Pink Paradox

The company I work for supports Breast Cancer Care, and donates a certain sum of money to them for each pack of our best-selling product. It's a great cause, and yesterday, the culmination of Breast Cancer Awareness week, the whole company made a special effort to raise extra funds for the charity. Ladies dressed in pink washed cars, hairy-chested men allowed themselves to be waxed (ouch!), local companies donated scores of goodies for the raffle - with prizes including wide-screen TVs, use of a brand new Mercedes SLK for the weekend, hampers, six-foot tall cuddly penguins (as in Happy Feet) - and a good friend of mine supplied huge quantities of alcohol from her company (which is also one of my former employers) for the Finance Wine Cellar Clearance. I'm sure she won't mind if I add a link here to her firm's cocktail website, which she works tirelessly to promote. There was a Car Boot-ique - an indoor car boot sale - and various pink non-alcoholic cocktails to try, pink doughnuts on sale, and, as we have a multi-national workforce, a fantastic buffet of food from around the world to sample at lunchtime. The Pink Panther put in an appearance and we had a Wii-mbledon tournament. My doubles partner and I got through to the quarter finals (no thanks to me - she kept having to remind me which cartoon character I was!)

The only sour note was a 'phone call from my boss to one of my colleagues to tell her that she must not spend any time on Pink Day activities, because we were all far too busy... What a shame he felt the need to point that out when we are all very responsible when it comes to prioritising work. What a great pity he felt the need to point it out when he had spent half of Friday out of contact travelling to be with his girlfriend for the weekend ...

I guess when you get to that level of seniority you feel you can make the rules, but don't think apply to you. Funny, but I have always subscribed to the 'lead by example' viewpoint...

Next time he asks me to do anything personal for him, I'm afraid I shall be too busy ...