Anthroposophical?

Categories: uncategorized

Tags: foundspeech, words

Date: 10 May 2007 23:58:54

Over heard on a train in London

"I met X going to the library - you know, the anthroposophical business..."

That's not a word you hear every day.

Especially

Two business types in cheap suits, SE London or urban Kent accents (that's "Estuary English" to the posh among you), one maybe in his twenties, one perhaps forty. Planning office coup. Colleague A, apparently, isn't up to the job and needs a little help. Manager B has other things on her mind and anyway she isn't "technical". Things have come to a head due to some critical email that makes A. look very bad. Manager C. needs keeping out of it. The younger man was being subtly invited to "help" A, with the unspoken promise that soon he will get a promotion out of it, maybe even step into A.'s job if he has to go. I never quite worked out what business they were in, but it seemed to involve mobile phones and providing internet access to clients. I wondered if maybe they worked for NTL, sorry, Virgin Media. Trite advice was passed around - the best being "Keep the customer in the loop - even if there is bad news". If it wasn't for the suits (I don't see a lot of suits these days) they could easily be the sort of blokes who drink in some of our local pubs. Maybe Charlton supporters rather than Millwall.

Then "anthroposophical". Where did that come from?

There I was making up stories about 5-a-side football fans from Sidcup with a couple of A-levels and ten years experience cabling things up for BT getting themselves jobs in some kind of barrow-boy comms provider in the city, maybe even calling themselves a Consultancy, the IT equivalent of Estate Agents, and now they have a library and use words like "anthroposophical".