Driven To The Wrong Conclusion

From the 1970s to the 1990s, my mother worked for a non-government organisation in our country; this organisation’s role is to educate and advise members of the general public about their legal rights and the legal options available to them.

My mother had worked her way up from being a secretary to being a project manager, reporting directly to the C-level executives and occasionally even meeting royalty and heads of state.

On this occasion, the project my mother had been selected to lead was, in simple terms, to build a computer network for the organisation, to store all of the documents used to educate and advise members of the general public, for retrieval either by the tens of thousands of staff in the organisation and/or by the tens of millions of members of the general public who used the organisation. 

The organisation didn’t have the technical ability to complete the project itself, so it decided to invite businesses to bid for parts of the project; one of the businesses bidding for part of the project decided to go all out and hired a high-end hotel to wine and dine the various principals.

Needing every moment to work on the project, my mother decided to work during the journey to the hotel by borrowing an early cell phone (A little bit more modern than Gordon Gekko’s, but only a little.) and laptop from the organisation, and by taking a plane to as near to the hotel as possible, and then by having a chauffeured car take her from the airport to the hotel. 

If you have an expense account, and it’s genuinely benefiting the organisation, why not use it?

So, my mother is working in the back of the car when the chauffeur announces that they’ve arrived; my mother looks up from her work… and is confused.

All she’s able to see is the busy courtyard and loading dock of the back of a building.

My Mother: “Are you certain that we’re at the correct address?”

It looks nothing like what she was expecting a high-end hotel to look like.

Chauffeur: “This is the correct address. The kitchen entrance is—” *Pointing.* “—just over there.”

My Mother: *Pointedly.* “I’m expected at the main entrance. I’m one of the VIPs. Do you really think that a person in a chauffeured car, dressed in a business suit, and using a cell phone and laptop that likely cost as much as this car, is one of the kitchen staff just because that person is a woman?”

The very embarrassed chauffeur drove my mother to the hotel’s main entrance, and suffice to say, he did not receive a tip.