Ultraparadoxical

I just endured a meeting at work today that was 40 solid minutes of nonsense.  My manager went on and on about sweet-baby-jesus-knows-what and everyone listening had a mix of confusion and annoyance on their face.  He opened it up to the audience and looked over to me for input.  “What do you think” he inquired.  I paused a second to wipe the glazed look off my face and said “Well, I feel that in this type of situation it is best to use a framework of structured flexibility and went on to use an analogy of building a house to reinforce my position.  He ate it up.  I had no idea what the fuck I was talking about.  For the minutes running up to when he called on me I had been spaced out thinking about winning the lottery, flinging myself off of the office balcony or some-such thing.  This made me realize something – any crackpot idea can be swallowed by someone as long as the idea is accompanied with a easy to understand analogy.  Tough to understand the mortgage crisis?  Compare it to car maintenance, or a baseball game.  Need to explain quantum physics to an idiot?  Say it is like a rubber band. Even if it doesn’t make any sense, people think they understand and will go on to believe whatever you just said.  Go try it in a meeting, I guarantee it will work.

These kinds of meetings and conversations are really just a symptom of the problem, not the problem itself.  That problem is Corporate America.  A place where no one works hard or gives a fuck but everyone (according to them) is “stressed out” and “sooooo busy”.  It is a crock of shit.  80% of people work just hard enough to keep their job and most people do less than that but have become experts at hiding the trail of their laziness.  In my 10 years after college I have seen incompetence get commended, brilliance get discarded and wasteful behavior get rewarded.   I just got off the phone with a colleague who was confronting someone who had just stabbed her in the back.  My colleague had email proof of the backstabbing yet the backstabber denied the allegations and said she was trying to be a “team player” and “strategic”.  This backstabber is loved by management and is always getting promoted.  How does that kind of shit happen?  The more full of shit someone is, the more respect they get in the organization.  That is fucked up. How has society been built to have everyone doing jobs that they don’t believe in to buy things that they really don’t need?  Another good question – why am I always a whiny bitch about work on my Monday posts?

Better go swing by my bosses office before I leave because I stayed at the office late today!  Ugh… I hate this shit.

“Success” in America has less to do with actual talent than any time in recent history.  We have forsaken competence, responsibility and intelligence in our country and replaced those attributes with shallow illusions of each.   It has been all around me lately in my workplace, in popular entertainment, and watching the government in action.  It aggravates me at times but mostly I just join in with a sense of apathy and embarrassment.  Incompetence and stupidity are part of every day life and in some aspects is accepted and embraced as a positive thing.  I cannot speak for much of the past as I have only experienced the last 30 years personally but it seems to me like talent, perseverance and commitment used to be things that guided Americans.  Now attitudes seem to be different. read more »

I recently posed this questions to one of my coworkers: If you were married would you rather have your husband go to a sales conference or a guys weekend in Vegas?  Her answer: unequivocally – guys weekend in Vegas.  People are absolutely shameless at our company events.  I just had my annual work conference (which is the reason that I have not posted in a while) and it did not fail to deliver.  All kinds of shit (literally) went down – even accounting for the fact that 50% of the rumors are probably lies still leaves that other 50% which is true.  Let me tell you… corporate America is not as up tight as you would think. read more »

After college I thought that things were going to be different with my life… I was heading into the “REAL” world.  I was merging into the career fast lane filled with focused intelligent professionals who would stop at nothing to get the job done.  Its not.  Post college work is more like being in the left lane stuck behind an Asian lady with a bunch of Hello Kitty dolls in her back window going 52MPH.  Its frustrating, slow and at times you absolutely want to lose your shit on the people around you.  I have learned to become zen-like in my tolerance for other people’s stupidity – I have seen boneheads get promotions and brilliant people get canned… I am probably somewhere in between, so I have stuck around.  Here is the rundown: read more »

Even though I am a self proclaimed sloth I have had at least a part time job since I was 15.  Anything that I am doing for money will eventually become (at least sometimes) something that I inherently dislike.  Even if I was the oil-boy for the Tropicana Girls Bikini Team the alarm would go off some mornings and I would dread even having to rub down some scantily clad honeys.  Jobs to me are just that – JOBS – they are a means to an end.  Whatever I can do to make the most amount of money and suffer the least aggravation then that is what I want to do.  It opens up more freedom in my personal time where I can enjoy life.  In this 2 part series I am going to dig into the past and relive my career job by job and try to pull out some lessons that I still hold on to today.  Part one covers everything up until my college graduation… read more »

I work in a salt mine…  Actually, I used to work in a salt mine.  Wait… that’s not true either.

The term salt mine was coined by my brother about 6 years ago when I was working at a shitty call center grinding through my 7-4 shift Tuesday through Saturday slinging Direct TV equipment.  He was visiting me for a couple of days and I let him borrow my car while I was working.  True to form he was about a half hour late picking me up from that God-forsaken hell hole.  Waiting for him on the uncomfortable plastic break room chairs while watching the other call center losers heat up their microwave burritos put me in an especially foul mood.  After reading pretty much everything on the bulletin board (within that half hour I became an expert in the occupational hazard law in California) I finally spotted my jackass brother pull up outside fresh from a surf.  The day had apparently beat me down because as I shambled out to the car (shirt half untucked, head hanging low) he said “Salt mine beating you down?”  I hopped into the car and looked at myself in the mirror.  Although I have never seen a salt miner I swear that I looked like I just clocked out of a 12 hour shift in the salt pit.  That’s how much a bad job can bring you down.  I have long since left that job for greener pastures to a less aggravating job but thinking back on it now it was certianly a true salt mine, but there is a little salt mine in every job.  Even if you love your job there are some days that you don’t want to be there or your co-workers suck.  Every salt mine has a crew of people that you would not normally spend 8 hours a day of your own volition and this Top Nine Friday is dedicated to the douchie-est of these familiar salt mine inhabitants. read more »