The game of words

I've missed writing in this blog incredibly, during the past few weeks. It's the place where I can introspect and extrospect, and spill my beans in a forum so public it's actually oddly private. It's the place where I can freely embellish my daily foibles, shaping my own rose-tinted memories as I bumble my way through life. But it's hard to make the time to be the blythe chronicler when you're working twelve hour days within the confines of a four-walled office, in which the air conditioning vascillates eratically from tropical to polar. Seriously. The cardigan I leave at work has even developed shiny elbows from the amount of times I have to take it off and put it on each day.

Anyways, so I've missed writing, during this busy period at work. Instead of this inane bloga-banter, I've had to spend my literary energies on a long string of employee communiques, which I suppose no self-respecting HR bod should complain about. But I do, I do. There's nothing so mind-numbingly dull to draft (or read, I'm sure) as a public announcement from HR.

So pushed to the teetering edge of desperation, I decided to amuse myself with a personal challenge. In each pulic email I sent to a wide distribution, I would try to slip in a quadri-syllablic word with utmost subtlety. And corporate words, like "impediment" couldn't count. My first test was 'triumvirate'. The problem with this word, which I hadn't quite thought through when I chose it, is that not much at my office actually happens in groups of three. Finally, I managed to work it into a sentence, which went something like: "Such-and-such event would be subject to the approval of the triumvirate of X, Y and Z (three managers)." Pretty good, no?Hard though it be to slip a word like that into any sentence in modern english without causing a raised eyebrow or two, I figured not many people would read the email anyway. I mean, don't most people just auto-delete their HR emails?

Apparently not.

A moment later I got the response from Manager Z: "X is out of office, and since Y is busy, the diumvirate of Y and I have decided that I should just handle this alone in solumvirate manner." Yeesh. Cheeky chappies.

A somewhat tempered success, I'd call that.

Still, not to be deterred in my cause, I plod doggedly on. My next word is 'ornery'. I know it's not quadri-syllablic, but it's a fun one, with potentially exciting ramifications, so it qualifies anyway.

Hmm - it did occur to me - maybe it would be more beneficial for my long-term career growth if I spent less time working and more time writing in my blog.