Read the following text. What do the expressions in bold mean ? We'll tell you next week.I was
at a loose end last Sunday afternoon. I could have called Jim; if I had invited him out for a pint he’d have come
at the drop of a hat. But my argument with my boss had
left a bad taste in my mouth. His remarks had been totally
below the belt and I had had
to bite my tongue to avoid saying something that I would have later regretted. When I told my boss that I was
getting cold feet about the new project he
came down on me like a ton of bricks. As I had got the job
by the skin of my teeth I didn’t want
to play with fire so I had
kept the bad news about the prototype under my hat. Even if I had told him about the problems, he’d have told me to
put a sock in it. I
felt on edge, but I
kept a stiff upper lip and anyway I didn’t want
to rock the boat. So, if I had invited Jim out for a beer, I would have just
talked shop and he’d have just told me
to keep my chin up and would have probably added that I was
making a mountain out of a mole-hill.
Finally, I realised how I could
kill two birds with one stone. After
picking the brains of a colleague who had already found himself in the same situation, I decided that I had
to pull myself together and
to take the bull by the horns. I arranged a meeting with my boss and our R & D team and I managed
to twist their arms to bring along the Seldox reports, which they themselves had contributed to. The reports showed that the project was
not exactly going like clockwork and it was clear that the company would
go to the wall if we didn’t
take steps to put things right. By taking this initiative I felt I was
turning a new leaf - at last I was
standing on my own two feet. Indeed, I had been
sitting on the fence for too long, never daring to say what I really thought about the project or my boss’s unrealistic ambitions for the company. When he read the Seldox reports he
put two and two together and realised that we would have
to go back to square one. He was
all ears when Jack Sebastian from the lab spoke about the
risks that we would be running if we continued
to stick our heads in the sand. The figures
brought my boss down to earth, as it became apparent that we had
a cat in hell’s chance of
pulling the project off. Jack’s experience
came in handy and it was his ability
to call a spade a spade that
won the day. I finally
came to the point and told my boss that he was
counting his chickens before they hatched by publishing over optimistic sales forecasts when we hadn’t even tested the product. Jack
hit the nail on the head when he
pointed out that,
in a nut-shell,
it all came down to marketing. My boss
had his hands tied and being forced to take advice from others, rather than to give orders, he must have
felt like a fish out of water. I had finally
turned the tables on him. Before that, he had
ruled with a rod of iron, but when he finally
saw the light he had
to take a back seat. If we had succeeded in saving the company it was thanks to good timing - we had
struck while the iron was hot, the Seldox reports having just been published.
My colleagues and I were
on cloud nine, but we continued
to put our shoulders to the wheel so as not
to lose our grip. As for the boss, he has looked
a bit under the weather recently and I’m sure
I’m in his bad books now.
