Identity

Congratulations to me, I’ve been given an email address for the new office, but I can’t help but notice the username asstpc just reads wrongly. Maybe it’s just me. It’s taken this long to get my own email address because my identity has been up for discussion and, up until now, I’ve been “from the London office”, rather than a Yangon employee. I am still the only person on the internal messaging system with the label London HQ next to my name. This is a problem because, historically, there is not a great deal of love between the Myanmar and London offices even though, ultimately, there is not much difference between them.

As an example, in London’s office the position of authority is strongly correlated with how close you sit to the window. For each desk, the boss sits at the end, looking out over a grand view of London. Anyone closer to the middle of the room is less important, along a spectrum of power. This probably explains why, for me, I was sat on the most distant desk, farthest from the window, behind a pillar.

In my new office, I am sat almost exactly in the middle and, once again, farthest from the windows. The shape of the office is different, but the principle remains the same, namely that all the important people are sat around the edges with views either across the office or to the outside world. So my identity has not changed at all in this transition.

The new office

There are small differences. Nowadays there is a lady who delivers me coffee twice a day, which on the face of it sounds great but to a coffee drinker is an eyebrow raiser. Only two cups? Previously I had to make my own coffee, but at least I could have one every hour. And with fresh milk. There is still the overuse of acronyms and people saying vis-à-vis, but it’s by far not as predominant in everyday talk as it was in London. If I could, I would entirely ban the use of vis-à-vis (I thought The Office had ridiculed it out of use…I was wrong) and I would restrict the use of acronyms to maybe only one per sentence, which is quite generous. A typical sentence, for instance “DG-ECHO funds the PC and PHC to manage the CHWs, AMWs and VHCs, who administer EmOAC, ANC and BHS in PHCs” takes about two years to decipher unless you are well-integrated or carry around the book of acronyms, which has more than 2000 entries, contains some acronyms of acronyms, and is not yet complete.

Plain English would be so much more inclusive, but saying stuff people don’t understand means people are less likely to argue with you and more likely to think you are clever. The route to that seat near the window is laced with NGO-speak, so I’d better get used to speaking it, vis-à-vis my career development. And that goes for whether I’m in London or Yangon.

Yours, asstpc