The Rubber Duck

 

When I was working, we were invited to partake in a course about exploring our personalities and the personalities of others with a view to learning how to deal with our colleagues in a more personal way based upon what we had learned about how they behave, how they interact with other people and how they like people to interact with them, the idea being that we would be much better equipped to keep ourselves and our colleagues happy. 

You know – a bullshit course.

I learned a few things about myself and my colleagues but as predicted, myself and the other guys on the course all forgot about what we had learned (mainly because it was pseudo-scientific nonsense) and within a month nothing had changed. 

In fact, if you were to ask me about even my own personality, I couldn’t recall after even a week. 

The organisers of the course presented each of us with a booklet, summarising what we were like as people at the very beginning of the course, firmly putting us into one of four groups, where each group had a colour. This was based on a multiple choice questionaire that we had filled in earlier. Call me an old cynic but I am very wary of such questionaires, given that Scientologists tried to indoctrinate me into their cult based on a similar one.

Of course, several people had traits of other groups, including me. However, I can’t even recall what colour I am supposed to be nor what other colours occasionally intervene to shape the person that I am. 

Also, given that most of the attendees were just like me, software developers, with varying levels of neurodiversity, it was little surprise to me that we were all roughly the same. The ones who weren’t the same were in the HR department or were managers or salespeople. I didn’t need a week long course to tell me that I was nothing like a salesperson or a person who worked in HR. 

The booklet summarising me had sentences like:

Dave is never happier than when he is sitting at a computer trying to resolve a tricky problem and working out the best way to persuade that computer to behave itself. Don’t send him out to sell one of your products because he doesn’t tolerate fools and can get very angry when confronted with business bullshit.

Actually, the gist of that last sentence is true even though it wasn't present in the booklet. 

I was once sitting in a meeting after we had successfully completed the testing of a large and complex computer system and I was relieved and delighted with our progress. However, when we had the meeting at the end with all the so-called important people, I had to endure all two hours of it and our efforts were, shall we say, not really appreciated by the so-called “powers that be” both within my own company, the customer’s company and other interested parties, sadly including people who didn’t need to even be there and were clueless about the discussion we were having. 

All this led to a hell of a lot of corporate bullshit being discussed. 

I wasn’t happy and I was sitting next to my manager at the time. As the meeting went on, I got more and more frustrated and to stop myself from speaking, I played with my pen – until one of the customers said something that made my blood boil, that was laced with business jargon. 

I was professional enough not to scream:

“JUST SPEAK ENGLISH! WHAT DOES THAT EVEN MEAN????? WE PASSED THE BLOODY TESTS WITH FLYING COLOURS, YOU ARSE!!!!”. 

Instead, my body and mind protested in a subtle way; I threw my pen high up in the air and allowed it to crash onto the table as I leaned back in my chair, looked up at the ceiling and sighed as loudly as I could. 

My manager, sitting next to me, actually kicked me and shook his head. Thankfully my mini protest at all the bullshit flying around the room had only been noticed by him so the remaining people continued to shovel bullshit around like it was going out of fashion. 

At the end of the meeting, my manager took me aside to ask me to rein in my natural instincts to show how pissed off I was for the next meeting.

“Next meeting?” I said incredulously. “Why do they need me there? We just spent two hours wasting our time and coming to no conclusion whatsoever. Do these people actually get paid for attending pointless meetings with a bonus for every corporate soundbite that they utter? I don’t do corporate bullshit.”

To be fair, that made him laugh but he told me that I had to be there “just in case”. I was more well-behaved at the next one and spent my time thinking about something else for the duration of the snooze-fest of a meeting that, again, just passed bullshit around in circles. 

Anyway, I have digressed because I did have a point to this post. You may have noticed that I called it “The Rubber Duck” and I have yet to refer to one. 

At that same personality course I mentioned at the start of this post, we had to say what we thought of another colleague and I referred to one of them (let’s call him Kenny – if he reads this he will know exactly why) as “My Rubber Duck”. 

Sadly, this caused a lot of amusement amongst the group because they obviously hadn’t heard of this phrase. I was surprised by this and also, I was potentially hypocritical because I guess this phrase could be classed as business jargon. 

Let me explain. 

A “rubber duck” is apparently something you can talk to in the bath if there is nobody else to talk to resolve a problem or talk around things. Now I can imagine dear reader that you think I spend my time in the bath talking to my rubber duck but the truth is that I don’t even own a rubber duck. And I don’t have baths. 

And before you think I am a dirty minger, I have showers instead. 

And I don’t talk to inanimate objects either (just the cats and they are very much alive). 

So why did I label my friend Kenny as my “rubber duck”?

At the time we sat next to each other at work and when I had a problem that I had to solve, sometimes it was good just to talk to somebody else to get a fresh perspective on the issue at hand. And a lot of the time, Kenny just listened and thought and, as I was talking and trying to explain the problem, the solution started to form in my head. And Kenny hadn’t actually helped me. He had inspired me just by listening to me. 

To be fair, I have also acted as a “rubber duck” to him and other colleagues. 

The phrase certainly caused a lot of amusement and it was the only thing that a lot of people remembered from the course. 

To be honest I was tempted to buy a rubber duck for Kenny as a silly gift when I came back from my next holiday. If you go to Europe, there are specialist rubber duck shops where you buy rubber ducks disguised as various characters. 

Kenny might have appreciated it. 

I certainly would have if somebody had bought one for me – that’s because I am weird – and anybody on that course who didn’t think so before, certainly thinks so now. 

Here are some pictures of rubber ducks you can buy:

And here's one that you can't buy (sadly) but I wish I could).