It's Almost Five in the Afternoon

It's almost five in the afternoon, and my digital calendar is blinking. It's telling me that I have a meeting coming up in less than fifteen minutes, which involves a final round of discussion over our IT setup in Asia. The resulting service contract and definitions will dictate the pace of our operations in the hemisphere for the next two years, and will most likely be a deciding factor between success and inconsistency for the largest market in the world.

But the meeting doesn't exist anymore, because somebody decided to walk out of a judicial hearing and break into the hotel down the street.

It's almost five in the afternoon, and my fingers are dancing across the keyboard. I have a search process running across two different applications in the background, because a contact in Europe asked me for some critical information two days ago. I've had to scan and scour my databases to answer her request; it turned out to be a high-level search, so I've been running processes each day in order to try and get her the data before our weekend deadline.

But my efforts are useless now, because somebody decided to arm a small cadre of supporters, whine about the state of the country, and take matters into their own hands.

It's almost five in the afternoon, and I'm preparing my reports for tomorrow. We have two meetings at the end of each month in order to go over our tasklists; we spend a grand total of four hours arguing over which items are important enough to get priority and which ones can be shunted aside for another month at possible expense to their managers. Projects live and die by meetings like these, and every time we have them, we realize that we make a difference in exactly how well the business functions.

But I won't be able to defend my projects tomorrow, because somebody decided that the public shared his exact same sentiments, and figured that he was to lead them like some modern messiah.

It's almost five in the afternoon, and I'm still in the office. Along with a bunch of other like-minded individuals, I'm trying to hold together a business that threatens to fall apart because somebody decided that planned instability was a whole lot better than seething impatience.

They can hold as many uprisings as they want, oh yes, but they don't know anything about holding things together. They don't care about international observers. They don't care about multinational investors. They don't care about the people who have to work and plead and convince that this country is a good place to do business in, that this is a safe and quiet environment where things can get done.

Of course, they'll never admit this. They'll say that they did it to 'liberate" us from a tyrant. They'll rant that the proper channels were too slow for their needs. They'll assume that their idealism is the most important thing in the world.

It's almost five in the afternoon, and somebody decided that people like me were not important enough to be considered at all.