I’ve spent my day in a dark room of an hotel about twenty miles from home. It’s been a revelation in as much as it’s been with a bunch of techies (technical people) who understand such things as SPSS, SAS, multi-variate regression analysis, partial least squares (which sounds vaguely familiar from my A Level Stats course), chi squared tests and all sorts of other fabulously unexciting but very necessary things in the lives of market researchers.

There was a famous person (exactly who escapes my memory) who said ‘there’s lies, damned lies and statistics’. I sometimes think that the old adage of many a true word is spoken in jest is absolutely true about that particular saying…..

Actually that’s just me being flippant after a whole day of listening to whether partial least squares or regression gives the best derived importance or whether a seven point scale or a five point scale is statistically stronger or more commercially viable. I do totally believe in these things and their value in explaining the world of business but I also wish they would be more straightforward to a simple soul like me. I think I fell off the trolley several times during the day.

My usual redress when I’m losing the plot is to go to the Ladies for a ‘breather’ in the (sometimes forlorn) hope that by the time I return the issue will be sorted and we can get back onto something I know a bit more about.

Likening the experience to watching paint dry is a bit glib really and we’ve actually covered a huge amount of ground but boy, for someone like me with the attention span of a flea, it’s all a bit tortuous…..so much so that in a toss-up between tomorrow’s Board Meeting and this I have a tough time deciding which would feel preferable. (Though I am already committed to this so it’s academic really.)

Now I sit in the bar of said hotel with two colleagues while the American folks are in their rooms freshening up after an overnight flight followed by a day-long meeting before taking them out to dinner. We’ve been privileged to receive some excellent hospitality from them while away so now it’s our turn to repay the compliment.

I was proven wrong about the hotel restaurant and we’re off to an Italian place in nearby Horsley. Hopefully it will be veggie-friendly. I’m sure we will have a good time anyway…….

Yep – a wonderful restaurant and fab food – cool.

You may ask ‘what’s all this to do with a photo of a bird of paradise plant?’ And you’d be right to – the analogy isn’t obvious by any means. In fact, this is very like my story – I bought the plant ten years ago with the promise that it would flower in three years. In the end, it took ten years to produce this, its first flower, just before I put the plant on the compost bin. So, it’s a perfect analogy – both my story of today and this picture have been the metaphorical ‘watching paint dry’ scenario – in both cases, I’ve waited forever for something beautiful to happen. I must now conclude that it is possible in my work example too!

Last year I was concerned with being a name not a number and two years ago I was in car heaven!