THE BIG 'W'

I was chairing a meeting of one of the Committees of my professional body, the Chartered Institute of Purchasing and Supply recently. It was dull, as these meetings often are, and after three hours, some of the Committee were becoming restless, and not a little fractious. One member I could see was writing a poem dedicated to his cat and another was working out his future from an inspection of his coffee grounds. We were discussing how we might review a ‘jargon-buster’ document that had been written and designed to simplify certain arcane terms that are used within procurement and the supply chain. We had almost decided that each of us would take home this 150-page document and read it, and see whether there were any pieces of jargon that we would wish to add to this body of work. The coffee-ground seer suddenly stopped glancing into his cup and spoke, with admirable succinctness. ‘I saw a film once,’ he said. ‘In it, a group of people gathered around the wreck of a car in which a thief had died, albeit not before he had divulged the whereabouts of the loot to certain other members of the group. As I recall,’ he said, ‘It was buried under a ‘big W’ in Santa Rosita Park, California. Anyway, they decided to split the loot a number of ways, dependent upon who was down at the wreck, the number of people who were in each car, and so on. Taking that principle a stage further, I note that there are nine of us in the room, including the cat poet here, and that fool of a Chairman, and there are twenty-six letters of the alphabet. I propose that we each take three letters and review those. In that way, we are not duplicating each other’s work. I will take the letters X, Y and Z. Good morning.’ And so saying, he arose from his chair and left.