A New York City parable

Just so you have some background here, my boss is an extremely competent, composed, high-energy woman who has lived in Tel Aviv and in New York City for most of her life. She is a good, no-nonsense manager who generally gives the impression she can take care of everything. But as you will understand, she is deeply, typically impaired in that born-and-bred-city-person kind of way.

This afternoon, I walked into her office and noticed that her office plant, (one of those typical, anonymous office plants, with several thick dusty stems sprawled over on the desk from lack of water, light, and an ecosystem in general,) had actually completely lost one of its floppy dusty branches. The fairly substantial branch was just lying there on her desk next to the plant. While she was working on something on her computer, I wandered over and picked up the branch and made a "this is a bummer" gesture at her with it, like I would commiserate with anyone else over a failing plant. She gave it a quick, fairly uninterested glance.

"Oh, yeah," she said matter-of-factly. "I'm leaving that there for when the building people came by. I'm thinking maybe they can stick it back on or something."