In addition to the freedom from management that success at work entails it also means more money.  Many people equate money with things, but to me money is freedom.  More money means I can do what I want when I want.  There is a delicate balancing act though.  It is a inverse relationship: the more responsibility and pressure that is realized at work the less that the income translates into freedom.  I feel bad for people who make a shitload of money doing something that they are not emotionally invested in that takes all of their time and stress.  They are incredibly rich and incredibly depressed.  Money is no longer freedom if you can’t do what you want with it.

I don’t really care too much about things, the pleasure I get from buying something comes and goes very quickly.  The mindset that I can do what I want when I want is far more powerful to me than anything that I can buy.  I think that is why I don’t buy too many things and I really find a lot of pleasure in saving money.  When I have a ton of money in the bank I can feel comfortable that I could bail on my job at any point and still be OK.  It also allows me to go out to dinner where I want, travel when I want to travel, and help my friends without stressing about how much those activities are going to cost me.

So, in my mind, I have a good work/life balance.  I work a reasonable amount to make a reasonable amount of money.  So how should I use the freedom that I have built my life around?  I recently received an email from KS and a line from that email struck me:

Hope the rest of your weekend was a success – booze, ladies and sleep? That’s what I assume you do with your time down there.

That IS what I do in Australia, without an ounce of sarcasm, she has me pegged.  I work all week, occasionally go out for dinner or casual drinks then Friday night hits and I get a bit rowdy, wake up the next morning play some basketball, bum around with friends during the day then go out again on Saturday to conclude my weekend activities by nursing a hangover/relaxing on Sunday.  Then every month or two I take a holiday and travel somewhere to get out of the city.  Rinse.  Repeat. (“white people problems”, I know… bear with me, I am not complaining just making a point). 

I sometimes think about what I want to be doing in 5 or 10 years time.  Where will I be living?  Where will I be working?  What will life look like?  I find the things that I am doing now amusing but ultimately boring.  I would not consider myself an extraordinarily passionate person but I am hoping that I find at least something I can be passionate about as I head into the second half of life (unless I get hit by a bus on Pacific Highway on my walk to the train after work today, then in that case – “Peace out bitches!”).  It is amazing that I have not found anything so far in my 32 years that I could not live without, but here I am.  I think being focused and passionate about something positive is one of the keys to finding fulfillment in life.  Whenever you talk to someone who really is deeply invested in cars, their wife, rock climbing, trading stock, engineering, painting, or any other random activity that people are in love with they seem like the most balanced happy people.

I think it goes back to the freedom thing in the end.  Not being able to live without something is the end of freedom.  Weather it is drugs, money, sports, music or a woman the thing that one cannot live without is a prison.  A person is bound to it and can’t let it go, without that person, activity or thing then nothing is the same.  Eventually I think I can be happy in a prison as long as my “cellmate” was some thing or someone that I would be happy to lose my freedom over.

I have designed my life up to this point to be as simple as possible however I think that complication is what makes life interesting.  The ultimate question though is what complication is worth all of those complications?

I was so busy when I had first moved to Australia that I didn’t have time to write about my adventures of when I first arrived here (I know you are on the edge of your seat wondering what happened).  This is my attempt to right what once was wrong (kind of like a crappy version of  Quantum Leap) and fill you in on the details of my arrival and first few weeks in Sydney.  I am going to write about it a little differently though, it will be less bloggy and more like a personal narrative broken up into a few parts.  Then at the end I will combine the parts and put it into the short story section of the blog.  So without further ado:

I am a professional sleeper.  I can sleep anywhere at any time, just give me a 15 minute heads-up and I could pass out in the middle of a noisy bar or the night before an important meeting.  My mind can be cleared and my senses dulled at a moment’s notice to accommodate a long trip or the need to get away from life and just cease to exist in my brain for a while.

That is why after climbing aboard, taxiing, lifting off and flying for an hour I was perplexed.  I was awake.  I don’t think I have ever been awake at this point in a flight.  This was not just any flight for me though.  This was a flight to Australia for which I had no return ticket.  I was leaving Southern California and not planning to come back for a long time.  I sat there with my eyes closed trying to force myself to sleep thinking of the last few weeks before I left the country.  The goodbye drinks, the farewell dinners, the moving preparations and all of the friends and family that I was leaving on another continent.  My thoughts shifted from the things I was leaving behind to the new world that I was entering.  I was nervous and there was no chance I would ever get to sleep.  Why would I leave a place that I know so well and risk an easy, laid back lifestyle just to move to another country?  That was my last thought until I woke up 13 hours later for breakfast.  I may not be a professional sleeper but I am definitely a top seeded amateur.

Airline food during a 15 hour flight is a necessary evil.  I had a long day ahead of me and if I waited until I landed to eat I would most likely crumble in a heap in the customs line.  My choice was runny eggs or mealy pancakes.  Runny eggs won and I started to deconstruct the plastic tomb in which my food was encased.  Not only are these meals disgusting, they also have to be the most anti-environmental way to eat anything.  Each morsel of food is packaged in its own non-biodegradable home.  They should just go all the way and put every square of toilet paper in its own shrink-wrap or hand out water in little capsules that you pop open, drink and discard on the floor like futuristic peanut shells.

After the plastic carcass of my meal was hauled away by the stewardess I was left to stare at the virtual map which showed my plane moving impossibly slowly across the vast expanse of the Pacific Ocean to my final destination: Sydney, Australia.  That tiny little dot on the map held all of the things that I was stressing about.  North Sydney was the location of my new office and the Harborside Hotel was where my luggage and I would be living for the next few months until the crate with the rest of my belongings would arrive.  It was also home to the 1 person on the entire continent that I knew outside of work, and I met her a few months before randomly, on vacation in Hawaii.  It was where I had decided that I wanted to live just two months before.  All of that was within the little spot that the video plane was pivoting towards.

Landing is my least favorite part of flying. I am never outwardly nervous but a part of me always looks out the window and wonders how there are not more crashes.  The pilots take a gigantic hunk of metal moving at a few hundred miles an hour and drop it perfectly on a slim strip of concrete a few thousand times a day, every day, with no incident.  Every other task that someone does in the course of my day is fucked up constantly.  How has something that is so difficult been done to almost flawless perfection for so often for so long?   Everyone is nervous during the landing because at some level they know humans are not meant to do this.  A tenth of a percent of me is amazed every time I don’t touch down in a cartwheeling fireball of my own demise.  After we hit the tarmac in Sydney everyone took a deep breath, stopped thinking about their potential death and started wondering where they wedged their laptop case 14 ½ hours ago.

I always think that I am going to get busted when I go through customs.  I had no drugs up my ass, no Mexicans in my suitcase or any flora or fauna that could possibly hump a wallaby and completely destroy the Australian ecosystem yet I felt every customs agent’s eyes drilling into me.  I would usually be tentative about being in the customs line but the flight had dulled my senses and the people watching was too fantastic to miss.  It is like a slide show that kept repeating as I wound around the queue.  First there was stinky Indian business man, and then the nerdy couple in sleep pants holding stuffed animals, and then the chick with fake tits that looked like she showered and did her makeup on the plane somehow , and then the sweet looking old couple and then the confused Asian family who were looking at their own passports like they were in a different language.  Each pass gave me a new perspective to observe the weirdness of the humanity around me.  If airports are a hurricane of people watching activity then the customs line is the eye of the storm.  The quiet calm before the assorted foreigners are spat out upon the baggage claim.

To be continued…

I don’t have many different options though.  I have gone down this road for the last 10 years and any type of career change now and I will take a massive pay cut.  That is the thing about sales, fundamentally it requires very little “skill”, yet pays extremely well considering the workload.  I am stuck and it is a bit depressing.  On the other hand, I feel like I am having another “this is why the terrorists hate us” moment because I AM making good money right now, not doing too much and due to this job they just moved me to Sydney.  Basically, I know I am not going to change anything but a guy can dream can’t he?  I have been thinking about some career change opportunities and the pro’s and con’s of each.

Entrepenuer

This has some allure because I would love to not have any managers lording over me or micromanaging what I do.  It is all me.  Out there.  Just myself to rely on.  Alone.  Wait, fuck that.  I definitely don’t trust myself enough to work my ass off for something even if it is my own welfare.  I am such a slacker sometimes and lose focus pretty easily, so maybe not having “the Man” nipping at my heels would cause my laziness to skyrocket to porch-monkey status.

Marketing

It is not sales, that’s for sure.  Marketing is somehow worse though.  It has all the aggravations of a sales job except none of the perks.  It is impossible to tell if a marketing person is doing a good job or a shitty job and therein lies the problem.  It is like art class in 5th grade, the work is useless but as long as the teacher/boss likes you, then you will get a good grade.  Marketing efforts are totally subjective.  There is no way that I could handle that simply because I cannot kiss ass.  No matter how hard I try, I have the urge to be a prick to anyone that tries to exert control over me.

Hobo

Not having to worry about a job – GOOD.  Sleeping on a cardboard box – BAD.  Checking myself out of the materialistic cycle of crap I don’t really need – GOOD.  Sucking dick for meth money – BAD.  Hmmm – the juries still out on this one.

Boytoy

Sweet baby Jesus I would love to have myself a sugar momma.  Hanging out at the pool all day catching up on some reading and working on my tan sounds fantastic.  What doesn’t sound fantastic is fucking some blue-haired socialite with skin resembling my childhood baseball mitt.

Farmer

I have lived in a large city for all of my adult life.  In theory the idea of going out to the country and fending for myself sounds like a pretty great idea.  Growing my own vegetables and living off the land is something that humans were actually meant to do rather than toiling away in front of a 21in LCD screen.  In reality though I would be absolutely clueless.  Seeds go into the ground, right?  How do chickens turn into breaded breast fillets… do they just come out of the eggs like that?  So many questions so little time.  I would most likely spend my time getting drunk and mailing cow shit to unsuspecting friends until I was broken and alone on the floor of my one room shack cradling a shotgun that I have no idea how to fire.  Man, I am a pussy.

Writer

Anytime that I sit in front of a blank word document it kind of freaks me out.  I have a hard enough time coming up with enough dick jokes and other forms of assholery to even make a weekly post here.  For me to  write a short story or really commit myself to writing something substantiative is frightening to me.  In reality that is the crux of it: the reason that I continue to toil in the sales “salt mine” is fear of failure.  I really don’t care about sales and if I succeed or fail makes no difference to me at a personal level.  If I sincerely tried something that I was more personally invested in and failed I would be crushed.  Sales is a job but in reality it is a shelter from failing at something that I really care about.

I constantly have thoughts about throwing caution to the wind and trying to do something that I care about but for a variety of reasons, I never do.  The paycheck is the first thing that comes to mind but more than that I feel like if I took a chance to do something I may find out that I really don’t care about that line of work either.  Maybe I am just set to hate whatever I am doing because I “have” to do it.  In that case, wouldn’t I be better off just sticking with something that I hate that pays, instead of working my ass off and being poor?Either I will or I won’t, I guess is depends on how much of my soul is left after working at a corporation for 10 years.

Geez, talk about depressing… on that note – have a fantastic Friday!

That’s right, this was the week of the dreaded “executive visit”.  My boss’s, boss’s, boss decided to grace us with his presence at the small office here in Australia.  It has been a constant agitation for the month running up to his visit and has made the office into a virtual hell-scape.  Everyone had been wringing their hands in anticipation of his visit making sure that everything goes right.  This is how it must be for women married to men in the army.  Their husbands come home for a few weeks and they better make those few weeks fantastic otherwise they man may be fucking some 19 year old Philipino chick on his next tour of duty.  Basically, this one visit will shape the executives view of our office until the next time he decides to come down here so if we fuck up there will be bad blood for 6-10 months.  Everyone is acting differently trying to look “productive” instead of actually doing their job.  The local management is getting up in everyone’s shit to make it look like they are in active control of all of the salespeople.  It has led to a halt in actual productivity, left morale at an all time low and increased my weekday drinking 5-fold.

I have taken our esteemed guests to a couple of meetings and needed to frantically come up with some customer contacts with lofty sounding titles for them to meet.  Were this meetings necessary? – NO.  Did we get anything of value accomplished? – NO.  We go into these meetings (usually at an overpriced, high-end restaurant) chat about this or that then the VP I brought will say something that I have already said to the customer a few hundred times before, promise a bunch of things that may or may not be able to happen to leave me with a laundry list of actions to complete for the customer which may or may not have any use whatsoever.

It is really a microcosm of corporate life and I have talked about it before but for some reason it has really aggravated me these past few days.  I think it is because when I worked at headquarters I had these types of corporate shenanigans looming above my head like a 300 lb seagull waiting to shit on me every day. Since I have been removed from it for these past few months it seems 100x’s worse, even in a small dose.  It is like getting in touch with an old friend and seeing they have ballooned into a massive fatass.  After not seeing them in such a long time I view them as obese but they just view it as their same old body since they have not seen a drastic change.  Thankfully this will all end tomorrow and I can get back to the work of actually doing my job and trying to make some money.

It has been a rough few days and I was ready to fling myself off of our balcony at the office when I received a life saving email from a friend.  It only contained this attachment:

Wow -  10/10 execution on that -  absolutely glorious.

Any good comments on corporate bullshit stories so we can wallow in our corporate crapulence together?

So before this blog shifts from being about a guy in San Diego to about a guy who lives in Sydney I wanted to give “America’s Finest City” a proper sendoff.  What better way to say goodbye to San Diego than a hastily put together Ultraparadoxical San Diego City Awards Spectacular!  So without further ado:

Best Tijuana Moment – Crappin’ in the Sports Book

Tijuana is just a stones throw from San Diego and I used to frequent the sports gambling facilities that were located right across the border.  I DID frequent them, that is, until I saw a guy get a rifle full of rock salt in the back steps from the door of the bar I was at.  That incident combined with the news stories of police chiefs getting beheaded and piles of dead bodies being found kinda turned me off the the whole Mexico thing.  Before I stopped going though, something magical happened… one of my friends needed to take a shit while we were across the border.  Thanks you Jesus!  Pure comedy… he went into a road side shop, the lady told him to take a hike… he went into McDonald’s, the guy at the counter told him it was for paying customers only (he had no time to stand in line).  As a last resort we went to the sports book (where we gambled) and he rolled the dice on the toilets there.  Now, I have been in that bathroom, it is exactly what you would think of if I told you to imagine a shitty Tijuana bathroom.  Apparently there is no time to clean the Tijuana bathrooms after cleaning all the ones right across the border.  He ended up getting his business done but I am sure there was some hovering involved of or a roll and a half of Mexican TP laid down to block the seat.  He left disgusted, but relieved and probably infected with 8 different kinds of Syphilis.

Stupidest News Moment

There is no hesitation, NONE, when she gets that gobbler in her hand to immediately assuming the position.  The best part of that clip is the reaction of the guys.  They thought they were just signing up to do a quick bit on turkey calls then the hot blond decides to perform fellatio on national TV… classic.

Best Natural Disaster – 2003 wildfires

When I say best, I actually mean the worst.  I was at a friend’s wedding in Arizona when I got a call from my roommate asking me what things I should take out of the house so they don’t get burnt to a crisp when the wildfires swept through out neighborhood.  My girlfriend and I left the wedding then she decided that the drive home was a great time to dump me, which came as a total shock seeing as we had just moved from Chicago to San Diego a few months before.  Wait, it gets better.  During the stone cold silence where I was contemplating the scorched wasteland my house mixed with the anguish of just getting dumped I was pulled over by a cop in Yuma, Arizona who slapped me with a $600 dollar speeding ticket.  After a windy path through 6 foot high walls of flame and a surreal ash-blown landscape (which i chronicled in a short story) we finally arrived back home to my shitfaced roommates in the hot tub, disaster averted… good times.

Best Event – Street Scenes

This was like Kwanzaa, Christmas, Halloween and Flag Day all rolled into one.  Street Scenes was a summer concert in the heart of downtown San Diego with a ton of cool bands.  Apparently the concert promoters were not too good at paying their bills as Street Scene never happened this year.  When I found out that this event was canceled it was like finding out Santa Claus isn’t real all over again.  By far it was most disappointing news I have heard all of 2010… and that’s why the terrorist hate us.

Most Valuable Hobo (MVH) – The Street Crapping Lady

This award goes to the lady who I happened to see on my way to work who was in the middle of taking a shit on the sidewalk.  She saw me out of the corner of her eye and proceed to duck-walk with her pants down to finish up her deuce on the curb.  Now that is a conscientious hobo!

Two of the “best of” headings center on crapping… does that make me immature?  Hopefully people are into poop jokes in Australia or I may be in trouble…

So, I have been away for a while.  Don’t hate me.  I have my reasons.  Just pretend like I am your deadbeat Dad sending you a shoddy birthday gift 2 months late.  Feel free to be happy I care about you but determined to become a slut in 10 years to repay me for my neglect during your childhood.  Wait, I think I took that simile too far.  Lets just forget the last few sentences ever happened.

So for the past few months my job has been toying with the idea of sending a few sales reps to work abroad at some of the satellite offices as a company culture exchange or some-such bullshit.  I was intrigued.  In traditional corporate style they talked in sweeping generalities and the initial conference call to discuss the opportunity sounded more like the musings of a stoner wanting to build a half-pipe in the backyard.  All talk and no substance. *sidenote* These were always some of my favorite conversations to listen in on, the discussion always ended with the phrase “we should TOTALLY do that” promptly followed by more bong hits and never speaking of the crackpot plan that was discussed ever again *end sidenote* The initial plan was to move us out with no increase in salary and no housing or car accommodations provided by the company.  Yeah, no.  Not quite, no one would do that.

I took the initial call with a grain of salt and remained cautiously optimistic then a couple days ago I had an interview with the manager of the sales team overseas.  The interview went well… he even mentioned that he would want someone to start before the end of the year.  He also mentioned a large pay increase and that there would be allowances made for living expenses.  Ahhhh!  That’s when shit got real.  I may actually have a shot at getting this gig and it may be worth getting.  When it was just some nebulous thing that “could” happen it was easy to say, “Hell yeah, I would love to go out there and do this” but when it starts to become more of a possibility the realities of the situation set in.

After I hung up the phone my analytical mind created a pro/con list in my head: Pro – more money and a promotion, Con – way more pressure to succeed, Pro – Sydney is amazing, Con – San Diego is also amazing, Pro – I would get to meet a ton of new people, Con – I don’t know anyone on the entire continent, Pro – I get to use all of the quotes from when the Simpsons went to Australia, Con – I am a douche bag about being excited about using Simpson’s quotes from the Australia episode.  That internal pro/con monologue has been going on in my head ever since.

I am horrible at making these types of decisions.  There is really no “right” answer and either way I will be missing out on something.  Maybe the life that I would take on with a move like this is not the kind that I want.  I would have to totally immerse myself in my job to be successful and I really have no passion for it.  So that leaves me back where I started.  At some point soon I am going to have to make a decision and at this point I don’t know what that decision will be.  Anyways, enough about me and my petty white male problems.  I feel like such an asshole complaining about an opportunity to move to Australia to live, just another reason why the terrorists hate us I guess.

The bottom line is that I may be writing this blog from Australia in a couple weeks or this same seat I have sat in for the past few years… just reading that sentence I know what would be more interesting, but I don’t know if it would be what I want.

Phone holster on the belt

Really?  I get it, you like your blackberry and you want to have it easily accessible but are you willing to sacrifice every shred of dignity for that?  My boss came over the other day looking like some kind of douchey sales cowboy with his phone holster hanging off of his belt – I was aghast and had to openly mock him.  I respect him and to see him turn into a “phone-on-the-belt-guy” was a jarring realization.  There is a certain point in every business person’s life when putting a phone holster on their belt starts making sense, I hope I can resist that urge for at least another 20 years.

New vocabulary

Did I ever think I would say things like “OK, that sounds good, I will ping you later when I get more details.”  Kill me now.  If I ever said that outside of work my buddies would disown me.  Why do I say things like that?  It is part of corporate jargon and no matter how hard I try these sayings end up in my vocabulary.  Some other hated phrases include “out of pocket” when someone is unreachable and “not having enough bandwidth to complete a task” when someone doesn’t have time or resources to do something.  About 5 times everyday I either say something ridiculous or sound like Bill Lumberg from Office Space and a little piece of me dies every time.  I don’t know how many pieces I have left (who am I kidding, being in sales hollowed me out and left me a shell of a man years ago).

Then there is this:

This is an excerpt of an actual email highlighting a list of “don’ts” that was sent to the entire sales force before a company event (my comments in red).

• Drinking games (and videos of those games) [Damn, and I was hoping to really stick it to my CEO when we played "King Asshole".]
• Fighting [Does that include cockfighting?]
• Sexual innuendos
• Inappropriate touching [Does this mean I am going to have to take down my "Amateur pelvic exam - $5" sign from my hotel room?]
• Comments regarding body parts or shape [Wait, so my comment to the accounting manager that her FUPA was "looking extraordinarily bulbous" was inappropriate?  No way.  Get the fuck out of here.]
• Crossing the line from friendliness to familiarity [Is this like asking someone to help me move to a new apartment or take me to the airport when we were just acquaintances?]
• Foul language
• Inebriated to the point of no control –  can’t walk, stumbling, not being able to remember what happened [Inebriated with a little control?  Totally cool.]
• Inappropriate attire. Appropriate business attire should be worn to all business activities. [Looks like my fishnet tank top and assless chaps are going to have to stay home this year... damn.]

The saddest thing is that the previous year I personally saw every one of these rules broken.  I look at that list and it seems like something that should be sent out before the 8th grade class trip to Washington DC.  I guess some things never change.

How many ways has your job broken you?

Sales

Sales people are usually known as the loudest, doucheist, most overpaid people in the whole company.  However, they are usually the funnest to hang out with and throw the best parties.  Part of the douchebaggery of the sales team is due to idiots getting paid way more then they should.  Just because a person has a knack for dealing with people they have the opportunity to get paid more than an astronaut or the President of the United States.  If I were some asshole with a Masters in Finance making 85K while a 25 year old guy in with a associates degree from Lake County Community College was making 185K I would be pissed too.

Marketing

These are all of the people who flaked out on Sales because they couldn’t hack it or they never got started because they couldn’t handle the pressure.  Sales people are pretty good at presenting the illusion of actually doing work but Marketing people have it down to a science.  I have never seen a “busier” group of people that gets absolutely nothing really accomplished.  That is why the marketing department is the first to get downsized when the shit hits the fan – you can whack 50% of them and operate as usual because every person in that department was only working half-speed anyways.

Purchasing

Like getting your ass kissed and being lazy?  You want to make a reasonable salary with the least amount of effort possible?  Sounds like I have a spot for you as a low level purchasing agent.  Dealing with the purchasing department is so painful because everything runs on their schedule and if something doesn’t happen it is usually OK because saving money for another day isn’t the most horrible thing that can happen to a company.  I can feel for them though, it is the equivalent of being a personal shopper for a rich jack-off.  They buy a bunch of stuff that they don’t want and that they can never enjoy.

Public Relations

Maybe I have a bad sampling of public relations people but to me they are a pack of backstabbing, materialistic skanks.  One of my old roommates used to do Public relations and everyone of her coworkers were like a poor version of Paris Hilton.  Not a good combination.  If you are in PR – prove me wrong.

IT

NNNNNNNNNEEEEEEERDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS!  Just kidding, these are usually the most down to earth, nicest people that get shit on with everyone problems 24/7.  Most of the time it is user error and these folks are put through the ringer.  “Is it plugged in?” should never be on the help desk questionnaire but it is for a reason.  Poor bastards!

Executive

Ass-kissers, former losers and people with personality disorders dominate the the top level of most organizations.   Extreme waste, greed and entitlement pervade their entire group.  One of the execs at my old company spent over 8oK at one of his favorite restaurants and laid off 5% of the workforce in the same year.  45% of them are just insecure assholes who enjoy the power trip the other 45% are boneheads who failed upward and the last 10% are decent, hardworking people who have genuinely earned the power that they wield… somehow I don’t like those odds.

Administration

Not much too say about this crew except that they are so powerless in the organization that they will latch on to anything that they can and try to exert their will on the rest of the employees.  I had one of the receptionists at my company bar me from entering a group lunch because my group wasn’t called yet.  she literally made me sit outside of the room for about 85 seconds and then let me in.  Fuck you and your stupid headset… go back to working at the tanning salon you bitch.

Janitorial

The hardest working people that get paid the least – USA, USA, USA!

Geeez… I guess I am a little bitter – maybe it is because I have been here for 4 hours longer than I wanted to be.  Oh well, the pain will be ending soon.  Any departments that I missed?

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.

I am not saying that I am above corner cutting and overall “softening” of the US’s collective intelligence, if anything, I am a product of it.  I can admit it though, a great example is my job.  I have been working in technology sales for a about ten years.  Some of it has been a never ending grind of cold calls and call metrics while other positions have been so incredibly cushy that I am surprised that someone is stupid enough to be paying me to do my job.  Right now I am in a position that is the latter but shifting to more of the former.  Most of my job is just exhibiting the appearance of work and doing anything in the background that needs to be done to attain my goals or at least be equal or better to my peers.  Sales jobs in general are a cat and mouse game between the salesperson and the executives where the executives try to game the quota system and the salespeople take the path of least resistance to get as much money as they can and not break too much of a sweat.  It disgusts me sometimes but then I look at my W-2 and everything seems OK after that.

That last sentence is part of the point that I am trying to make.  Everything is so focused on the short term results of whatever we are doing that it is difficult to zero in on any longer term damage or what we had to do (good or bad) to achieve those goals.  Sometimes my job success requires me to be shady or tell half truths to get results and I do whatever it takes because if I don’t, someone else will and where will that leave me?  Most issues that are facing the US is a culmination of that problem.  Environmental issues, the collapse of the mortgage/banking system and the health care debacle are all cases of people in charge focusing on the short term and trying to rig the system for their own interests.  Everyone is out there doing the same thing.  Why should I work hard, play by the rules and focus on sustainable long term goals when everyone else is cheating and no one seems to really care?  This is only exacerbated in oligopolies like the government and corporate America where a few key people have control over the destinies of millions.  When I screw someone over on a deal at work it only effects a few people.  When a senator or a CEO is selfish or not working for the good of the community at large it can have a terrible effect.

This sense of entitlement and short sightedness has spilled over into the world of entertainment.  Reality stars surface, skyrocket to popularity and plummet back to anonymity while the public clamors for news about people that are in the public eye not because they are talented but rather because they are aberrations from the norm.  I seldom watch these shows but when I do I watch them for the “train wreck” factor.  Really it is just me revel is other’s misfortune and idiocy.  Is that what our society has come too?  Seeing talentless idiots like “Snookie” is a cheap thrill and diminishes the collective intelligence of everyone involved.  Instead of talking with a friend, listening to some good music or reading a book people get sucked in to watching complete morons make asses of themselves on TV.

In addition to the worship of shallow idiots modern entertainment zealously feasts on the poor decisions of the talented (or at least semi-talented) people.  When someone like Tiger Woods, Michael Jackson or celebrity du jour X       fall, they fall hard.  To the glee of the media and its ravenous consumers the dirt of the fallen is paraded around until they are dropped to the level of the reader.  Only then is the public satisfied, craving the decimation of public, talented people to temper their jealousy and make them feel more important.  It always gets me when people demand an apology from a celebrity for some public gaffe.  Why does anyone give a shit if a celebrity is sorry for what they did?  I certainly couldn’t give a fuck.  It is all part of people’s self importance and the only thing the public likes to see more than no name reality show idiots rise and flame out is talented people crash disastrously.

I think at the core people are good.  Society and the environment are constantly taking that core and shaping it into what we really are at that moment – in the case of most Americans that core has been changed into a narcissistic, lazy conniving shadow of what it could be.

There is some good left though.  How can we change our current trajectory?  Damned if I know but we can’t change anything about what we are until we take a step back and realize there is a problem.  Only then can we move away from a hard fall for our own country punctuated by fingerpointing and apathy.

Geez – I guess Mondays suck… what do you think?  Is there a silver lining somewhere that I can’t see?