The Animal in You

I once remember my colleagues returning from a training seminar on group dynamics and all they were talking about was animals. Apparently, during the seminar they had been taught a principle which categorized people into different groups that related to animal characteristics. There were about 12 of them, but the ones I remember distinctly are:

The donkey: these are people that are very stubborn and will not change their point of view
The lion: the kind of people who fight whenever others disagree with their plans
The ostrich: the type of person that buries his head in the sand and refuses to admit any problem at all
The cat: this type of person is always looking for sympathy
The tortoise: who withdraws from the group refusing to give ideas or opinions
The peacock: these are the ones who are always competing for attention – they think too highly of themselves.

So next time you meet someone, be sure to take a closer look at them. You might actually be face to face with a housefly – a regular pest that always turns up when they are not wanted and sticks their hands into everything. Or perhaps you might be dating a butterfly – hardly sticks to one thing, always flitting from this to the other. Or you might be lucky enough to meet a tiger – the kind that has a high level of social tolerance so their fights are kept to a minimum.

Or maybe I should be asking, what kind of an animal are you?

Venus and Mars Collide

I cannot think of a time I was more embarrassed than earlier this year when my attempts at showing appreciation of one of my friends went terribly sour!

At the dawn of the new year, as you were making your new year's resolutions all of which by now are broken, I was doing something far more exciting. I did a thorough inventory of my friendships and came to the conclusion that there was one friend I was treating particularly shabbily.

This particular friend is quite resourceful in a profession that I am new to, so from time to time, I call him up when I need technical help. This is not a bad thing, of course, what are friends for? However, the problem is I had only looked him up specifically when I needed help, and never otherwise (tsk! tsk!)

So, in the spirit of new beginnings and making amends, I purposed to call him up when I don't need help and just have a good old chat. This seemed like a perfectly grand idea to me until the last minute of the evening we were supposed to meet up for a drink and a chat when this friend balked!

After replaying the incident several times in my head and with a few consultations here and there from member of the less fare sex, I think I may have unravelled the mystery. He thought I was hitting on him! A single unattached woman, on a mission, offering rather assertively to buy him a drink, out of the blues, and not asking for any favours as was the custom, may have been all too much for him!

I have since abandoned that mission and set out on one that I hope will be greatly beneficial to the entire human race, well, perhaps the entire woman race - an in depth analysis of the theory that men are from mars and women from venus. Any volunteers, guys? I promise, I won't offer to buy you a drink!