[BBLISA] pre-comment on tonight's meeting ("Fragile Ops")

[Doug Hirsch]

Quote was from Lois McMaster Bujold, Captain Vorpatril's Alliance.  Highly
recommended fun read, particularly for fans of Bujold's Vorkosigan series.
She always manages to squeeze in the unexpected slice of life.

Doug


On Wed, Jan 8, 2014 at 10:23 AM, Bill Bogstad <bogstad at pobox.com> wrote:

> [...]
> I'll close with a couple of paragraphs from a book I just read.   The
> excerpt is about triaging the email of a boss, but it reminds of how
> life sometimes felt in those environments.
>
> Bill Bogstad
>
> ====
>
> Ivan had developed a personal metaphor for this first task (after
> coffee)  of the day.   It was like opening one's door to find that an
> overnight delivery service had left a large pile of boxes on one's
> porch, all marked "miscellaneous".  In reality, they were all marked
> urgent, in Ivan's view they might as well be labeled miscellaneous.
>
> Each box contained one of the following:
>
> live, venomous, agitated snakes on the verge of escape;
> quiescent venomous snakes;
> nonvenomous garden snakes;
> dead snakes;
> or things that looked like snakes but weren't, such as large, sluggish
> worms.
>
> It was Ivan's morning duty to open each box, identify, the species,
> vigor, mood, and fang-count of the writhing things inside, and sort
> them by genuine urgency.
>
> ===
>
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