Fili’s world

-
‘Now! Now!’ cried the Queen. ‘Faster! Faster!’ And they went so fast that at last they seemed to skim through the air, hardly touching the ground with their feet, till suddenly, just as Alice was getting quite exhausted, they stopped, and she found herself sitting on the ground, breathless and giddy.
The Queen propped her up against a tree, and said kindly, ‘You may rest a little now.’
Alice looked round her in great surprise. ‘Why, I do believe we’ve been under this tree the whole time! Everything’s just as it was!’
‘Of course it is,’ said the Queen, ‘what would you have it?’
‘Well, in OUR country,’ said Alice, still panting a little, ‘you’d generally get to somewhere else — if you ran very fast for a long time, as we’ve been doing.’
‘A slow sort of country!’ said the Queen. ‘Now, HERE, you see, it takes all the running YOU can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!’
-

Hesitating, I take one step forward. I’ve been there before, so I know what to expect, but it doesn’t change the feeling I have of expecting something totally unexpected. I make it through the looking-glass and land back into corporate wonderland. I meet again with all the same strange characters I’ve met before - There’s the red queen, her husband, the cards, the crazy hat guy, the cat, the rabbit. They’re all there, doing the same things they’ve done before, according to the some old anarchy rules that no body understands in the pursuit of a goal no body has ever defined. A lot’s happening, all the time, and nothing’s happening at all.

- “Are you here?” they give me a wink.
- “What do you mean?” I make an attempt to follow if they’re laughing at me or with me.
- “Just making sure you really landed”, I get a big smile back.

Am I ‘here’? I must be, since ‘here’ is the only place I can imagine where ‘this’ can happen. It doesn’t bother me as much as it used to, and after what I’ve been through I don’t think it really can. I’ve agreed to start off with some consulting for 1-2 days a week, which with the unrealistic hi-tech salaries today will still earn me more than I would earn doing anything else in a different field fulltime and that’s even without me wanting to bargain for the salary.

I’m back to doing something I’ve been said to be good at - pointing out logical gaps and suggesting how those might be dealt with from a strategic perspective. I also get to do something I like doing and that’s examining a world from within. A qualitative experience, the academy would put it. Procedures, processes, and most interesting of all - people. I don’t wish to make wonderland into something it’s not, I just take part in it so that I can gain from its uniqueness. It’s a bit of a shock to see how small a shock it is to be back with the folks on this side of the looking-glass.

(Folks from this corporate world are reading this as well, in case you wondered, or atleast - the important ones are, or can… :P)