As time goes by
Ten minutes to ten, John, the head of the department under which I’ve been placed, appeared in my office. “We have a divisional meeting at ten. You should be there.” We showed up, and slowly, people started trickling in. Only at 11 did the division head show up and after that, it was two and a half hours of mind numbing boredom. It reminded me of one of the reasons why I wasn’t working for a large organization anymore.
One of the tasks on my list is installing a LAN at the offices. And building an internal information system before a LAN is installed doesn’t make much sense. The cost of installing the LAN are so high, that it needs to be tendered, meaning that it will take at least four weeks, possibly longer, before the LAN will be implemented. What’s more, I’m not needed for installing a LAN. There are enough professionals around in this country.
In the evening, after being dropped off in town by the corporate staffbus, I walked over to the Bronte hotel, where Jouwert, my ICCO contact in Zimbabwe who’s living with his wife in the Eastern Highlands. He wasn’t there, but showed up later, when I was sharing salads with Nathalie at the Italian Bakery, just minutes after Loverboyd finally showed up.
Jouwert and I talked about the possible problems I might encounter. He seemed to be convinced that the biggest hurdle could become people within the SRC only paying lip service to commitments or agreements, resulting in stalling and, simply put, nothing happening. I had to get backing from the right people in order to get things going. However, I personally don’t care if things get stalled or don’t happen. The SRC is NOT my company, it’s NOT my responsibility. It is my objective to help. If these people don’t want to be helped, it’s their problem. Anyway, I don’t want to be hanging around here for two years, wasting my time.