One of my favorite expressions, brought to me by my larger-than-life stepbrother, is “He/She gets the joke.”
It denotes whether someone is tuned to the same radio station, one step ahead, connecting the dots. I love it when my boss, Deepak Advani, the CMO of Lenovo, sits in a meeting and hurries along the PowerPoint presentations by saying, “Okay, I get it.”
He’s not being rude, he’s just acting like a modem handshaking with another modem, figuring out the bandwidth and adjusting throughput accordingly. Me, I tend let people drone along out of good manners, then when I am good and bored I blurt out something to show I too “get it” and push it along. I’ve also figured out that when I start nodding off in meetings the best way to wake up is to say something.
So I write while living on a day of conference calls and powerpoints ….