Tonsil Hockey

I am sick today. Stuffy nose. Soar throat. Achy muscles. Nothing life-threatening, but you know what I’m saying. Just an aura of illness. It’s not debilitating. More like a minor inconvenience. I could still go to work if I weren’t retired. I could still go to work if I worked at a company that aimed to extract every last ounce of productivity out of their “human resources” army. You know what I’m talking about, the ones who don’t really give a sh*t about the human being behind the corporate email address. The employees are just a number. A line item on the payroll. A cost center. Like all cost centers, the headcount ought to be constrained while maximum output is still sustained. It’s a simple optimization equation. Minimize labor costs while keeping profit steady. I learned about it in business school. As a business owner, as a manager, all it asks of me is to treat all of my employees as a variable. “Labor” is often the chosen descriptor. It’s an appropriate word for serving this purpose because it’s so impersonal. (Not to mention, it sounds like it belongs in a “History of the 1800s” crossword puzzle: Labor, Civil War, Robber Barrons, Industrial.) Referring to the group of humans as “Labor” creates a Grand Canyon-sized separation between employee and employer. This separation prevents the business owner from questioning his assumptions. The assumption that the Labor just wants to clock in, do as little as possible, grab their paycheck with their greedy lil fingers, then return home… until they’ve saved enough to retire. The owner gets to maintain his view that his (<— intentionally possessive) workforce is a faceless mass of money-hungry sluggards. These hardly-human resources will lie, cheat, and steal if left unmonitored. These most appalling of characteristics of Labor generate the need for a manager. The manager’s role is to treat the Labor Pool. Not in the sense of “treat them like human beings”, more in the sense of “treat them with chlorine.” The assumption is that these drooling, desperate drones are chemically misbalanced. They value money above all else (a trait very clearly not shared by the most virtuous business owner). Behind money, their second priority is preserving their freedom to be lazy. They want to return as quickly as possible to their lives of misery. Third, they want to make their money and acquire their freedom to be lazy by any means necessary (again, a trait not shared by the corporate overlords do-gooders). This means they’ll unapologetically steal from the company, given the opportunity. One of the most profound of such offenses: time theft. So, the manager must be vigilant, like the Assistant to the Regional Manager at Dunder Mifflin. The manager must exercise extreme skepticism whenever any employee suggests that they might need a sick day. The manager must demand a doctor’s note (a tactic that the mindless minions should know to adhere to after the conditioning they received during their days in school) in order to provide beyond-a-ridiculous-level-of-doubt proof that they’re not shirking their responsibilities. After all, the manager knows that nobody would show up to this company and do the work willingly. Thus, his (and I use this pronoun intentionally given the proportion of penises in management positions) policy is a projection of his own dissatisfaction. He hates it here! So, he assumes that none of the employees would willingly do their duties without the shock treatment he’s administering. It’s an attitude of “I only work here because I have a family. Once my high-expectations wife was expecting, I knew it was time to give up on my dreams. I knew I’d never again get to do work that mattered to me. Sure, I know I have an Ivy League degree and could get a job in effectively any field I wanted. But it’s hard for me to imagine doing something that actually makes me want to get out of bed in the morning. After all, in order to attain that Ivy League degree, I had to learn how to stop thinking. I mean, I cultivated my intellect, sure. But I also had to conform to a system of achievement that required me to sideline my True Self. I thought it was only a temporary suspension. But, I eventually realized that this modus operand didn’t magically stop at graduation. They say (whoever “they” are) that you “go to college to learn how to learn”. But not me and my classmates. Our version is different. We “go to The League (yeah, we call it that… we even have our own app) to learn how to achieve”. We learn how to set aside our personal aspirations and achieve what would be impressive to people at a cocktail party. Whatever would be impressive to people who have no knowledge of our individual idiosyncrasies. Whatever would be impressive to people who have no desire to get to know us as a human. So, in a way (and I’m realizing, quite intentionally), we were carefully treated (again, in the chlorine sense) in order to be impressive to our future executives. The ones who we’d first meet at a networking cocktail party. The ones who would sweep us off our feet with talks of “meaningful work” and “value-creating responsibilities”. The ones who recited the same lines every year as they aimed to pick up the 21-year old in a dimly lit bar. We trusted these ones because they were brought in by our school. We trusted them because they wore expensive suits and even had the same haircut as my doctor. So, of course we trusted them, we were groomed to trust these signs of authority. After popping our contract cherry and signing up for “at-will employment” (which is basically saying that this always-side-eyeing-a-hotter-prospect bachelor can break up with us at any moment), we got pregnant. Pregnant with entirely unexpected responsibilities. It was a whoopsie indeed! Like being told that we’re gonna be raising twin koala bears as a single mother.This outlandish setup is not what we were promised! This is most definitely not what we signed up for. “But that’s just the way it is,” our new commanders say to us with their sh*t-eating grins. (Or rather, their sh*t-producing grins. Because it’s us who has to eat the sh*t in order to preserve our employment.) And that’s if they notice us at all. Their actions suggest that they don’t really give a sh*t about us. They don’t care about our overall well-being or personal aspirations. These are the ones who have no knowledge of what makes us unique. The only knowledge they have of us is that they can comfortably label us an “addict.” An addict, just like the rest of our colleagues and classmates. Addicted to achievement. Addicted to the praise. Addicted to being impressive to our friends, family, and that stranger at the cocktail party. They know we don’t want to show up to our full slate of weddings this summer without a job that boasts to our friends that we have a promising career. They know that would absolutely crush our identity as an “always-achieving hard worker.” They know that leaving a job or (gasp!) getting fired would induce unbearable shame. Our kind, the always-achieving perfectionists, are simply unable to make such a grave mistake. Like a drug dealer who gives you the first baggie free, these guys got us hooked. They gave us the offer letter well before the start date. They gave us plenty of time to go tell ALL of our family and friends about the “incredibly-impressive job” that we just landed. No matter that we would be starting the job until months in the future. A job that, turns out, we knew nothing about. A job that, turns out, I knew nothing about. So, here I am, treating human beings with chemicals. My role as “manager” is to ensure that I maximize the productivity of the resources below me. I was told on my first day in this role that “You are responsible for their work product. So do whatever you need to do to make it adequate. And, by the way, these new resources get a 1-month ramp period.” Reading between the lines, I was able to decipher the message without Sherlock Holmes level detective skills: “I am responsible for their work product. [Unspoken Interpretation: I am not responsible for their mental health or physical health, except to the extent that it interferes with their work product. If we must give them a sick day to avoid a lawsuit, then ensure they work from home. If they are unable to work while at home, then make it clear that they are expected to be fully caught up on their work within 2 days of returning to their desk (from their most-certainly false sickness). It doesn’t matter if this progressively-piling-up stack of work will bury them in fear while they’re meant to be resting & recovering. We don’t have the resources to cover for them. Well, we do, but adding more cost centers would mean lower profits for the business’s owners. So, hiring more hardly-human resources is something we’re just not going to do. If, for any reason, they don’t meet their expected output, then you will be replaced with a new manager that we’ve been side-eyeing.] So do whatever you need to do to make it adequate. [Unspoken Interpretation: Manipulate their addiction. Give them praise in extremely small doses at very unpredictable measures. Ensure that when you do give them praise, it’s in the form of a 2-word, no capitalization email. Examples include, “good work” or “keep pushing”. We don’t want them to think that they have, in any way, won our approval. If they begin to see through the praise that you are so meticulously dispensing, then feel free to drop a bomb on them in their performance review. Start by showering them in praise to get their lil anticipatory-dopamine-centers firing. Get their attention. Get their heart racing. Then, inform them that you’re considering hiring a replacement if they don’t “pick it up” and meet your (vague) expectations. We want to find consistent, subtle ways to remind them of our at-will employment agreement. Inject in them the fear of “losing everything”. They will be too afraid to realize that they never needed us in the first place. They will be too blind to see that we need them, collectively, far more than they need us, individually. After all, those of us running the business in these management positions stopped doing the actually-productive work of the Labor Pool long ago. All of our time is now spent treating the pool of drooling drones. But we are incapable of doing what they do. Our skills are tailored to 1) manipulating the hardly-human resources to do what we tell them to and 2) adding & removing these resources from the pool. Thus, we become entirely useless if the pool itself ceases to exist. So, let me remind you, Mr. Manager, that your tenure at this company is only secured with an at-will employment agreement. In fact, we have already begun interviewing for your replacement if you don’t begin to pick it up. So, I would get to manipulating those resources of yours.] And, by the way, these new resources get a 1-month ramp period. [Unspoken Interpretation: Our Excel spreadsheet indicates that these new resources need to be fully productive within 1-month of their start date in order for us to hit our completely unrealistic Q2 sales target. This is the plan that was approved by the board. Us business owners needed to put a plan in front of them that would demonstrate a pathway to 40% QoQ growth. Like all things discussed in that meeting, it was pulled out of thin air. But 40% QoQ growth sounds better than the far-more-realistic flat quarter. As much as I hate to admit, us executives also have an at-will employment agreement. The board can fire us in any moment. I don’t think they will, since the board is comprised entirely of my friends from my social club, but you can never be too sure. Especially because I know they’re not my “real friends” at the end of the day. They’re only in this relationship for the same reason that I am, they think they can make some money from it. So, if they see an opportunity to make more money by firing me, then I wouldn’t be surprised if they took it. After all, I would do the same thing if I were in their position. Well, I guess I am. I’m on the board of their company in an ultra-strategic quid-pro-quo transaction. It’s like we’re two sharpshooters with our guns drawn in a Mexican standoff. My “buddy” fires me. Well, he’s gonna get blapped too. So, there’s no real accountability at the board level. In the same way that I have no “real friends” despite all this wealth that I’ve accumulated. (Impossible to know who actually likes me because I’m so expressive about how I’m worth so much money. Sure, I could be coy about my wealth. But, I prefer it this way, since I don’t want to know the real answer about whether people actually like me for my personality. So, I guess you could say that I have a deep Financial Insecurity.) So anyways, we just approve these P&L “stretch goals” each quarter in the meeting. Let me assure you, they mean nothing. Except our managers and might-as-well-be-factory-line-employees take our word as gospel: “Coming down from above! The written word! Look! It’s right there in the board deck! The Q2 sales projection! We must attain it! Hitting this metric will take us to the Promised Land! No matter that we don’t think it’s remotely possible to attain it without embellishing the capabilities of our still-developing product! We must rally the troops! We must sell our incomplete product to unsuspecting customers! This will lead us to the Promised Land! The Promised Land of winning our owners’ approval! We must satisfy our overlords! This is the only way to get our fix! We must do what it takes to feed our addiction to achievement!” So, I suggest you use your direct rejects’ reports’ crippling fear to get them ramped and productive in this 1-month period. If you don’t, we won’t hit our completely unrealistic Q2 sales target. And if we don’t achieve that, then we will be revisiting the spirit of your at-will employment agreement.]” So, as you can tell, I hate my job as well. When I was swindled into signed up for this management position, I thought I’d get to have a positive impact on the next generation of world-changing workers. I thought I’d get to cultivate their creativity. I thought I’d get to unlock the power inherent in their diversity. I thought I’d be enabling a group of people who were the best & brightest coming from the world’s top universities. And I could have been. These human resources humans possessed all those raw ingredients. But, it became my task to treat it out of them. I was handed that most-destructive halogen. I got afforded the “innovative, strategic opportunity” to dump chlorine on their heads. Creativity… killed. Individuality… killed. Free-thinking-approach-that-pushed-the-limits-of-the-outdated-rulebook…treated with chemo. This was the worst of it. Treating new ideas that “could maybe, possibly, potentially rock the boat” like they were a Stage 4 brain tumor. Those who proposed new ideas were exiled like they’d just pissed in the pool. Because clearly the chlorine treatment wasn’t working on them. They were immune to the chemicals intended to turn them into conformists. So, we had to get rid of them. And that was the worst of it. That was the day that I learned that “creativity”, “autonomy”, and “go-getters” were only words that were used in the job description. But, the truth is, I’m not going to complain about this company or the broader system. I can’t! I have a family and a wife with extremely high expectations. I’m still not sure if she even likes me. However, I’m pretty certain that she doesn’t love me. After all, we met when I’d already made a sh*tload of money. And I wasn’t shy about it either. Rolex on my wrist. I brought her back to my penthouse, 2-bedroom New York City apartment. I know I tell all my “friends” that “I want someone who loves me for me.” But, I don’t really mean it. I mean, I don’t really trust that somebody would. I’m afraid to know the answer to whether people actually like me for my personality. I guess you could say that I also have a deep Financial Insecurity. So, I can’t criticize the business owners, even though it makes me sick to be a part of their system. I can’t risk losing this job, because if I do, then I’m almost certain that my wife will leave me. And I’m almost certain that I’d die if she did. Left alone. No job. No family. The worst part would be that I’d no longer have my pristine reputation. The thing that I’ve been carefully crafting ever since I first started pursuing that prestigious Ivy League degree. I don’t know who I am without my pristine reputation. To say nothing of leaving behind a legacy. What would I do? Who would I be? I don’t know. I don’t like to think about it. This whole group of questions makes me sick to my stomach. And we’re not allowed to take sick days. And I’m not about to risk my at-will employment. Reducing human beings to their cost versus productive output isn’t how I would do it if I were running the business. I’d like to think I’d treat people as humans, rather than resources. But, then again, here I am. Opting in to this system. Willingly abiding by the policies set by our Hardly-Human Resources Department. Woah… am I a part of the Labor Pool too? Did the chlorine treatment work on me?” I should clarify, I woke up feeling pretty sick today. But, after spending all this time writing, I’m feeling much better already. My muscles aren’t so achy. My nose isn’t so stuffy. Although, I wouldn’t say my throat is fully healed. Still a lil sore. I probably need one more day of recovery before I can hop back on the rink to start playing Tonsil Hockey. But, that’s all good because I know I’m not a Body (by Loud Luxury) anyway. This soreness might be because I’ve been talking too much. So, I’m gonna wrap this up. After all, there’s a huge sodium chloride pool out front. And someone’s gotta sign up to go swimming in this one. I’m hoping NaCl will wash away any chlorine sickness residue.