We had a wonderful game back in the last office i worked in. Very much like the vivid vintage hindi movies of old. If you will remember, they usually started out with a neat family, slowly worn down by the unfairness of life, disease, president incumbents. Then, stricken by a polluted evil, the eldest son gets drawn into a life of crime, leaving his weary mother to care for the hobbled dad and grandmother gone insane. The storm clouds gather, crops ravaged and just as the deluge and hail are about to cast a final tragedy on the gathered gloom, the cherubic hindu god with beetling eyebrows and googlie eyes drops from the sky and saves the day.
That was the game we played, the god game.
The trick was for the director of the firm, the headman, the proprieter of the shop, to be above it all. Clean and disassociated from daily happenings job to job. Thats the way it worked in the office; i was a frontliner, a footsoldier and wrestler sent out to wage the war of design gives and design takes. Never conceeding a cause just because the client held the say so, fighting to the last design breath under the task of keeping to budgets simply because you believed in what you did. And when the final confrontation happened, when clients got pissed off not being able to make headway with their unreason, then the director of the firm would descend like an angel of reason, translucent, peaceful and godlike, an entity of objectivity to take away the client's pain. 'Its these young impetuous architects', he'd say, passionate and just burning to do the best possible work'. Yes, the best work. Passionate. Just burning. What client could possibly argue with that?
Descending angels and passion. Takes one through storm clouds and polluted evil.