anyway, now that the friend has moved off they don’t need to shout at each other in exaggerated ‘dahling’ accents from a range of approximately 15 cm.  It is an improvement from the last café where stressed executives ran up and done whacking everyone in the vicinity with their satchels.  They were worse at this than school children.  Some of the school children, for their part, were all having ciggies in the local park.  Winfield Blue or Marlboro?  Who can say?

Anyway, no doubt the executives will be heading off to some meeting or other.  To discuss high intellectual theory which is actually utter nonsense.  A friend of mine worked in a management consulting firm at one time, we can’t use their real name here so we will call them ‘The Workhouse’.  In fact nothing about this story relates to any real firm Mycroft has ever known personally. 

The Workhouse was a funny place, my friend said, mostly because of the distance between management perceptions of themselves and what they were actually like.  One of the senior managers was apparently called ‘Spanner’ because he was such a tool. My friend said that he thought he was a great guy.  Sadly, to show the distance between perception and reality (what he and his fellow managers might have called the ‘delta’) he was in fact a complete prong.