Ever have one of those days at work where you get on everyone’s nerves - including your own. I had one recently and I still don’t know why. Granted, I dropped my iPhone, cracking the screen so badly that even those nice people at Timsons couldn’t replace it. Later, I discovered that we were mysteriously - and worryingly - behind schedule on a major job. And at lunchtime, I was invited by LinkedIn to congratulate someone I’d never heard of on their new job.
I don’t know why I’m on LinkedIn. By temperament, I’m more of a LinkedOut kind of person. Originally, I went on there because someone told me that if I raised my profile I’d get some business from it. That was five years ago and so far I’ve had nothing more exciting than someone endorsing me for a skill I don’t really have - marketing. Mind you, our sales director was recently endorsed for sword-fighting by some wind-up merchant which did make me laugh.
It would be unfair to blame LinkedIn entirely. As Mrs Mole is fond of pointing out, I was never very fond of social networks even of the traditional variety - golf clubs, Rotary dinners, industry charities didn’t do it for me either. To be honest, outside of the family, the only social network I ever really belonged to was going to the football and sitting next to the same crowd of season ticket holders. Then a few years back the season ticket price shot up and I decided I couldn’t justify it (the business was suffering at the time).
None of which explains why I was so grumpy. It may have been my finance director who, since the Brexit vote, has been about as optimistic as Eeyore, the morose donkey in ‘Winnie The Pooh’. His mood darkened further when Trump won. He’s having trouble adjusting to what I call the new abnormal and came in, on that irritating day, with one of his dismal financial forecasts. So far, none of them have been realised - we’re doing better than his projections - but, as he says so often these days, expect the worst and you won’t be disappointed.
The best part of the day was that I got out of the office, not too late, without having bitten anyone’s head off. And although those business bestsellers would never admit as much, some days that counts as success.