Sardonic Office Humor

We lunched recently with our friend Chris, a superscribe with the vaunted international consuling firm McKinsey & Co., and he regaled us in the usual fashion with stories of his exploits. We know some fast-brained folks, but he's right near the top in the neural circuitry department, and the occasional catch-up chats are never long enough to capture half of what we'd like to discuss, but of course that only renders it that much more interesting the next time. Still, we do our best by racing through dozens of subjects of mutual interest. But I often walk away from these lunches chuckling over one special nugget of information, a joke, observation about the news, or some other detail. This time it was a bit of office humor he shared. Referring to the fast pace of work and constant travel in the company, and the need to squeeze personal vacations into business travel plans, he said the term they use for adding personal time to business travel is "leveraged flyouts," a take-off on leveraged buyouts, or purchases of companies with the use of lots of debt. Anyway, it made me laugh. We've mentioned Chris once before, by the way, in this account of his observations of China. And I also referred to a touching story he once shared about his then-infant son's reaction to his parting, in this dad's column.