There’s nothing worse than a bout of monotony to suffocate the chance of a decent idea. That and road works. So, having commuted the same well-worn path from the same house to the same office far too many times than I care to remember, I thought the time had come to shake things up a bit.
Changing the house or the office was far too challenging so on a warm and sunny Friday morning last week, I ditched the car keys and took a stroll down the hill to the wharf. A few minutes later I had settled into my outdoor seat on the 8.10 a.m. ferry and was chugging serenely through the coves of Sydney Harbour, wondering why I didn’t make more of this extraordinarily serene mode of transport.
Setting off for the morning commute with the aid of water transport is not something I’m particularly familiar with. (Unless of course you count a Type 21 Leander frigate, but that had guns and missiles and things and rarely got you back home in time for tea. In fact you were lucky if that got you back for Christmas, but let’s leave that for a more politically tainted blog). It has always been planes, trains and automobiles for me.
But I do remember one particular morning commute, courtesy of the 319 Battersea to Chelsea double-decker bus, when the idea of kicking off the day with a gang-plank first struck a cord. Sir Terence Conran, the self proclaimed father of British design (and it’s a pretty fair claim too), was belly-aching in the London Times about the failure of someone to do something about tapping into the transport possibilities of the Thames. After all, he said, the river had been trucking untold numbers of Englishmen up and down its estuaries for near on a Millennia.
As a novice to the role of a decent bit of publicity to prepare the community for a new business venture, it failed to dawn on me that Conran was in the process of finalising another restaurant venture down at Thames Wharf. But Machiavellian or otherwise, he had a point.
Look at any bustling city and, for the very obvious reason of pre-industrial trade links, there’s usually a river somewhere in the middle of it carrying everything from tourists to giant billboards to jaded commuters. Hong Kong has its Star Ferry, Sydney the rumbling green and gold ferry network and New York the Staten Island ferry. Few of these are exactly state of the art but they provide an important service to increasingly cluttered land based transport choices.
Of course, where Sydney wins hands down is the picture postcard setting. Most of the wharfs along the Lower North Shore are tucked within nature reserves, heritage bushland and a few clusters of beautiful homes. Peeking out behind every cove and inlet, another soon comes into view, up until the Opera House and Harbour Bridge begin to dominate the scenery. On a warm sunny morning, there really is no better place to be – particularly if you have a full day’s work ahead of you.
And so with a mind swimming with possibility, the din of the family breakfast behind me, a few thoughts on how to manage some particular commercial challenge began to flow. It really is extraordinary what a different path can do to the senses.
Alas, inspiration was short-lived. It dawned on me that I was alone. The only one taking stock of the space and fresh air; doing some thinking. Everyone, to a man, had their backs hunched up, shoulders rounded out and head dipped low. Gone was any appreciation of their environment. Gone was the time to think. Monotany had come crashing down on this particular paradise, with Blackberrys the (de)vice of choice. For them it was a case of catching up on emails, tracking market movements and ensuring the team in New York knew exactly what was required of them before their day came to a close. It seemed that commuters had commondeered the fleet and created a floating office of their very own.
Ignoring opportunities to think are lost opportunities indeed. More often than not there are few points in the day where we can grasp time for ourselves – places where issues have a chance of being resolved and solutions developed to some meaningful conclusion. Instead we rely on strategy meetings and group huddles to make up our minds. We have become a society of thought by committee. And that’s dangerous.
And so, to give myself time to think, I’ve resolved to take the ferry to work at least twice a month this Southern Hemisphere Summer. Who knows what will pop into my head. But I do have one idea. I shall be spending my pre-Christmas efforts on finding a cure for the soon-to-be-known-as condition, the Blackberry Hunch. By the look of my fellow commuters, I think it could be a blockbuster drug by 2015. Nice.
