Swimming in the office, mate?
A swimming pool is like an office, lots of people splashing about without getting anywhere. And most of them scarcely doing what they should be doing, which is swimming.
Just like at work, only 10 percent are going at it while the rest float around like logs — the dead wood that they are, simply coming in the way of those trying to get a few laps in.
The analogy is fascinating. The second-rate and the mediocre keep blocking the flow and the rhythm and getting away with it.
If you are there to swim, for heaven’s sake swim, stop flopping about wasting time and space. See what I mean, you’ve this lot by the drove in every workplace. We call them the destructive influences.
Let’s go around a swimming pool and see if we can stretch the similarities. See how the incompetent congregate at the shallow end, never venturing beyond the parameters of safety and yet sharing the same waters and perks with the more daring.
And see that swimmer edging along next to the concrete and, playing it desperately safe. I swear I have seen him at work always sitting on the fence and playing “straddles”, never committing himself to any cause.
And that group of fatcats sunning themselves while gorging on the food and drink. They’ll never enter the water to even get wet but they’re swimming just like the rest. See them in office. They are the mega-bosses who never get their feet wet but monopolize the fat of the company bottom line and dictate from the outside.
Then we have the image-maker, Tan oil, monogrammed costume, goggles, flippers, hairband, mobile music system, book and sunscreen, all set to give the right impression but no way is he going to show that, beneath it all, the water scares him white once it crosses the paddle pool level.
So he sends out all the right vibrations and this slick, oily individual slippery clever at the office, worms his way to the top without anyone every finding out that if you took away all his top and frippery he’d make the Emperor come off overdressed.
Down here (or up, I believe) at the deep end are worthy stalwarts churning up the waters literally out of their depths and hoping like hell the froth they are creating will cover up their magnificent lack of expertise. We’ve met this tribe at the 9 to 5.
Well above his station in life he exhausts his energies in bluster, table thumping and generally projecting a no-nonsense image. Not only does he flounder both in and out of the pool but he takes a few good people to Davy Jones’ locker with him when the air runs out. He shouldn’t be allowed so far out in the first place, huffing and puffing and wrecking up the works.
Out there is our underground expert who sneaks up behind an unsuspecting swimmer and frightens the hell out of him. He’s the sly one, whose knife never met the Marquis of Queensbury and who spends his life ruining your happiness while professing to be a frolicking friend. Usually, this lot are lean and hungry and in an office capable of playing merry hell with the hierarchy…also called office gossip.
Our floater can be spotted with ease. Minimum effort as he plumply goes with the tide, keeping his nose above water but never really making a decision . He is the company drone, the passenger that seems mandatory on every gravy train. He survives because he never does anything to get into trouble or draw attention to himself.
See those two leaving the pool only minutes after they came in. They are submissive and self-conscious because there is too much of a crowd. They are OK as loners but if the heat is switched on they have no gumption to fight for their patch. They surrender it. At work these are the ones who stop coming one morning and no one notices it for a week.
There is also the clown who engages in constant tomfoolery but then every court needs its jester and pools are no exception. I’ve met him at work, a fun-loving insufferable pain in the neck who never knows when to stop and imagines life is one big party. In both venues, he is a health hazard, to himself and to others since he takes stupid risks and often enough, no one is laughing.
And then we have our clumsy diver who flip flops in for the sake of exhibition and believes life is in the doing, not in the how well. He invariably ends up a section head way behind his schedule with a staff cheerfully ready to commit suicide.
When all this going on, suddenly there is this cut in the water and a clean limbed body cleaves the blue as this human dart makes for the other end. The pool falls silent as if in commanded deference to a thoroughbred. Envious eyes watch as the body turns sharply and scythes back into the return. The hush endures.
Most of the world will never catch up.
You see, either you have it or you don’t.
In the pool or at work.
