Work is increasingly like a puzzle. Sometimes you can float over the pieces and, like Tom Cruise's character in Minority Report, effortlessly use your magic gloves to shift the shapes into a coherent pattern. Other times, you're at a rickety card table in the stuffy spare bedroom of your great aunt's house, working on a barely started picture of Elvis in Blue Hawaii, and none of the pieces fits. Occasionally, you end up with pieces from a thousand different puzzles - big wooden chunks from a toddler's George of the Jungle puzzle, worn cardboard pieces all of blue sky, three dimensional pop-ups of humpback whales. Except when these are work puzzles, all the pieces are people and their lives and every time you shuffle one, you're affecting someone's life in ways you can't possibly imagine. We in business hide behind the "it's not personal, it's just business" mantra, or worse yet, "we have to think about the bigger picture". Which is all bullshit - every decision *is* personal, every choice affects someone's individual picture. This is not related to some specific, looming decision I need to make, only a reflection on the reality of being in a job that requires a certain degree of distance that makes me increasingly uncomfortable.

I've found that I cannot write a story (I write fiction on occasion, though rarely finish anything) or think about most topics without the salient points being condensed into bullets on a PowerPoint slide. There has been some press coverage of this lately - how poorly information is usually presented using electronic presentation tools, how lazy it makes the presenters, how important views of the data are lost. All of this is true and yet I just asked one of staff members to summarize some information in PowerPoint because I don't have the brain energy to think through the spreadsheet she sent me. I wonder what the symptoms of PowerPoint withdrawal are like?