My job description could be something like: "acting self-important and busy while calling lots of people on the phone"- thereby making them and everyone else in the department/group feel important, consequently creating the impression towards the bosses that they are important because they are managing such important people, which in turn gives the comfortable feeling that, as a group, we are involved in something important. They have a problem with having me as a first link in this chain - but I think they don't know that yet.

The grass is always greener on the other side, of course. I was invited to a dinner party last Wednesday by Mathieu, who works at the Paris office of the World Bank. Those at the dinner were mostly his colleagues and the way they were describing their jobs confirmed the suspicion that helping the poor is not necessarily the main motivation of most at the WB. This should not have been a particularly shocking piece of information (although the extent to which some of their "important people" do not even bother to keep up appearances is quite shocking). It is more that I have to think over my well rehearsed answer to the "where do you see yourself ten years from now" question. In the corporate world I have met many a pompous, status obsessed a**hole with money to burn on the symbols of their acquired (and aspired) status, but they at least were spending either their own money, or that of the company they worked for and these companies' mission was certainly not "to fight poverty and improve the living standards of people in the developing world". Evidently, this latter sentence - and the first in the World Bank's mission statement does not prevent some of its senior (and less senior) employees from behaving exactly like my corporate buffoons. Depressing.