Real Horror Show

Life delivers a lot of functional interactions. These are not the same as having company round or sharing in a real conversation. They merely exist to serve a purpose, deliver a deadline, complete a task.

When you reflect on these gentle dialogues, at least in the workplace they could represent a certain mutual lack of humanity. That's not to say you weren't acting with human qualities. It's just that it was functional and perhaps little more.

There's a deadness to this dialogue which, while it doesn't produce the early chill that it might, hides a danger that, as the months and years tick by, may deliver a late shudder. And like all horror, the scariness comes from just a very slightly different view of what you previously chose as your reality.

The discovery is made.

You have noticed.

You have adjusted.

You hope it's not too late.

I think the challenge - the solution if you like - is to add humanity where you can, to add value. But sadly in this age we inhabit, there is a danger.

Anyone who wants to score a point against you can choose to actively misinterpret or to misreport something you might say. Or might not have said. Get it wrong (or just wrongly right) and it could lose you your job, your husband, your wife.

Generally it's just too big a price to pay. And yet...

I would suggest that the best tool of adding humanity is a playful flexibility with language. You might call it neurolinguistic playfulness.

(You may prefer a dangerous leer or or a saucy wink. I don't recommend it. No one appreciates the Carry On movies more than me but it is 2011. And for the next seven months at least there's very little we can do about that).

That playful flexibility can be your noose. That's the trouble with flexibility. It can contort and twist and eventually fracture like a young willow. And the edge of that willow can be poked into one of your eyes. Or both. Hard like.

You have to be careful with this humanity thing but you use it or you lose it so please.... do it anyway.

Because unless you can think of a better way, that's how you change the world.