What (if any) leisure activity is acceptable when handling a crisis?

[Chil1234]

In the view of certain commentators, a quick blast around the Solent with your teenage son at the weekend is not an appropriate way for BP CEO Tony Hayward to take a breather.

Should people bearing such weighty problems on their shoulders be allowed to relax at all? Is there an acceptable list of suitably sober activites...? Tiddlywinks? Sudoku? Ballroom Dancing? Or should anyone reponsible for an environmental crisis/ongoing war/civil unrest/economic catastrophe be firmly lashed to the proverbial wheel and not released from their harness until it's all over to our satisfaction?

he had a day off, the fishermaen are doing much better in compensation than fishing $1200 per day rather than $1200 per week and the rig was owned by an american company.

crochet seems inoffensive

ZZZ, perhaps we should send him a selection of those hobby magazines they have in newsagents? Cross stitch today?

I guess the BP PR team have tried but are finding it impossible to make a silk purse out of their chief exec's ear...

this is beginning to look like pantomime with this guy playing the role of villain. The PR disasters are a bit too obvious now.

I'm not in the UK, so am curious to know how this sailing trip is reported in the press there.

Is the general feeling he is entitled to a day off doing whatever he likes, or that his timing/choice of activity was unfortunate?

It's being reported as an affront to Americans.

He did look to me as though he was trying to keep his head down - cap, glasses, jacket up to his ears, sat facing inwards. Not exactly jumping up and down enjoying himself.

Thinking of some sort of crisis at work or at home (I know it's not exactly on a comparable scale) for example, is it more productive to spend 24/7 trying to sort it out and running yourself into the ground or to give yourself a break now and again?

The media should lay off him, it's not helping the situation.

I hate this irrational fixation on one person.
This spill looks like the result of a systemic failure of a company and its (US) sub-contractors in which the US regulator was also complicit.

Tony Twerp may have a tin ear for the public's sensitivities but the hounding of the man (and general foreigner-bashing)is infantile. It's also what people do when they want to avoid facing up to the fact a situation is fiendishly complicated rather than easy to solve; or facing up to their own part in it (eg as oil consumers who would generally rather have very risky drilling than cut consumption, or voters who want small government and looser regulation).

Well said eldritch

I think as a pp said he would have been fine going to church. The royals are often flimed
leaving church too in times of trouble!

Do at a personal level have some sympathy for the man and his family.....but he did take the salary, and somebody has to carry the can.