Next in my series concerning people that I hate, I decided it would be good to blog about the idiots with whom I work. I noticed on the forums someone bellyaching about the office in which they work so I decided it was time to share my experiences in the matter.
As previously mentioned, I work in a factory and I manage people. Working in a factory puts me in a position to manage the best and brightest souls that our local slums and trailer parks can muster. If they've been to jail or are prone to eventually go there, they usually work in my factory. Those are my employees. Sure, I have the occassional goon that is clean but just dumb through heredity but for the most part I get to enjoy the company of crackheads, dopefiends, rednecks and the product of our great Alabama judicial and correctional system.
As much comedic material that the dopefiends and other trailer dwellers provide me through the day, the real winners are the mental heavyweights that make up our office staff. I'll never understand how 4 years of beer-bongs and panty-chasing on a college campus make these silver spoon-fed, pimple-faced brats qualified to run a company but nevertheless, there they sit - in the Air Conditioning - making decisions that affect the lives of tens of thousands of people and related to a product they have never laid eyes on much less understand. Most are children and benefactors of genepool-lottery winning parents who themselves inherited similar upbringings in suburbian aristocracy. The men are usually overly-ambitious future workaholics that struggle to prove themselves through their careers, are beginning to bald and one day will divorce over a secretarial love interest or have a premature heart attack from obesity, beer and self-induced stress.
The office women ususally come in different flavors. Some are home-wrecker ex-cheerleader trophy-wife secretaries that land positions through their abilities under the desk, against the copier or bent over the board-table rather than their skills at the desk, with a copier or sitting at the board-table. Others are frigid, bra-burning overzealous icequeen femonists constantly proving they can compete with the men in everything from intellectual prowess to leg hair. Both are the type of women who apply makeup while driving carelessly to work, threatening the lives of schoolbuses full of retarded children, church choirs and kids on fieldtrips; with any justice the gates of hell would open to consume them on the way to nail appointments but instead they too have a say in the futures of tens of thousands of laborers. Still others are bible-thumping recent grandmothers who are regretting their time spent in youth as home-wrecking secretaries and wishing they had thought sooner about retirement -- the kind of gullable people who forward emails containing every possible joke, chain letter, african bank scam or cheesy spiritual motivation that has been watered down for the simpler understanding of all of the above.
Sure, I know - it sounds cynical but I can't always help it. Being a manager I spend just as much time with these people as I do with the workers in the plant that they exploit and often it's my job to tell someone in the plant, already holding down two jobs to make ends meet, that their overtime is restricted or healthcare costs are going up because someone in the office gets a bonus for cutting operational costs or doesn't feel like waiting 6 mos on their new beach home in order to absorb such rising costs.
It amazes me that companies spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to put measures into place that save tens of thousands or less. When the office braniacs decided that providing coffee was too great a burden, I noticed the spoiled office staff wasted even more time gossiping amongst themselves about the tyranny of the matter. How much did the company loose in produtivity of high-paying jobs slacking off because of the decision or spend in man-hours to make the policy known? Meanwhile a father of 3 in my crew, clean for 8 mos and counting on a little overtime to help offset the cost of gas and summer cooling bills has to find another way to make ends meet. Does he spend that time harping about it at the watercooler? Hell no.
So, this blog posting I send out to the millionaire geniuses that run the plant -- glad to see that your high dollar college education killed any remaining common sense. Enjoy your sports car, vacation home and boat while the dumping on the little guy and leaving me to try to be a company man and put a positive spin on it.
John