Day 246: I Am Bound To Silence

Despite being essentially non-working in my heart, I must sometimes work to get money. At the moment, I work in Amsterdam in a room high up on a canal. I have a view, and in my job in the day I build brands and differentiate parity products. When I am not doing that, I sit in rooms with conference calls, eat biscuits, write words like "hijack" and "replicate" on flipcharts*, phone people up and write things down. Sometimes I also empty the old coffee out of the coffee machine, load the dishwasher, write things that say "Strategy" on the top and avoid the use of the word "cretin" for up to and including three hours.

But I cannot allude, even vaguely, to the rest of it. Not the giant kites in the shape of biscuits; the tethered blimps; the 4m diameter glitterballs; the Turkish shopping centre; the Montrealers in the roof who wear pastel-shaded sleeveless jerseys and still look like men; the 23-year-old Frenchman who asks me earnestly if I have heard of Nick Drake; the bicycles disguised as wafers; the lunches in the basement; the Roman with the broken printer; the pony in the garden; the inadequate salad.

And most of all I can't tell you anything about an email we received today that inspired us all with the simple words: "... put these clients on the railway line to saving the world ... this is the job of superhumans! Not children!"


* Inc. arrows and dotted lines