Looking for advice? Just ask me
One of my favourite newspaper columnists, Elizabeth Bruenig of The Washington Post, once said to her followers on social media: “You guys write me the most wonderful letters... I strive to be the person readers have in mind when they sit down to write to me.”
It made me wonder about the person you have in mind when you write to me: the brooding curmudgeon, hunched over his Commodore 64 in a cellar lit only by paraffin lamps, sneering his acidic views into a Norelco miniature cassette recorder, grieving the death of a common-sense language that never existed in the first place.
I strive to be that person too.
That person may not seem like someone you want to pour your heart out to, seek work advice from or engage in any form of correspondence with – in fact, I’ve explicitly told you on numerous occasions that I have the emotional intelligence of flatus – and yet you keep sending them.
And you should.
I once compared advice to a cat and said “If you go looking for it, grasp at it, it will walk away, showing you the disdain your neediness deserves. To get advice, you must sit quietly, patiently waiting for it to jump into your lap.”
I have since sought advice on that advice and now realise I was wrong; advice is more like a dog. You can go looking for it. In fact you can wake it up on its snooze mat and scruffle its ears and demand that it plays with you. And it will happily oblige.
Anyway, what I’m trying to say if you’d like to send me an email, my Lotus Notes inbox is always open.