Christmas Lunch

The team - what's left of it - went out for a Christmas lunch last week in defiance of the office atmosphere, the ridiculousness of recent (and not so recent) events and the exasperatingly poor level of support offered by senior management.
As we sat in out local restaurant where we go for all our "celebratory" meals (it's the only decent place to eat for miles), I thought about all the other meals we'd eaten there and the circumstances that took us out of the office to have lunch together.
Looking back over the past couple of years, it seems that there has been far more to commiserate over than there has been to celebrate. It makes me sad that a group of people who have a real and evident passion for the work in which they are involved can be so ungraciously left to cope with the fallout of the HNC's incapabilities and general disregard of the many issues that the team has brought to it's attention over the years.

Although we had a pleasant enough time over lunch, it was clear that as the year ends, the team has very little to celebrate.
The office is now filled with an air of inevitability and you can almost hear the time bomb ticking quietly away to itself in the corner.
Tick tick tick..........
.......and so on and so on