Some truth is on display in the office, particularly in the unhealthy lifestyles of your prole coworkers. You hear their stories of drinking binges, entertainment binges, and utter neglect of physical activity they know is destroying them. There’s no way to hide the results on plain display to all. They are wheezing pictures of wrecked…
Author: Office Manager
Jobs are jails at which we suffer needlessly
Filibuster Strategies
For most salaried jobs, no one at the company that is responsible for making evaluations has the ability to actually assess performance. When only appearance matters, crazy fakery flourishes. One project manager I worked with was famous for producing reams of documentation which he would send to the client for affirmation of the information therein….
Get Fat
I listened to the lout from engineering offer his sage advice to a guy who was recently married. “My minister recently told us that newlyweds put on 5 to 10 pounds a year because of the married lifestyle.” That got me thinking. It wasn’t just stress, it was acting as though one’s life was over…
Poverty of Consumption
Otto must have been raised in poverty and even though he had separated from that, it was forever a key part of his soul from which he could not recover. He was a system administrator and made sure to tell everyone he met that he owned a BMW M3. Lots of people had nice cars…
Detached Salesmen
The salesman chases leads and uses his cunning to convert them into sales. Because his social skills are unusual compared to workers, they are given fairly free reign and little scrutiny so long as they bring in sales. Since they work for a commission, they utilize this flexibility to shift costs — and are cognizant…
Hazard Pay
IT work dwells in non-human abstractions. The problems being solved rarely consider human relevancy. Management tracks with metrics detached from quality. Policies keep workers in compliance yet fail to bring about good results. Removing humanity from daily life creates a challenging dynamic, like an astronaut transported into outer space far from family, home, and everything…
Leftism is the new Free Pizza
Before Google and Twitter, technology companies used to prove their coolness by periodically buying large quantities of pizza. Executives would happily pay a few hundred dollars for bad pizza to thrill easily stimulated workers and get thousands of dollars of work for the investment. Free pizza evolved to chef-led kitchens so workers would ideally start…
Bordain’s Suicide By Job
Bordain’s public persona talked him into a corner with the convincing line that he had the best job in the world. He repeated that mantra as an opiate to sooth him from the brutal consequences of his self-imposed schedule of exhaustion. Lonely moments of reflections gave insight on the pointlessness of making yet another disposable…
Sleep Deprivation Will Make You a Million
White collar workers are chronically sleep deprived from waking up too early and taking work home to ponder at night, while checking email and texts at all hours and being dramatically preoccupied with small events that don’t matter much. Many add in habitual late night shows, watching sports, movies, video games, and other base amusements…
IT Testing Center Comedy
The IT testing center was an accredited space where clients could take training classes and certificate bearing exams. These were needed because university degrees no longer conferred knowledge or general competence. Hiring managers were similarly deficient and couldn’t weed out fakers from the experienced, and everyone was lying about their skills on resumes. It was…
Reverse Engineering
Our jobs are silly duties we’re willing to tolerate in exchange for money we can use on larger goals. Everything else being the same, you’d just as well shovel septic sludge all day, restore order in the mentally traumatized, harvest organs for malevolent overlords, or provide skilled legal advice to extract good people from the…
Thinning Away Low Morale
Amazon is offering employees $2000 to $5000 if they want to quit. Those who will accept the offer obviously don’t want to be there. Amazon’s offer is a way out for workers who think the job is hell and need a cushion to help them leave for a new job. Without such payments to quit,…