"Oh well," our project manager says as yet another new business initiative evaporates into blank faces and apathetic shrugs. "I guess Rome wasn't built in a day."
Ah, if only we could build Rome. Alas, such marbled magnificence is far beyond our capabilities. These days we can just about manage a rudimentary settlement in the Alban Hills; modest dwellings only; no forum and no temples; and certainly no triumphal arches. Even the most primitive of Etruscans would consider our efforts to be inadequate. To paraphrase Augustus, we found a city of brick and it is still brick, but with more profane graffiti than before.
In fact, we are so far from building Rome that, forget the Alban Hills, we might as well be barbarian nomads camped out far north of Hadrian's wall. We paint our faces blue and clothe ourselves in animal skins, mostly rabbit because we are too scared to hunt larger creatures. Nevertheless, we huddle around the embers of our dying fires to recite the sagas of mythical project managers from legendary projects of yore.
But our sagas are not like the great oral storytelling traditions of antiquity. After all, nobody who works here has the capacity to remember any tale longer than an excuse for being late. So our sagas need to be written down; well, to tell the truth, we mostly just cut and paste them from the sagas of other companies that we've seen on the Internet.
Rome wasn't built in a day. Don't make me laugh. Here's my idea: we'll put a full page advertisement in the classifieds for Romulus and Remus. "Must supply own she-wolf." Meanwhile, our project manager can email the Cumaean Sybil for the umpteenth time. But I'm sure it will just get lost in the prophetess's spam folder yet again like all the others surely have.
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