Today I drove home without turning on my headlights. This miracle was occasioned by the combined influence of reaching the end of a task at 5 pm; my boss, Justin, going home at 4 pm; and his boss, David, worrying more about what Justin was doing than what I was doing. As I passed David he sent me off with his signature humor: “Half day today?”<\/p>\n
I should not mind his teasing, since I heartily take to the opposite role in the same game. It was only Tuesday at lunch that I took my most recent shot: David said, of one of his staff sitting with us, “Her projects always have problems because I don’t know the details until afterward.”<\/p>\n
“Oh,” I said, “Are you saying micro-managing increases efficiency?”<\/p>\n
Besides illustrating my propensity for barbed remarks, this little story also shows why I don’t like David’s teasing. In this case it is his comment about his other employee I take umbrage at. Obviously the remark was meant at least in part in jest, but it seemed to be as much a deliberate performance criticism; and if so, it should not have been delivered in front of me. But maybe it was meant entirely in jest; in that case the problem would be that it was too hard to tell.<\/p>\n
Now if I had real diplomacy I would glide past such repartee without taking sides. My criticism of David applies to myself: if the rebuke was meant, it was given in the wrong context. My ire defeats my prudence.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Today I drove home without turning on my headlights. This miracle was occasioned by the combined influence of reaching the end of a task at 5 pm; my boss, Justin, going home at 4 pm; and his boss, David, worrying more about what Justin was doing than what I was doing. As I passed David he sent me off with Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cleverdialectic.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/533"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cleverdialectic.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cleverdialectic.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cleverdialectic.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cleverdialectic.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=533"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/cleverdialectic.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/533\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":540,"href":"https:\/\/cleverdialectic.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/533\/revisions\/540"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cleverdialectic.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=533"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cleverdialectic.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=533"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cleverdialectic.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=533"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}