So I’ve met a wide range of people in my travels.  Some of them are great, absolutely great.  Some are less than desireable.

I’ve blathered on, previously, about my general dissatisfaction with what society has come to accept as “standard practice / standard quality of performance”, mostly in length that belies a greater dissatisfaction than even stated.

One of the finest guys I’ve had the fortune of working alongside has an almost frightening fascination with America’s well known big-green-tractors… lawnmowers… beer-coolers… So for the sake of this article, we’ll just call him ‘John Deere’.

John and I would often postulate on the human condition, as it applied to getting ahead in the world, and inevitibly we’d come to the same sad conclusion each time.  That being, we’re stuck where we’re respectively at.  We deduced… well, he deduced, I provided color-commentary, that there are watershed events necessary to escalate one up the corporate chain of command / chain of importance.  For reference, he’s a modified and enhanced list:

1- thou shalt lose all sense of self-respect.  How are you supposed to take your daily beating if your self worth is anything greater than that of a peanut?

2- thou shalt learn to lie with skill and be fluent in the language of bullshit.  You can’t stumble or forget your place when you’re trying to make up a story about how “it” wasn’t your fault at all, and that the “other guy” told you that he was taking care of everything, and that it is in fact all his fault, and that you recommend that he be lynched and burned at the stake.

3- thou shalt forget everything you ever learned about grade-school math.  Calculus - schmalculus!  Trig - schmig!  Multiplication - schmaltiplication!  Hell, there’s a whole new math out there… I think it’s base 18.  If you know that your production line can and will regularly run 20 boxes per minute, with a maximum ability to peak out at 22 boxes per minute, and someone asks you how fast you can run… then you better tell them “12″.  Using the base 18 philisophy, this isn’t technically a lie (which, if it was, that would be fine… see #2, above), but it’ll certainly makes everyone else look really stupid when you start beating the living shit out of equipment because you’re running 22 (base 10) items per minute across machinery designed and built around a target of 12 (base 10) items.  Just remember, when the smarter people who actually have some remote clue of what they’re doing start pointing fingers at you like weary cavemen trying to build a fire — thats when you just say “well I told you 20!”… even if you didn’t (see #2, above).  This same logic can be used to play a fun and enjoyable game known as “find the savings”.  This game involves a bumbling idiot randomly picking out equipment to modify and perform a project on.  Said bumbling idiot then has a vendor come in who knows less about the equipment and proposed changes than even the original bumbling idiot does; the vendor then lines up some expensive items that he has an overstock of and needs to get rid of, and arranges for the bumbling idiot to purchase them.  The bumbling idiot then puts together a project, and asks for X amount of dollars, where X = the cost of the overpriced snake-oil products.  This does not include the cost of labor, regulatory or code compliance measures, additional installation parts such as bringing utilities (gas / water / steam / etc.) to the area, or anything else (which often ends up costing a lot more than the actual ‘thing’ you’re trying to install).  Lastly, bumbling idiot goes ahead and fudges some numbers so that it looks like the company would save three times the cost of the project over the course of a year.  Outstanding!  Brilliant!  Certifiably Insane!

4- thou shalt not have any integrity.  Make promises that you can’t keep.  Push your people harder and harder, and then act like they’re dead to you.  Find any and all ways to do the exact opposite of what would be considered common decency.

5- thou shalt contract Alzheimer’s and Dimentia at an early age.  When someone asks you why something didn’t get done / didn’t happen / etc… then you must respond with, “I have no idea.  I was not aware of the situation until just now.  Let me get with my team, and we’ll come up with an organized plan in response.  Remember, I’m here to support you.  We’ll do whatever is necessary to make it right.”  Even if they put 10 emails in front of you from as long as 6 months ago, show you letters signed in the blood of Mother Teresa where they’ve notified you of the issue, and have no less than President Franklin Roosevelt, back from the dead, give a sworn affidavit that you were aware of the situation — even if that — you still give them the canned response, “As, I said, we were unaware of the situation until just now, let me get with my team, and we’ll get back to you.”  — and then be sure not to get back to them.  It takes skill, practice it.

So I think I’ve hit my glass ceiling — that is, I’m at the bottom of the proverbial totem-pole and will likely stay there for fear of becoming like some of these executives that you see on TV from AIG and the lending companies that got us into this ‘mortgage crisis’; and I’m fine with that.  Maybe if I start drinking the Kool-Aid my opinion will change, but I doubt it.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009 at 8:33 pm and is filed under darwinism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.