Q: Dear Miss Cordelia, My boss said to me the other day: ‘we need to rethink the ITAM TOM.’ It sounded almost menacing! Should I be worried? (Kerry M.)
A: Your letter arrived with all the intrigue of a telegram marked urgent, and I confess I had to read it out loud twice to understand it properly, while my maid Betsy was polishing the silver and pretending not to listen. The phrase “rethink the ITAM TOM” does sound rather like the opening line of a detective serial, does it not?
Now, whenever gentlemen talk of ‘rethinking’ anything, I grow immediately suspicious. In my experience, that sort of ‘thinking’ is the natural habitat of committees and men who enjoy holding meetings more than doing actual work.
As for TOM — well! That depends entirely on which Tom one means.
In our neighbourhood alone we have Tom the butcher, who believes every problem could be solved if only he had a sharper knife; Tom from the post office, who insists organisation is the secret to civilisation (I do sympathise with this point of view); and Tom who runs the ironmongers, who is so haphazard that when he last attempted to reorganise his shop he ended up unable to find the nails for three weeks.
So, when someone says they must “rethink the role of something about Tom,” my instinct is not alarm, but curiosity. In my experience it usually means someone has decided the cupboards should be rearranged again, which makes me wonder ‘why?’
You see, households, and I suspect offices as well, periodically fall victim to what I call The Great Reorganisation Fever. A superior person looks at a perfectly serviceable arrangement of things and declares that everything must now be placed differently. Drawers are emptied, labels are rewritten, and everyone spends several weeks wondering where the teaspoons have gone. But take heart: these exercises rarely mean catastrophe. More often they are an attempt to make sense of a complicated pantry.
Betsy, who has been hovering by the door pretending to dust the umbrella stand, adds this observation: “When people start reorganising, Miss, it’s usually because they’ve realised they don’t know where half their things are.”
Exactly so.
Therefore, my advice is simple: remain calm, keep your indexes tidy, label everything and listen carefully. When the dust settles, the one who understands where everything actually is often becomes the most valuable person in the room.
And if the matter does involve Tom the butcher, do write again, because that would be an entirely different sort of problem.
Yours in good order and labelled cupboards,
Miss Cordelia (and Betsy, who has just bought me a cup of afternoon tea.)