POKÉMON HUNTERS

I walked back from lunch and happened to peer in at the building next door. There was a meeting going on.

Six men sat around a table. I counted them. Smart shirts (one slightly pinkish), short hair greying at the temples, some of the faces furnished with thick-rimmed spectacles. Each wore coloured lanyards, and there were laptops angled open on the table, all clustered around a compact digital projector.

One of them (obviously talking, obviously in control) gestured wide with his hands. He had a relaxed style, a gold watch glimmering on one wrist. The other hand span a pen with all the flair of a Victorian showman. The boss, I imagined.

What were they talking about? Sales figures? Upcoming projects? Outsourcing? Restructuring? Customer engagement? Budgets? Pokémon?

Well they may as well have been, I suppose, discussing strategies on how best to 'catch 'em all'; it makes just as much difference to me.

Then I started wondering about how many offices up and down the land are full of similar rooms of similar people having similar meetings. And for what? To sell more stuff, to make better decisions, to communicate values, to hire, to fire, to drop, to acquire, to search and yes, perhaps indeed to capture invisible pocket monsters by any other name?

It all seems so serious and consuming. Will they remember what they said in a year? Will we? What's really important? I mean, really?

Anyway, on that existential note, I found my way back to my own office. The new furniture for the kitchen refurb had arrived in piles of flat-pack boxes, and about fifteen people were busy putting it together in a flurry of cardboard and packets of screws. That's how we roll.

I wonder what those six executives would have made of the scene as they walked past our window.