Strategic Black Swans of Family Values

Overheard in the caravan:

It’s Sunday and Hay and The Chairman are about to go out for a walk. Cat is in the caravan, having wandered into it earlier.

Hay: “I’m just going to tell Caravan that Cat is in the caravan.”
Chairman: “Why?”
Hay: “In case Cat wants to be let out while we’re out.”
Chairman: “And precisely how is Cat going to let Caravan know that she wants to get out? Mobile phone?”

I was looking at my Linked-In contacts yesterday and noticed one of them had labelled herself as a strategic thinker. I roared with laughter on seeing that her job function was that of an HR Manager. Anyone who has dealings with Human Remains knows that the words ‘HR’ and ‘strategic thinker’ simply cannot appear in the same sentence. HR departments are renowned for being as strategically inclined as Amy Winehouse. HR, by its very nature, is purely reactive in terms of hiring people as and when other departments tell them they need some bodies – not predicting what roles will need to be filled and pipelining them. Unfortunately HR is a necessary evil resulting from bureaucratic intervention in the business process by government busybodies and the EU.

I tried to find some info in strategic HR and came up with this. It’s several pages of management-speak that be coalesced into four words; ‘total and utter bollocks’. See if you can glean anything worthwhile from the mishmash of verbiage.

I’ve been reading The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. A very interesting read about the effects of hard-to-predict events, such as, for example, 9/11. Did you know that there were at least another 1,200 American victims of Osama Bin-Laden’s 9/11 atrocity who have been forgotten and will never have a public memorial? As a consequence of 9/11, thousands of people the world over refused to travel by air, irrationally fearing it was now unsafe. Instead they took to the roads, where the risk of death is many orders of magnitude higher than from flying. It’s been estimated that about an extra 1,200 people were added to the road death toll as a direct consequence of 9/11 – and that’s in America alone.

We have the Caravans and Hay’s sister over for dinner on Saturday evening. Poor old Caravan sounded as if he was on a 15 second obscenity delay as he kept offering contributions to the previous conversation to the one in process.

Hay’s sister was telling us the benefits of being a therapist to mental health patients with insomnia and paranoia – the insomniacs are up all night cooking you cakes and the paranoiacs bring you their own food, being under the delusion that they are trying to poison themselves and thus refusing to eat it themselves.

We were discussing The Boy Cameroon’s plans to campaign for the Prime Ministership on the platform of British family values. We decided that this must surely mean kids moving away from their oppressive families after leaving university and setting up shop and the other end of the country, returning home only to place their parents in care homes for the elderly and selling off the house.

We also discussed the invention or discovery that has contributed most to humanity, settling on the wheel. Unfortunately the chap who invented it never got the recognition he deserved, but given President Obama has received the Nobel Peace Prize for doing bugger all, the inventor should certainly get a posthumous Nobel Prize for Physics.

A man whose contribution to a rape investigation resulted in the rapist being caught has donated his £10,000 reward to the victim. What a marvellous gesture.