MIQ Musings – Day 6

MIQ Diary – Day 6 – Rejoice in small things and they will continue to grow.

A 630am wake-up! I am cured! Well, perhaps not entirely as I woke up at 1am and 3am. I still think my sleep patterns are on the mend, albeit slowly.

820am and a I received a phone call from the MinHealth person telling me there would be no face-to-face health check due to staff shortage. I resisted the temptation to ask whether it was due to illness…

We did the usual routine (sans thermometer in the earhole) over the phone instead. I put the phone down and realised I felt a bit disappointed that we couldn’t catch up in person. Cabin fever, perhaps.

The morning flew by, with a few Zooms, but mainly with many small-but-important admin tasks. Invoices, reports, Kanban reviews, data cross-references, due diligence documents…the list wasn’t quite endless but it was still significant. The tasks were individually quite trivial but having done them all left me feeling like I’d achieved something big. If my brain were a provincial hotel room then I had just vacuumed the carpet of a week’s biscuit crumbs.

The Kiwi Sausage Sizzle happened in the afternoon, and I was the recipient of two sausages wrapped in bread and covered in onions. Having only eaten lunch an hour before & with dinner likely to turn up in a couple of hours, I did what any sane person would do. I ate both of them. And unsurprisingly they were terrible.

Ninety-nine per cent of New Zealand sausages are dreadful. The other one per cent is labelled ‘gourmet’ so the extortionate prices can be justified by the idiots who buy them, but they are still largely dreadful.

New Zealand sausage culture (which is a thing) is a travesty. Sausages are treated as cheap food, they are made cheaply, with awful ingredients & are cooked poorly. New Zealand should learn from the UK, where the sausage is a work of art. Even the cheapest UK sausages are delicious, packed with real ingredients & cooked with an appropriate degree of reverence. Hang your heads in sausage-based shame, New Zealand!

But besides all that, while the Kiwi Sausage Sizzle sausages were not good, they were still a welcome distraction.

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I spent the rest of the afternoon pottering with more small items of concern.

The fiction on LinkedIn is that people are changing the world through the power of [insert utterly banal product or service here.] The truth is, “Oh no they’re not.” It’s the small things that make a difference. Attention to detail is what matters. Wave your arms about as much as you like about your highfalutin’ concepts, but if you can’t deal with the details you might as well go home.

God, I wish I could go home.

Anyway, yet again today I didn’t change the world, but I did make it a bit tidier.