A Peek At The Peak

This afternoon, I spent an hour on Mt. Everest. I made it all the way to the summit. That's right...I "summited". In an hour. Because that's a verb. Wanna know how I did it? With team work. Team work that includes an "I", because for some reason - I was told that it does. That the "I" is just as important as all the other letters. A concept I had trouble wrapping my head around because of what it does to the analogy.

And that's what this meeting was. One giant analogy...no pertinent information. I HATE meetings like this. My company is making some changes that could be considered cool, if you cared about such things - and I thought this was going to be our opportunity to get more information on just what "changes" would entail. Instead we got an hour of PowerPoint slides of Everest - of the camps on Everest, of the white people climbing Everest and of the sherpas helping the white people climb Everest. And how the metaphor of the summit applies to not only our professional lives, but to our personal lives. Because we need to live in a world where anything's possible.


There are no quotation marks, but this is almost verbatim. It was nice to learn, albeit belatedly, that our benefits include unsolicited life coaching.

This isn't the first time this has happened. In the past - these gatherings have included references to how we must all drink the Kool-aid. It's what keeps us together, etc. Disturbing. I can't help but wonder if the executives understand exactly what happened at the end of that story. Because if they did, I feel certain they would agree that such a metaphor is inappropriate. Always.

This is how the cynicism bulb gets nourished into a full bloom. I've been maintaining my full bloom for so long, I really only have about 1/4 of my soul left. The rest of it has been sloughed off here and there on the way up to the summit.