Gosh dear reader, I have been neglecting you, have I not… Truth is, things have been a little hectic in Engineer’s world lately, with the inevitable overspill into Judge’s and Boxer’s worlds and onwards into mine. It’s a feeble excuse though, and once again I thank the Almighty that I am not a serious journalist who has to produce a weekly (or daily!) column in order for my salary to roll into my bank account, or we would all be eating baked beans and living in a caravan.
My rant for today concerns the hypocrisy of people, and more accurately, adults. Children don’t do hypocrisy. It must be something we go on a training course for at around the age of 16. This particular rant has come about due to an incident at my (paid) work this week, in which someone much more important than me failed to persuade me to attend a 2 hour meeting in London because the value of the 2 hours was difficult to justify against the monetary cost of actually getting me there and back, not to mention the cost of my time, having to rise at 5am, suffer the vagaries of Easyjet and the Gatwick Express (an oxymoron if ever I heard one), and not get home until 10pm. So instead of using a more persuasive argument, or offering me the option of dialling in instead, or even agreeing that my presence at the meeting was not justifiable, my contribution could be captured some other way and the output of the meeting could be communicated to me after the event, this particular person did what the Weak tend to do in these situations and clyped on me to my boss.
For those non-Scots amongst us, the word “clype” has no easy, one word definition really. It means to tell tales. We spend our parenthood days telling our children not to do it. We try hard not to respond to a clype (it can be both a noun and a verb) but we often can’t help ourselves. We hear our teachers telling our children not to clype, unless it’s “really serious”, but they don’t really define what “really serious” actually is, and having its hair pulled is “really serious” to a 6 year old. In any work environment, the easiest way to get something done is to go up the chain of command, rather than attempt to win someone over through charm and stakeholder persuasion, and it is far easier this way to bring about retribution for behaviour which has pissed you off, rather than confronting directly and discussing with a view to solving the problem.
In many organisations, clyping is a way of life, entrenched in accepted behaviour and corporate identity, and even documented in procedures and processes. It leads to, or stems from, structures which are too hierarchical where everyone has their place and must be involved in the decision-making process, which in turn becomes unwieldy and top heavy, and it renders the process itself far more long-winded and complex than it needs to be.
And it starts in childhood. It’s a “do as I say, not as I do” situation. We tell children not to clype, and yet we do it all the time. We tell children they are empowered to sort out their own issues, and then we wade in to try and sort them out, by writing a letter to a teacher, confronting the parent of the child with whom our child’s issue is, or by telling our child what to do about it rather than letting him or her work out the best course of action themselves. This is all fondly meant – we do it because we love them, but we end up doing more harm than good because we perpetrate the clyping adult. And so it goes on into the next generation.
