Seating and Dreams

For some reason, I woke up this morning thinking of two things: Ayant and chairs.

AYANT is the present participle for the French verb AVOIR, or TO HAVE.  It means HAVING.  I have no idea why I was thinking of that, or why it was driving me crazy that I could not remember.  I looked it up as soon as I awoke, today, and now I've got it. HAVING. 

The other thing had to do with an experience when I was a junior manager.

One day my boss told me that he had ordered new chairs for my group.  He said that I would be notified when they arrived.  In due course, I got the message, and trundled down to the shipping department.  Chairs? they said.  We don't have any chairs for you.  We did get some chairs, but they were for Ed.

Ed was another manager, been one for years.  This is the kind of manager he was: the data center would bill him (and everyone else) once a month for the storage that they were using on that day.  They'd assume that the usage didn't vary too much during the month, which was right.

On tthe day before that day, Ed would back up all of his storage to tape (which was much cheaper).  The next day, he'd restore it all to disk. This meant that he paid the data center much less than he should have.  It was legal.  Unethical, but legal.  And since Ed had been a manager for years, everyone  knew him. Oh, that's just Ed, they would say. They'd laugh about it.  So would he. He laughed a lot, as I recall.

So I went to Ed and said Hey, I understand that you may have my new chairs.  He didn't even look up. Go talk to your boss, he said. So I did. My boss was a friend of Ed's.  And what he basically said was Oh, that's just Ed.  Too bad.  We'll order some more. 

My group never did get the new chairs.  I considered going to Ed's area one night and stealing them, but this was at a time when I took the principles of ethical behavior seriously.  Ethical people don't steal.  This, despite the fact that I'd just gotten an object lesson in how deeply people in management believed in ethics.

For some reason, Trump reminds me of Ed.

Still don't understand where AYANT figures into it, though.