Are you sure you don't want to quit?

Anybody who accepts mediocrity - in school, on the job, in life - is a person who compromises, and when the leader compromises, the whole organization compromises.
Charles Knight

"Are you sure you don't want to quit school and come work for us?" one of my bosses asked. I was in the middle of donning my coat, gathering my stuff and getting the hell out of dodge. As much fun as that would be, I don't think I'd get too far without an education of the signed-stamped-and-sealed kind, so, no.

Monday saw me sitting in my corner, reading texts for class, doodling around on the internet and not doing much that was productive. I corrected the occasional text sent my way, perused the filing system and wished I had brought more stuff to read while repeatedly and unsuccessfully seeking my boss for an undetermined assignment. "This is only temporary," someone told me. Yeah, okay.

It is impossible to enjoy idling thoroughly unless one has plenty of work to do.
Jerome K. Jerome (1859 - 1927)

And it was temporary.

The conference has forty sessions, each with between three and five presenters. Each presenter has an abstract which, in addition to the session description, needs
to be proofread by me, and then an invitation letter and a registration form for each presenter needs to be drafted via a template. I am responsible for all of the steps for only some of the sessions, but I am responsible for all of the proofreading as well as correcting random texts from other people, anything from resumes to
business letters to funding proposals. It's lots of fun, plenty to do and the time just flies by.

I am also increasingly impressed with the organisation itself. Today was Team Meeting, which involved representatives of all departments and most of the 30-odd staff of the European Secretariat. The meeting was relatively short--one hour--has rotating chairmanship, and allows for the director and each of the team leaders to update the others on current projects. Many of the reports focused on which team leaders were attending which conferencs in which far-off and lovely-sounding cities, in Italy, in Spain, the Canaries, Nairobi, what have you. Sign me up, please.

Meetings are an addictive, highly self-indulgent activity that corporations and other organizations habitually engage in only because they cannot actually masturbate.
Alain van der Heide

Our team meets weekly on Mondays; the meeting is conducted while standing to keep it from getting long and is run from an agenda to which each team member is encouraged to add. Each person has initials, and the person in question is listed under the respective agenda item for which they have responsibility, and the entirety is formatted in terms of specific tasks relating to a certain item. So, speaker invitations--our project this week--has a list of what things need to be done and by whom. What seems to be crucially important--and what continues to impress me--is the development of process. Things aren't done haphazardly; they are considered and a process is developed before anything gets done, sort of a checklist. The filing system is immense and the entire project works off of several enormous databases with more functions than I could possibly dream of, so it is important to keep things straight and not muck it up. The creation of theses processes, however, has been whittled down to a science such that it is not complicated to draft an instruction sheet for creating invitations or updating this or doing that; instructions are often written out; paper drafts are kept and organized and filed. It's efficient, transparent, and simple. Everyone knows what they have to do, how to do it, whom to talk to when something goes wrong or is unclear.





In high school I always loved correcting texts; my friends called me the "editor from hell" because of my love of the red pen. Now I have a red pen and a green pen and couldn't be happier--subtle symbols of my power. I love languages, I love how they work and how they sound and how they flow. Of course, making sure items in a list end with semicolons instead of commas is not necessarily my idea of a rowdy good time, but I generally enjoy it. Many of the texts--almost all, excluding some session abstracts--were written by non native speakers of english. This means anything from overenthusiastic use of commas to having to find a Spanish or Italian colleague to translate the original document because I can't make sense of the English. One of the worst texts I corrected, however, came from Scotland (no cultural inference here, just an observation). Correcting these texts also differs from correcting someone's creative or academic prose--in this example, it is not about keeping someone's "voice," helping them learn from mistakes or merely pointing out poor style, but rather that myself or someone else will enter my changes in exactly as I have written them, and this document will be sent to quite a few people so it had better be correct.

The quality of an organization can never exceed the quality of the minds that make it up.
Harold R. McAlindon

The informal environment also makes it particularly enjoyable. The staff are young and international, but we are all on a "first name basis", with all of the German cultural connotations that implies; the policy is "open door". Everyone has gone out of their way to get to know me, who I am, where I come from and what I am doing there. With my inability to remember names I am having a bit of a trick keeping it all straight, but as soon as I can connect a story to a face I am in the clear. In mixed company the language is English but often devolves into other languages according to those present. And besides, they offer me all the Fair Trade tea and coffee I can drink and have an international book exchange (source of the Isabel Allende novel I picked up and have not read).



They asked me if I could come in on Friday for some meetings and training, but I would have to miss a seminar and I need to be clear that this is not going to take over my life just because there is lots of work to do. With that in mind I have been resolutely pursuing the rest of my life, so except for an occasional sleep defecit it couldn't be better.