It’s story time!

Imagine you work at a magic brewery, as a product developer. Someone in management comes to your product development group and says that they want to try and sell the Magic Beer your product development group is currently to Armenia as well as the country you’re in. This isn’t unreasonable, as many people in Armenia like to drink Magic Beer, and if you could get the support of a Magic Beer distributor in Armenia, they could provide further funding for the development of your Magic Beer, and you could make it even better and more magical.

So, your management ask you to produce a sample bottle of Magic Beer to send over to Armenia to let the Magic Beer distributors there see, smell, taste and experience the Magic for themselves. They give you quite a tight deadline to work to, and in order to meet it, lots of people on your team will have to work some weekends, bank holidays and evenings in order to finish the bottle in time. The deadline is absolute and immovable, the team is told, because the meetings are already booked with the Armenian Magic Beer distributors, and they can’t be moved. Also, none of you get paid for working this overtime, but because everyone enjoys making Magic Beer so much, and the prospect of getting more money to make the Magic Beer even better is exciting to them all, you put the work in anyway.

The art team spend ages design a stunning logo to make the bottle look pretty; the brewing team work until their fingers bleed refining the recipe; the magicians wave their wands until no more sparks will fly making sure the beer is as absolutely magical as it can be. The hours drag on, and many problems are faced; tempers become frayed, families and social lives are neglected; but, at the end of the last day, you finally finish. The team, relieved that it’s finally finished, all sit and look, exhausted and bleary eyed, at the bottle of Magic Beer you have produced, and you all agree that it is truly a splendid thing indeed, and that even though the work was long and hard, you pulled together and produced something really worthwhile. You entrust the bottle of Magic Beer to a courier, and send it on its way to head office, ready to go to Armenia, and go home to enjoy a blissful, relaxing, work-free weekend.

Imagine how utterly delighted you are on the following Monday, then, when you get into work to discover a message from head office saying that they like the Magic Beer very much, but would like them to spend another week making it even more special and magical. You therefore conclude that you’ve made a Magic Beer so magical that it’s clearly capable of distorting time and moving immovable deadlines, because there can be no other possible explanation for why you’ve suddenly got an extra week, given that all the meeting in Armenia have all been booked and can’t be moved at all.

The above is purely and entirely a work of fiction and any similarities to any real events are entirely coincidental. Yes. *cough*

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 15th, 2004 at 5:01 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.