Home again.

I've been away. It's a long story, though mostly available on Facebook and Twitter for those as is interested.

But it's good to be home. We shared a large bottle of Italian white wine and ate pasta with allotment fennel and tomato sauce. Then we watched Juno. I loved it. I hope there are really are teenage girls like that these days. There weren't when I was one. We did our best, but we didn't have the role models.

joella

The politics of meeting

It's all about work at the moment. Which makes it hard to write about, given the Blogging Policy. But I have noticed an interesting form of power-play recently.

You get a meeting invite. Before you accept it, you check your calendar, only to find that you have not one, but two meetings in that slot already. So you send a reschedule request. Here, you have a choice. You can choose a time that you know you are available, or you can take the time to check the other person's calendar and choose a time that you know you are both available.

But they didn't take the time to do that before they sent the invite, so by doing it you are saying 'I acknowledge that your time is more important than mine'.

You never get these kinds of invites from people who are more junior than you. They will have taken the time to check your calendar, so that you are more likely to accept their invite rather than just decline it. And you never get them from very senior people, as they have PAs. PAs will check your calendar, and won't schedule a clash unless they have made a judgement that the thing already in your calendar can probably be moved quite easily. And they usually say that on the invite.

No, it's the people who are about as senior as you are who usually do this. And they are usually men. The women will usually ring you up and say 'we should meet, when are you free?', and you each look at your own calendar and suggest a time.

For a while, I adopted a policy of just accepting every invite without checking my calendar, choosing to have faith in all my colleagues. That was a disaster, but I haven't found a strategy I like better yet. There are certain situations where it's important not to give ground. More on this to follow.

joella