Slick as a seal's ass

This concept that our economy is struggling because of bloated bureaucracies is absurd. I work for a bureaucracy, and I can assure you that they are a 100% solution-oriented operation. Let me give you an example.

Security is so restrictive here that they spend about $1000 every month just unlocking people's accounts. Mine, for instance, locks up as a precautionary measure every day at about 4:00 because my computer automatically handshakes with a third-party vendor that I have to use for my job, and my computer isn't 100% sure they aren't trying to steal our information. Additionally, since our Internet Explorer is two generations old, it's so slow I can't even do my job with it, so I use Safari, which my computer doesn't recognize, so it locks me out from time to time.

74% of calls to IT, evidently, are people who are locked out of their computer for some reason. So the company has just released a bulletin letting people know how to solve this cost-prohibitive issue. Their solution? Stop calling in to have your computer unlocked. See how simple that is? If nobody calls in, it doesn't cost them any money to fix it! What exactly we're supposed to do with a locked computer, of course, is our problem.

Spring Cleaning

I could clean out my desk in five minutes, and nobody would even know I was ever here. And I'd forget, too. —Ryan "the temp" Howard

A resolution was made, by me, recently, that I would grind down and really start getting things done at work. No more piles of things that "need to be done eventually" sitting in the recesses of my desk. Whereas I would spend much of my time sitting around trying to explain to my bosses why so-and-so wanted such-and-such completed, I'd just get it done. Instead of going back and forth with my colleagues asking why they won't file the contract amendment I put in their mailbox, I would stand in their cubicles and say "what do you need for this to get completed and I will get it for you.
In one case, a client had asked to do some work for us in a state where he wasn't authorized to work. In another case, a colleague of mine didn't understand what needed to be done so she didn't do it (that was November). In another case, I never really pursued the needs of a particular client because that client had never brought in any work for us. But this was the time that they got their needs addressed. I helped client 1 get authorized to do business. I restarted the case where my colleague was sitting on it and reasssigned it to someone else. I got client 3 rolling, and put him out on the road so he could do some work for us.
Suddenly, management was all over me. Why was work being done that came in four months ago? Why aren't there any records of client 2 being addressed? Why is a processor making decisions that authorize a case that management has been discussing for a week and hasn't come to any conclusions on? Suddenly, the boss is in my space telling me I'm a "problem employee," that when one of these things come up it's just an isolated event, but they're starting to see a pattern of me making things happen. "Making things happen," the crime of all crimes.
Then, my computer starts to break.
Now, I use a significant amount of technology that my collagues don't understand. IE5 takes five minutes to load, so I download Safari, which loads instantly. Outlook doesn't index emails, so I use Desktop Search, which is instantaneous. Instead of printing everything and keeping it on my desk where it can't be searched, indexed, or trigger reminders, I save everything as PDFs and attach them to tasks (they all have to be scanned back into the computer anyway). So my boss is fuming now, and starts demanding to know why I feel I have to load up my computer with all this extra stuff and make it break.
Here's what happened: Adobe Reader poses a security risk to our computers. This affects 95% of employees, as they use Adobe Reader. I don't; I use Adobe Acrobat. Well, when they put in a patch to block this security risk, it blocked Acrobat entirely. That confused Outlook 2003 since the patch was too new, which would send panic messages to Internet Explorer, but since IE5 was rendered obsolete 3 years ago, it can't pull the patch from Microsoft Help, because Microsoft no longer supports IE5. For everyone else's computer, the computer doesn't check to see if anything's wrong. But all of my new apps suddenly started asking "what the hell are all these old apps doing here?" and the whole thing crashes.
IT can't easily fix the computer, and here's why: it's a tier 5 problem. They have to exhaust all tier 1 possibilities before they troubleshoot tier 2. They have to exhaust all tier 2 possibilities before troubleshooting tier 3. And so on. Three days I sat at my desk, my computer on the fritz, getting all the work done that I can on the new, functional applications while the 6 year-old apps fall like dominoes.
Finally, today, the whole thing crashed. My boss sternly advises me that management is going to start discussing me; if their discussion moves as fast as their talks about all my clients, that won't affect me for months. But I needed some sort of catharsis. So, while IT sits at my computer, gradually escalating my issue, I started cleaning. First, it was organizing all the letters clients have sent me. Then, I started cleaning coffee mugs. Then I started shredding old documents from resolved issues. Then I started putting my paper clips in the supply cabinet. Then I started removing my desk accessories—pen holders, staplers—and at last I take down all the decorations, from posters and calendars to cheat sheets that I've since saved as excel spreadsheets on my computer, until all that's left is a pile of work to be done and my Dell.
At 3:00 PDT, my computer was finally fixed. I sat down and started closing out the existing issues. It's pretty slow these days, so I think I can have everything done on my desk by Monday. Then, the second an issue lands on my desk, I'll use the same panicked "have to get it off my desk" strategy that I used when I was behind. When my work is caught up, I'll finally get around to indexing the department's old excel spreadsheets into one easy-to-use database.
And I'll be happy. Not because my work is done, or because I'm moving forward, or because the boss is off my back. I'll be happy because of that clean desk. It's a psychological reminder that at any time, however hard things get, I could be gone in five minutes, and everyone would forget I was ever there. And I'll forget, too.

The Layoffs

One of my company's five campus buildings is being shut down and everyone who works in it is being laid off, regardless of job description… the President sent out an email reassuring us that is was not due to the economic crisis or lack of financial strength, but their continuing effort to decrease their bottom line to keep pricing competitive.

That’s like telling my wife that I’m not staying out late with my secretary because I’m having an affair, we’re just relying on each other for emotional and physical support.

Erik Ayala

The reports on the Erik Ayala massacre in downtown Portland this week are the same as the reports of all the others. The killer was young, quiet, kept to himself. He had a history of mental problems and depression, but had been showing no signs of violence. He had no criminal record, and he was perfectly calm when he walked into the pawn shop and bought a semi-automatic pistol shortly before he turned it on a group of girls, walking down the same street I walk down every time I hit the town, just like they were doing.

There are a few things people have been clinging to as the blame for all of this. The Oregonian put in big headline letters, “fan of video games.” The Tribune was quick to point out that he was born in Mexico, though they downplay the fact that he legally entered the country and was completely assimilated. Today the media focus on how easy it was for someone with a history of mental issues to acquire a gun.

Basically, nobody gives a fuck about this kid; somewhere inside of them they’re grateful that another group of innocent bystanders was shot down in cold blood, because with all the optimism we’ve had recently, they were running out of statistics to point to in furthering their cause.
Me, I noticed the little things. The fact is, I’ve written a suicide letter in my head much like the one which was published from the kid. I’ve written the letter not because I’m suicidal, but because sometimes I’m just angry enough at someone that I want them to have my death on their conscience for a little while. Your mind goes to dark places when it’s past its pushing point.

But you can only have that much anger towards someone you love, and anyone with any empathy could never do that to someone they love. So your mind recovers, and you move on to better times. You turn to your friends, you rant to your parents, you lash out at your significant other, and they understand it’s just something you’re going through.

That’s where Erik Ayala was different. He was detached from his parents. His friends were there but unsupportive—after the incident, none of his friends even knew he was fighting depression. Erik didn’t have any loved ones, and he was just a temp—there was no one he could turn to at work. He didn’t have people who loved him. He just had anger. So he found a group of people he felt he could kill without guilt, probably to ensure that his suicide didn’t just disappear without notice, and then turned the gun on himself, punishing all the people he loved for not loving him back.

I’d like to share something from this story that affected me on a personal level. For any of you who have followed this blog, you will know that I have long faced problems being happy at work. With that in mind, I want to share with you what Erik's old employers said about him (not at the temp agency; at the place that laid him off after two years of service). They asked his old employers what they remembered of him, and this is exactly how they replied:

Erik was our top employee in terms of reaching performance standards both for production and low error rates.

That’s the bonds we have at work. That’s how people who you’ve spent 2/3 of your waking hours with remember you. They ask what someone was like whom they’d known intimately for two years, and that’s how they answer.

If you want to start asking questions about how someone can slowly collapse into homicidal depression without anyone noticing, I’d like to suggest that this is where to start looking.

Those moments

There is only one thing greater than that moment: you're working away, just listening to music in the background. This particular playlist is your "upbeat" playlist; the one you play towards the end of a Friday, to give you the energy to keep working until 5:00 at your dead-end job.

Then That Song comes on. It could be one of several, but at that moment it feels like the only song ever written. Your plan to keep working by listening to music backfires in the most wonderful way—you're so captivated by your music, you can't think of anything else. There's nothing in the world that can pull you away from the feeling the song gives you. These songs are usually the "singles" on an album—really catchy, uplifting songs. The ones where you buy the whole album, and it's pretty good, but then that one song plays, the anamoly, that incredible gem that the songwriters themselves couldn't conjecture how the song came to be. Maybe the muses are real, if for only that one song. Finding that song, especially after you've forgotten it, buried deep in your playlist... hearing that song again for the first time is hands down the second-greatest feeling a person could possibly have.

The greatest feeling in the world is when it's a song you wrote.

What the fuck am I doing here? What possible value does this job have to culture? What contribution am I making to anyone in the world by typing addresses into a computer? What strides has our civilization made, in having companies whose sole purpose is to give the richest 5% (that's my client base) a little extra luxury that they don't even need? Could that possibly be more valuable than sharing songs like this with the world?

Some songs I write purely for myself. Introspective songs that mean something personal, something special, to me. This isn't one of those songs. This is a song I pored over for 2½ years, adjusting, altering, stealing from other songs, to make the perfect beast. It's a process I've only gone through 3 or 4 times in my life; most of my songs are written in an afternoon, and only slightly modified over the years. This was an intentional effort, with the express purpose of making something wonderful.

For what? For me? How is that of any value? Even if I tried getting the song out to the world, it would never reach open ears, drowned out by the literally millions of cheap one-off efforts from high school kids who have been deluded into thinking that all you have to do to make it in the music world is to be more persistent and ornery than everyone else. People get so soured to new music that by their 24th birthday, they call it a lifetime and spend the next 50 years listening to all the songs they remember from their youth. They won't open up to new songs. And for the under-24 crowd... well, even if they did still listen to rock music, how would they know that I'm not just another pushy obnoxious kid with a guitar, trying to force myself on them like a pubescent teen in eyeshot of a D cup? One of the most common compliments I get from people is "this is really good... I'm surprised!" The surprise comes from the presumption that it will be terrible, and they listen to it begrudgingly because they figure I won't leave them alone unless I do.

Well, you know what? I'll tell you right now that I have a handful of songs, maybe 5 or 6, that are fucking wonderful. I don't just think so, you think so. You just don't know it. And if you think you're open to listening to them, that you'll give them a shot, well... fuck you. My culture doesn't want me, so I don't want my culture. You can continue your life with your soul a little emptier than mine. Just writing this blog has pissed me off, but I'll be over it in 5 minutes and 13 seconds.

I have the remedy for a darkened soul.

Remember job loyalty?

I remember when I first started in the job market, one thing people would always say is to stick with one job for a few years. If you switch jobs to often, companies will consider you a "job hopper," i.e. you don't have sufficient job loyalty.

A friend of mine just applied for an internal job transfer about three weeks ago—they chose him for the position, then laid the position off while he was still in his two weeks notice at his old position. The only people who knew he’d gotten the new job were his current boss and prospective boss. Consequently, he’s just keeping his old position as if nothing had happened. So the only thing that was influenced by the whole process was the dropping of his morale.

Sadly, that’s not the first time I’ve heard of that happening (and not just at my company). Another friend of mine had a stable job once, then was hired into a better job somewhere else, and was laid off within weeks of taking the new job. They still hadn’t filled her old position, but she had officially left the company. She ended up having to apply for her old job back, just a week after leaving. She got it back, but what a humiliating experience.

This is why you never see “job loyalty” in this day and age. It’s an unrequited relationship. Maybe if all these companies that are going under really want to blame the job hoppers, or unions, or employees in general for all their problems, they should treat their employees with respect to begin with, and give employees a reason to help the company out.

My job loyalty reaches as far as my next paycheck, and it's not because I don't care. It's because I do care, and because I pay attention to how I'm treated as an employee. Once in a while there's a job out there where somebody goes to work and provides a service, and their employer compensates them for their time. They don't necessarily "love what they do," they just do it and do it well so they can be appreciated. The more common relationship, though, is that a company needs an ass in the chair so they can convincingly charge their clients as much as they do, and they're bribing me not to vacate that chair while anyone is watching.

Apologies to Management

Management at my company hates me for being likeable. Many of them are my friends. My proudest moment was when someone said to the director “that guy is really, really smart, isn’t he?” to which she replied somewhat ironically, “yeah, we’re trying to rein that in.” She has since quit, but her replacement feels the same way about me. As does my new supervisor, who has often invited me out for drinks.
Earlier this week, management had a closed-door meeting discussing the possibility of requiring employees to work over Christmas vacation. Most employees didn’t pick up on that message, but I know how to read people, and I knew it was a consideration. I sent an email to the entire department, proactively warning of the dangers of making such a request, and at the very least, if the option is on the table, to come out and say it now, instead of dropping it on people the week of Christmas.
As it well should, the email caused an instant panic. Many of the more resigned employees laughed it off— not because they didn’t think it would happen, but that they would expect no better than to have Christmas cancelled. The newer employees started looking for the signs that it was an option, and started seeing them.

My boss called a meeting with me.

He started the meeting with explicit instructions: this meeting was purely for documentation purposes, to record that I had been made aware of the company’s email etiquette policy. He listed the reasons why the email was not appropriate. He asked me, as he is bureaucratically required to do, what my side of the story was. I gave it to him, he wrote down his notes, and then gave the response that the director had already fed him to give. I pushed back, pushing him to tell me outright if cancelling Christmas was being considered, and he replied, “that’s a fair question, I’m just saying that’s a question that you relay to me, not replying to the whole team.”
“Well, I think we’ve resolved the communication issue. I will parlay all grievances to you directly. I’m giving you one now– I’m not speaking for myself; I’m telling you as management, our department can not afford to rely on employees coming in on Christmas.”
“That’s a valid concern,” he reiterates, “I just want you to understand that you need to bring these to my attention, and not to the team.”

I really like the guy. I specifically asked to work with him. But this isn’t personal. This is me, the employee, fully aware that what I tell him is going on record. I say it again, as my concern had not been addressed.
“I am not saying this in my own defense, nor as an individual employee. I’m asking on the behalf of the team, has the planning been put into action that if we do not provide the results you need, that it will be demanded that we work over the holidays?”

He looked down at the table, mumbling almost incomprehensibly, “okay, it’s just how you communicate it.”

He looks up at me, begging me with his eyes not to do this to him. The meeting was a policy-mandated reprimand, not him criticizing me personally. But I'm not attacking him personally either; I'm attacking management. I just wait for a response. Finally, he meekly closes his book and says, “okay, I’ll send you a write-up of our meeting for the records,” and stands up.

Sorry Chris, it wasn’t personal. For what its worth, I’ve stood up against nearly every authority figure in our department and never once reached an accord. I understand why. The fact is, they’re just here because it’s a living. Words matter, and when I criticize management, it hurts.

He made it very clear how much it hurt for the director to read my email, outright asking her, “are you planning on taking away Christmas?” She never wanted to be that person, and still doesn’t. He never wanted to be the guy on his side of the table, reprimanding someone for standing up for what he thought was right. But he is the guy on the other side of the table.

His job as a supervisor is to keep me quiet, and I respect that. My job is to speak out, and I take pride in my job.

Fuck this

As this day is coming to an end, do you know what occurs to me? I would get 4x as much work done, at least, if I worked from home, or even from a Starbucks. Even if every other aspect was the same—I still had to interact with my colleagues (by email, IM or phone), I still got the same amount of inquiries from clients, everything else the same, I can tell you that this job sucks the productivity out of me. This morning, I was absolutely juiced to get some work done. I was seriously rolling. Then, at 9:00, I was pulled away for a one hour meeting that had three minutes of information and 57 minutes of people whining. I even warned my supervisor that I had a full head of steam and was afraid the meeting would have a serious deflating effect.

Then, as I started rolling again, I was interrupted by the QA folks who wanted me to give them a report of information they already had, in a format I don’t usually use, so I had to sit and do stuff that had nothing to do with my job, typing out information I already had somewhere else. By then, I only had a half hour or so to do any real work before my mandated lunch break.

When I got back from lunch, I was deluged with a bunch of trivial, two or three minute interruptions that were in no way related to my work (they were solving problems created by my coworkers). Not only did I have to fix the problems, but I had to go over to my colleagues’ desks and listen to them explain to me for ten minutes why it was that they weren’t going to fix it themselves. Not only am I not a supervisor, but some of those colleagues are my superiors. Unfortunately, my supervisors don’t believe in doing any supervising themselves; instead, they just have us type up reports explaining how it is we’re doing their jobs.

Last, but not least, my ex-supervisor kept interrupting me asking me how I was doing. I said fine, and tried to get back to work, but she started moping about how she wasn’t important anymore, now that I have a new supervisor. Meanwhile, my new supervisor, the one who had coffee with me and talked to me about how I had more potential than just being a processor, has been denying every request I have submitted to attend conferences and meetings to help make things more efficient and sustainable, saying it was more important that I was at my desk entering addresses.

Now I feel completely sapped. I barely have the energy to return to work. Worst of all, I have the distinct memory of how I felt six hours ago, rearing to get things done, and the knowledge that the energy would still be in me if I had been actually working all day instead of dealing with all of the above. As it is, I’ve barely gotten anything done today, and now I don’t want to.

Linguistics and mid-management

ME: “Boy, my boss is dumb.”
ME: “How dumb is she?”
ME: “She heard me sneeze, and sent me an IM that said ‘kazoontite.’”
ME: “Hmmm, that’s not very funny.”
ME: “Oh, it wasn’t a joke. My boss actually thinks it’s spelled ‘kazoontite.’ I replied that I didn’t know what she was saying, and she confusedly explained to me that that is what you say after someone sneezes.”
ME: “Oh. Oh dear.”
ME: “Yeah. I had to cover my tracks for implying she was an idiot by saying ‘Oh, I didn’t realize it was a reply to my sneeze.’”
ME: “Well, thank God you’re witty enough to still convince your boss that you’re dumber than her.”
ME: (sound of blowing brains out)

I am not making this up

One of the assigned responsibilities of our “tier one,” as she is called, is maintaining printer supplies and such. I walk up to the printer to print off one page, and she’s just staring blankly at the printer. She looks at me and asks, “did you print something?”

“Not yet,” I reply. “My job’s in queue.”

“Well, it’s not working for some reason,” she says. I look at the screen on the printer and >TONER EMPTY: REPLACE CARTRIDGE< is blinking. So I point out that there’s no toner in the printer. “I see that,” she says as she rolls her eyes, “I didn’t expect that that would stop it from printing!”

“Yep,” I say. “It can’t print without any ink.”

“Well, the toner cartridges are right over there,” she points, and walks away. I’m wearing all white today, but I need that printout, so I grab the toner and carefully replace it (we have one of those old printers that blow out a plume of toner whenever it’s replaced). I close up the printer and print the queue.

My supervisor walks up and looks at the printer. “Oh,” she says, “did someone get this working again?”

I shrug, “we just needed to replace the toner, so I swapped it out.”

She laughs. “Yeah, I saw that it said replace cartridge. I asked J.J. to do it, but he didn’t know how, and I don’t know how. I figure there had to be instructions somewhere.”

I look at her, trying not to make any sort of judgmental face. “You just swap it out from the toner tray.

She rolls her eyes, “well, I know that. I know that the toner goes in this tray right here—” she says as she opens it while it’s printing, causing a loud XKKRYNGH sound as seven sheets of paper get jammed up inside. “Whoops,” she says. “I’ll go get J.J. and see if he knows how to fix it.”

Side note: J.J. is our accountant. He is not our tier one.

I volunteer to un-jam the printer, and I calmly open it out and start weeding out all the jammed paper. At this point, the tier one comes back in and sees me pulling things out of the printer. She’s visibly upset. “I already called the service guy,” she says, “exactly so this doesn’t happen. You shouldn’t be trying to swap out the toner yourself.”

“The toner wasn’t the problem,” I say. “We just got a paper jam. It’s easy to fix.” I pull out the last piece of paper, close up the printer, and re-send the queue. I grab the one page of paper that I need, while the other 50 print back out, and I leave.

I pass J.J. on my way out of the printer room. I hear him talking to my supervisor behind me. “Oh,” he says, “did you get the toner cartridge replaced?”

“Yeah, Robert did it,” the supervisor replied. “I guess you just have to put it on this tray here—” XKKRYNGH!!!

So now the printer’s “out of order.” I’ll pull out the paper next time I need to print something. Which will probably be Wednesday.

On the other hand, we do have two printers…

Welcome to entry #100!

So, I'm playing Dance Dance Revolution in my apartment, and it occurs to me the problem with my job: I can't be perfect at anything.

I'm playing the game at a very respectable level (difficulty 6), and even occasionally stumbling upon a level 7, and I'm actually doing really well. Not passing the levels, mind you, but keeping pace to be sure. Then I pop my knee which makes my leg a little sore doing the really tough ones, but I set a goal for myself (700 calories) and by God, I'm going to keep it, so I just do some easy levels. I figure, this will be a nice cool-off period before I call it a night.

Plus, I've never seen the screen when you get a perfect score. So, since I can easily keep up with level 6, I do a couple level 3 songs—ones so easy, they verge on boring. And you know what? Not once did I get a perfect score. I can hit a 100-combo on fast speed no sweat, but I do a comfortably-paced song with only 80 steps and I will screw one up, guaranteed.

This is the exact same thing that I keep getting in trouble for at work. I am "above expectations" in every single category except one: accuracy. In accuracy, I still do very well (92%), but according to the job detail, you have to be 100% accurate. You're allowed a 98% average every three months, to allow for the occasional slip (that comes out to 3/4 of an error per month). I have never hit 98%, let alone made the average.

I can't be perfect. I've never been perfect at anything. I've never sung a song and gotten every word, even if I'm reading the lyrics while I do it. I've never played a song without missing a note. I've never typed a letter without a typo or mistype (which I have to pick up with a proofread). The only true 100% grade I ever got in school was when I was taking the Social Studies GED, in my second year of college, and that was entirely by luck; on every other test, I missed exactly one question.

This isn't me complaining or self-deprecating. I'm very, very good at a lot of things. In fact, there are tons of things which I can do and only make one mistake every time. But I am never perfect.

This month at work, I've made special arrangements to game the system; i.e. get a "perfect" score, not by avoiding any mistakes, but by guiding QA to the ones without any mistakes in them. Now, you may ask, if I know what QA is going to look at, why don't I just fix the mistakes that they would have found before they see them? And if you ask that question, you obviously missed my point with this blog. 

Don't beat yourself up over it, though. We all make mistakes.

Wanna buy an insurance company?

AIG, the second largest public insurance company, is selling itself off for parts. The Feds bought 80% of their stocks for $85 billion, which AIG immediately lent to itself, giving it $170 billion to work with (I'm not really sure how that's not fraudulent), and are now paying something like 30% interest on the loan, so they said they need to sell off their services. So they've put up their aviation department, casualty insurance, life insurance, and property insurance departments up for sale, along with a few smaller business units, which they said they will sell for and "reasonable price." They're hoping to pull $150 billion dollars, use $85 billion (plus interest) to pay off their loans, buy back $48 billion worth of their stocks (80% of the remainder), and give back the other $12 to the shareholders, who just watched their stock drop from $62 in January down to about $2 and dropping by the minute.

I am tickled pink. I've thought the stock market was a ridiculous idea from the moment I learned about it in high school economics. I'm going to get hurt by this financial crisis, of course, but not NEARLY as much as the people who have bought into it. The only investment I have in the stock market is my 401 (k), which is worth about $1,500. Currency isn't an actual object; it's a unit of measurement, and comparably I'm getting wealthier and wealthier the longer this crisis continues.

It's an indicator of morale

when one of the senior team members gazes longingly out of the window and says to me, "I think I'll become a window washer."

I say, "are you fond of heights?" He looks at me with a terrified look in his eyes and replies, "not at all. But I'm not really fond of what I do here, either. It'd be something... different." He sighs, and walks out of the office.

No Honor Among Thieves

When I was fifteen I was a fairly habitual shoplifter, and had been doing it for years. I wasn't so much a thief as I was fascinated that I could just walk out with something and completely violate the agreement that I would pay for it. Then I got stopped by security. A man had reported that he saw me pocket something and they wanted to check my pockets. I had a jumbo candy bar in my left pants pocket, but I just looked at the security guard with a confused look and said, "what do you mean by 'pocket' something?" He explained that he meant "steal," and I just glared at him like the concept was completely foreign to me.

I shrugged and told him that I respected his job and encouraged him to check all my pockets, as was his responsibility to keep the store safe. I gave him my jacket, and as he rifled through the pockets, the man who accused me of stealing kept his eye on me. While the man watched me, I calmly slid the candy bar out of my pocket, into my sleeve, and into the band of my jeans. I then pulled out my front pockets and showed him my sleeves. He asked to pat me down, so I slipped the bar of candy into my sleeve and held up my arms. He patted me down, apologized, and let me go, and I vowed to never steal again... it was just too easy for me to get away with it, and I knew I was heading down the slippery slope into a criminal lifestyle, which it seemed I would have been very successful at living.

In April, I made a boneheaded mistake at work and ended up costing someone hundreds of dollars. I prolonged the situation for months, and now our client is outraged that they were cheated out of money they earned. I made no conscious effort to screw them out of their money, and I profit in no way from it, but that didn't mean I wasn't responsible. I went straight back to the client and said nothing could be done about it, which was true, but of course they still wanted someone to blame. I explained the situation in full fact to both my supervisor and the client and at no point making any effort to defend myself, yet both of them are now walking away thanking me for going to such great lengths to try and make everything go right, and for helping them fix the mistake that they are now convinced I had nothing to do with.

Not once did I lie, I omitted no facts, and yet I have again been absolved of all responsibility for something I unequivocably made happen, and once again, I'm walking out of the store scot-free with the candy bar still in my pocket.

It's not always a good feeling to succeed.

I want to work Freelance

I think, ultimately, that's what it comes down to. I know for a fact that I can better manage a workflow than the people I work for now, and I would be able to set my own system, without having to compromise for the people who have been doing things "the way they're done" for the last 15 years. I think it'd give me a genuine edge on corporations which have been operating under the status quo. I have no desire to run my own business, the risk is just way too high.

I guess the concept isn't new. Something like 60% of Americans say they want to be their own boss. But I think most people just say it because they don't want anybody holding them accountable. I think a lot of people just believe that "being your own boss" means you can get up at 10:30, start working sometime around lunch, and call it a day once you're bored a couple hours later.

Besides which, people don't "start" working freelance. People work for a stodgy corporation for 20 years and then go out on their own, taking the corporation's leads with them.

Anyway. Just thinking out loud.

Why I fail in 5 words or less

Here it is:

I have to be challenged.

It says so right in my student evaluation from 1996. I have spent weeks without rest grinding out a screenplay that I have no intention to sell. I have practiced half an hour a night for the last three weeks singing a song that I will most likely never perform in public. I have written dissertations which will never be published. I've taken the LSAT three times, but never for a grade, and I'll probably never take it.

Yet I never got straight A's in school. I've never been a manager at a job. I've never been paid to write. When I was in a band, I never memorized my own lyrics (yet I can still write every word of entire albums from that time period). Even now, I'm in a play in three weeks, and I never practice my lines. There's no challenge in it.

Suppose I do become the top performer at work. What's in it for me? A raise? Big deal. I can't get promoted from my current position, and my work might be recognized, but it won't make any difference to anyone else, and I don't really feel a pressing need to help the company I work for. Suppose I did go take the LSAT, and got top score, maybe even a scholarship. I still can't afford law school, not without a free ride, and I will never be a rich lawyer– I want a family, and lawyers don't get those. The list goes on.

Now, here's the thing. I will always fail, professionally. This is because you're never hired for a position that challenges you. Look in the paper. If you want to be a contract analyst, you must have 6 years experience with contracts. If you want to be a corporate manager, you must have an MBA and a good background. If you want to be a professional writer, you have to have been writing for so long for free that you can spit out a 600 word op-ed in your sleep. The only prerequisite that all jobs have in common is this: they cannot be challenging to you. If you want to be CEO of a company, maybe you can someday, but you have to wait until you've been a top level manager for so long that you have every eventuality of corporate politics memorized. Christ, people are saying that Obama's not electable as President because he's only been a Senator for four years. Probably the most challenging job on the planet, and we won't put someone in office until they're completely numb to the possible challenges they face, even after we've had to deal with eight years of a nepotized dipshit of the system. Clinton said it herself in her 3:00am advertisement.

The only way I will ever be good at a job is if someone can make a mistake in the hiring process and hire me when they shouldn't have. Suddenly, I will be alive, inspired, focused. I will be the greatest thing to happen to them. All because I'm not qualified to do the job. 

Lee Bucks

So, every once in a while, the VP asks a challenging question in a meeting. Whoever answers the question right gets a dollar—or as they call them, "Lee Bucks." I've gotten two right and spent the two bucks. My supervisor was appalled; evidently, every single member of the management team has their "Lee Bucks" pinned to their cubicle wall like a trophy. I defended myself by saying, "well, you guys make more money than me; I need every dollar I can get." At which point my supervisor blushes a little bit and turns to look at her computer and mumbles, "don't... presume you make less money than me if you don't know..."

On a related note, she only has two Lee Bucks posted to her wall. She has a meeting with him two or three times a week. I have a meeting with him once every three or four months. I also have earned two Lee Bucks.

Also, I just started here last November.

I'm thinking of breaking a twenty and putting a fan of singles on my cubicle wall.

A goal I can sink my teeth into

I struggle at work to get an acceptable "accuracy rating"— not because I'm inaccurate, but because nobody here does anything whatsoever unless they are specifically asked to in direct, written documentation, and have received explicit permission to do so. Consequently, any time I do anything because that's what one of my clients want, or as a preventative measure to prevent future problems from occurring, or in an effort to better document or serve the company, it comes up on some report as a deviation from the prescribed process, and they deduct my "mistake" from my "accuracy report." The single thing, then, preventing me from receiving a raise, is the fact that my accuracy rating is at 92% when it has to be at least 98%.

Here, then, is my goal to myself– something that I can personally invest into for the purposes of a greater gain. I will aspire to reach a perfect rating, with high productivity numbers, and to completely stop helping anyone in any way. My clients will notice—many of them comment daily on how I'm the best person they've ever worked with, and they can't believe what a pleasure it is—but I can just flat out tell them that it's something I'm not allowed to do anymore. I'm just a processor. I'm going to quit this place anyway, so they're going to lose me either way.

Then, when I find a new job, I'll quit, just as my numbers hit acceptable levels for a raise.

In the exit interview, my boss will inevitably ask, "your numbers went way up at the end there. What did you do to fix the problems you were having?" At which point I will reply, "I just stopped caring. Since I was already on my way out, I just stopped helping the team and sat at my desk waiting for five o'clock to roll around, and my numbers just shot through the roof. Hey, did you get that puppy you were talking about at my last review?"

She's not bright enough to make the connection, but fuck her. She's the one who only understands arbitrary statistics pulled from computerized reports. What a twat.

Progress Report

My apartment is not clean, but it is cleaner than it was Friday. On Friday, it was cleaner than it had been Thursday. I think that's a smarter way to go. It's like how the gyms get packed every January– all those people, resolving to make a change. But they can change overnight, and then, after a couple weeks, they miss a workout. Then another. Then they figure, I failed, might as well give up.

I'm fucking tired of giving up. So I'm not going to burn myself out, but I'm not going to allow myself to quit. For once. But if I can just get a little farther each day, I'll be a little closer to my goal. So I picked up the front room, cleaned off the bathroom floor, and folded most of my clothes. No one room is clean, but I'm getting there.

I emailed the director of the play I'm in and told him I wasn't going to play guitar in the show. It's not giving up– I didn't want to do it in the first place. But, he asked me, and I seem to have this belief that the more you say you can do, the more successful you are. That's how I got into so much trouble at work, I now realize– every day I wanted to take on more and more, in an effort to somehow prove something. As a result, I overwhelmed myself.

Work, too, is getting better. In rare form, my mother actually offered me some useful input: she pointed out that I should feel perfectly comfortable with lower productivity than my colleagues. Management clearly recognizes that I have some skills which my co-workers lack; I should feel confident in saying to management, "I didn't close as many cases as the others, because I was busy doing all those other things I do." Keep my desk caught up, then just focus on doing what I'm good at. If they ask why my numbers are lower, that's my answer.

I'm terrible at the piano. I never learned how to read music, I never got technically proficient, and I'm awful with music history. Occasionally, I'll really make an effort to learn a song (particularly if it's one of my own; yes, I'm so bad at piano I cannot play song which I myself have written). When I make that effort, something strange can happen- suddenly, my fingers will just start playing the song. My brain takes no part in the action- I can actually look down and see these fingers playing, but they sure aren't mine. They just... play. If I get pushed out of that zone, I can't replicate it. I can't just sit down and start playing the song again.

That's my goal. It's against my nature to be clean, to be productive, to just do what I'm good at and not to try and fool people into believing I can do something else. But if I just start doing it, whether I like it or not, if I just stop trying to force things, I really believe I can get into a zone. I really do think that I can get to a point where, after I finish my dinner, my body will eventually just go over to the kitchen, clean the dishes, put everything away, and pick up the kitchen, without checking with me to see if that's what I want to do. I will just get into this routine at work where I do my fucking job when I come in, and by the afternoon I have a clean desk and I can focus on doing all those things that only I can do.

When I wake up tomorrow morning, my apartment is still going to be dirty, my job is still going to suck, and my guitar will be in its case in the closet. I have to tell myself that's okay- I'll just need to keep on it tomorrow, and hopefully Tuesday, my apartment will be a little cleaner, my work will be a little better, and control of my life will be a little closer.

A different Friday

There are greater conflicts that come from my job– most obviously, that it's a gross mismatch with my personality and, as they say, "professional skill set." There are also a plethora of minutia that make my job frustrating. My peers are thirty years older than me. The company allows for training, but does not let you reduce your workload to make time. We are expected to work overtime when they want to unrealistically increase the quantity of workload, but we are not allowed to work overtime when we want to improve the quality. I have been asking for some basic office supplies for six months and still haven't gotten them– basic things, like a filing wallet, windowed envelopes, and a three-hole punch. The rationale is that since most of my coworkers don't use hole punches, there must not be a business need (my coworker Deb, for instance, has a large box in her cubicle, where she has a big pile of her pending cases, unsorted, no folders, held together with binder clips). In other words, they want us to mimic whoever in the office has the least efficient, least organized, most incompetent methodology.

But there is a certain tangible benefit to having a processing job– any moron can do it. It's not like I have a job classifying water samples or helping kids with autism, where I'd be completely lost and about six years behind of where I'd need to be. I just type shit into a computer and it shows up on the other end. As a matter of fact, they've created rudimentary computer programs—open source, even—that could do my job adequately. Fortunately, my company is hovering at around 1996-level technology. Their goal is to have 25% of their customers using an online system by the end of 2009, and even at that, the "online system" is a dummy system; it can't actually read the information that's coming in. So, in short, everyone where I work has absolute job security until at least the end of next year.

Which was why I was so intrigued by the conversation I overheard from the cube next to mine. My coworker Katy was just typing away, type type type, when her boss came over and said "okay, it's one o'clock." This piqued my attention, because this boss (also my boss) hasn't remembered an appointment once in the eight months I've worked there. Even when I'm sitting at her desk with a stack of documents to review, she's just as likely to interrupt to tell me she wants a new puppy as she is to actually address my work questions (true example). In short, she's a fucking eight year-old. Which is nice for me because I can manipulate the hell out of her, but makes it all the more surprising that she's actually being, well, bossy to one of my peers.

But get this– my coworker then says, "hold on, I'm checking my personal emails." My boss replies, "we agreed that you would have everything done by one o'clock, now it's time for you to go."

"I don't want you scrubbing through my personal emails," she says. "We're just going to erase the hard drive," my boss replies. "Nobody will read your emails. It's time to go."

"Just let me finish this," my co-worker says. My boss replies, "no, your time is up. Please stand up and step away from your computer." My co-worker keeps working on her computer. "Stand up and step away from the computer, now."

"Well, let me grab my things," my co-worker says. "Do I get a box, or do I just have to carry them?"

"We will have your personal affects mailed to you. Don't worry about those, it's time for you to go."

"I don't have that many things, anyway," she says, and starts grabbing things with her arms.

"Okay, we've given you plenty of time," my boss says, and with that, a security guard approaches and firmly grabs the employee's arm, and she is guided out to the elevator lobby.

A "short meeting" (hour and a half, and I'm still trying to get caught up after my training class) is called to announce that Katy is no longer with the company. That makes three employees in two months that have left and aren't coming back. One transferred, but it appears that the other two were assuaged to leave (one was coaxed into retirement, and now Katy was shit-canned). I think all three of them were positive losses. In fact, I could think of a few more that could be sifted out, who won't be. But then again, I've got my review soon. I have the worst accuracy rating of anyone in our department. I have the worst turnaround time of anyone in our department. I've taken more management training than any of our managers, I have more schooling than anyone in our entire business unit, I have actually gotten in trouble because so many people call me for information or advice from other departments that I've been accused of undermining my peers (for you see, expertise is a demerit where I work), and I have clients who absolutely love me and openly say so, leading management to believe I spend too much time making our customers happy and not enough time doing paperwork.

But I still need this job, and obviously, the job security isn't nearly as high as I thought it was. My weaknesses show up as obvious weaknesses. My strengths show up as obvious weaknesses. Why do I have any reason to believe that I will still be allowed to work here, once they're back up to full staffing?

After our meeting, I went back to my co-worker's desk to see what was left. While we were in the meeting, her cube had been entirely cleared out. When I left for lunch, she was there working, just like any other day. An hour before I went home, all that was left was a stack of folders, a few office supplies, and an ergonomic keyboard. So, I took a second to say a silent goodbye. I thought about how her being fired affected me. Then, I stole her hole punch, file wallet, and envelopes, and went back to work.