“Hello, my name is Wedge and I’m an internal communications specialist.”
This is usually all I have to say at parties to be whisked away to the VIP section and doused liberally with Cristal. Sure, there’s glamour, kudos, perks and the sheer gosh-damned fabulousness of it all, but don’t let the flash cars and the bling suits fool you – at some time during the day there can be some really hard meetings to attend.
Sure, they may seem like ‘lunch’ to the casual observer, but to those of us with a corporate Melcrum account, they are ‘working lunches’. Time is a critical commodity for a communicator; news needs to be rigorously contained and controlled, piped down specific channels to targeted audiences long before Maureen in the canteen has blabbed it all out to the coffee queue.
There are some days when a ‘breakfast war room’ must be set up to ensure that various communicators and people we call stakeholders are kept happy / in the dark (preferably both). There’s little glamour in dragging yourself into the board room for eight o’clock when all breakfast entails is a croisont and burnt coffee. Sacrifices are to be made of course – not that I mean to be a martyr or anything, I know there are people worse off than me. For instance, some communicators get mistaken for IT people – imagine the horror! It’s a harsh world.
I guess your working life is all very much the same. No?
[Wedge – a hard working communicator and intranet manager in the complex and ill-defined world of internal communications.]Photo credit: vancouverfilmschool
