A day without cooks...
I don't like to think of humanitarian aid workers as a bunch of soft, spoiled, whinging whiners but, more often than not, I think that just might be what we are.
Yesterday was a public holiday and therefore, in accordance with - oh THE LAW - we gave all our national staff the day off. Including the cooks. This doesn't seem to me to be all that big of a deal. We're a bunch of grown ups. Surely we can hunt-and-gather our own food for a day...surely we won't waste away to nothing and be found by the cooks when they return (THE FOLLOWING DAY!) as a heap of corpses in front of the refrigerator our cold dead fingers having to be pried from the door that we were unable to open.
Apparently, I was wrong. And I was told so in no uncertain terms in our senior managers meeting for at least half an hour. HALF AN HOUR discussion about whether we should pay the cooks overtime to come in on a public holiday.
Seriously, the higher I am in senior management the sillier the discussions become.
Yesterday was a public holiday and therefore, in accordance with - oh THE LAW - we gave all our national staff the day off. Including the cooks. This doesn't seem to me to be all that big of a deal. We're a bunch of grown ups. Surely we can hunt-and-gather our own food for a day...surely we won't waste away to nothing and be found by the cooks when they return (THE FOLLOWING DAY!) as a heap of corpses in front of the refrigerator our cold dead fingers having to be pried from the door that we were unable to open.
Apparently, I was wrong. And I was told so in no uncertain terms in our senior managers meeting for at least half an hour. HALF AN HOUR discussion about whether we should pay the cooks overtime to come in on a public holiday.
Seriously, the higher I am in senior management the sillier the discussions become.
Comments