Horizon

>finely honed lying skills

I almost was going to give a disquition on small lies big lies and white lies (sorry Alan and Martha if I've offended by saying 'white lies'- are they now colourless lies? I don't have the hymn sheet from Berkeley to hand) but then I seemed to remember you're a lawyer?

Robbie: You think I'm a lawyer? I've been good for their business, but that's about it.

I thought you were or seemed to remember. Apologies.

Jeepers, don't apologize. I wouldn't want to be a lawyer, but I wish I had the qualifications.

I figure if Bobby were a lawyer, he wouldn't have all this free time in the office he's always bragging about.

I've been reading Harry Frankfurt's little book
on Bullshit. He quotes from Eric Ambler's
_Dirty Story_:
"Never tell a lie when you can bullshit your
way through."

The cleverest way to lie is to tell the stoney
cold truth in such a way that your listener
infers a falsity -- which you NEVER (of course!)
implied.
--
Cheers,
Elliott

If he were a lawyer he'd never own up either to lying or to wasting time on the job. Not even from behind a pseudonym.

I have some very bad news. In a couple weeks I'm moving to a new project, which will require 8 hours of actual work each day. I may protest to the HR department. I've been selected for the new project because, I'm told, it matches my skill set. This doesn't seem possible because the only thing I've been really good at for the last 9 months is nothing.

I had a lovely slack period at a previous employer. All the old management had finally vested their stock options, and so the place was gutted -- there was nobody permanant between my manager and the VP of an thousand-odd-person engineering department.

A lot gets lost in that shuffle. One of my coworkers lost his team-lead, and then the release date for his project was shelved indefinitely, but he wasn't reassigned for fear of losing funding. After a few months, even his weekly status reports were cancelled. With neither deliverables nor human contact, he became more and more eccentric. He bought a multi-thousand dollar graphics program, installed it on his development machines, and spent his days designing desktop wallpapers to enter into contests. Some days he'd leave his darkened interior office, poke his head into mine and go on an hour-long megalomaniacal rant.

In my case, we had a delay of several months before a product we'd finished could be tested. Any rational manager would have had us testing the thing ourselves, but instead we just managed to stretch the work out. It occurred at a convenient time for me -- I was able to purchase a house, plan a wedding, plant a garden, and do a vast amouth of reading.

Such things get tiring after a while, however. Utopias either bore the reader or turn into dystopias, and the same is true with such a job. The sensation that someday the game will be up nags at you, as does the effects of months spent without any sense of accomplishment. A sense of malaise can develop inot full-scale lunacy, as I saw with my friend. Whenever I find myself working a night or weekend, I think back on that time and remember that it could be worse.