City Gentleman Feels Sympathy For His Old Friend(Part 1)
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When he was gone I soon forgot his wit And rambling office E-mail bullshit. But three months into His redundancy I saw Bazza Sterling Hurling special brew, In the gutter, unfurling Reels of losing lottery Numbers, madly scraping Up cigarette stumps, While shouting abuse At any passer-by Wearing suit and tie. Inwardly I sobbed At the wreckage, Recalling the former Jargon-monger in his Prime, gilding conference Calls with interjections Simultaneously embarrassing And sublime. If by heaven's hand was Ever wrought an earthly crime, Then it was this, that to such wicked fate The blameless Sterling was assigned. Desperately I longed to aid him, but Was victim to the vagaries of time. ‘I must away,’ I cried, ‘For to attend my Weekly Status meeting at half past nine.’ And as his working eye rolled into focus, I waved and grinned at my old friend and Said we must do lunch some time.
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Poem Study Notes:This poem was written in 2002, on the occasion of the resignation of an office colleague. It was written just after the IT boom of the early 00s, when redundancies were starting to become a fashionable aspect of corporate life. Around that time, the corporate conference call craze was also taking over and all of a sudden you were always hearing people say that they could not go to lunch or for a coffee because they had a conference call to attend, as if that was somehow supposed to impress you. The trouble with conference calls is that people convince themselves that just by being on a call something will get done. In reality in most corporations, nothing gets done because everyone is always on a conference call. The narrator of this poem may well be The Smug Professional from another poem.
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