Work Venting

I just have to vent here for a minute.  This is so far off my normal base, but I have to – I just have to.

I was in a meeting yesterday afternoon, and was made to feel very small and ineffective.  Our boss is under a lot of pressure, and I guess it got to the point where he needed to share that pressure with us in the form of letting us know how little we’re doing to contribute to the improvement of this company.  (I have mentioned before that our company is CLOSING, and moving to Mexico by the end of this year)  It was purely a snapshot, knee-jerk reaction without any appreciation whatsoever for what has really gone on in our area over the past month and a half.  I won’t go into details about it, but it was humiliating.  I hate being treated that way.  So, I’ve been thinking about it a lot ever since.

I see the guys above me, and how they stress and worry and blame their days away.  These guys have been working some 10 – 20 years longer than me, and have managed to achieve titles such as “Director of Operations”, and “Vice President/General Manager” of a company that will cease to exist in a matter of months.  All the stress and politics, and for what?  They’ve managed themselves into another job hunting expedition.  God knows, I don’t want to do that!  I don’t want to get to that point in my life, and look back and wonder what the heck I’ve been doing for the last 30 – 40 years.  Has my life been worth all of that effort?

Working for a company is a great source of income and insurance.  Maybe you can climb the corporate ladder enough to get a nice title and make a whole lot of money.  Would you be happy then?  Me?  I don’t want to do it anymore.  I don’t enjoy it.  I really don’t enjoy it anymore.  I’ll play the game until I’m asked to leave, then probably do it again because I’m too pathetic to get my sorry butt motivated to follow at least one of my paltry dreams.  Ick!  The Death of Ivan Ilych comes to mind.

Here’s an illustrative story by Ellen Goodman – “The Company Man”:

He worked himself to death, finally and precisely, at 3:00 A.M. Sunday morning.The obituary didn’t say that, of course. It said that he died of a coronary thrombosis–I think that was it–but everyone among his friends and acquaintances knew it instantly. He was a perfect Type A, a workaholic, a classic, they said to each other and shook their heads–and thought for five or ten minutes about the way they lived.

This man who worked himself to death finally and precisely at 3:00 A.M. Sunday morning–on his day off–was fifty-one years old and a vice-president. He was, however, one of six vice-presidents, and one of three who might conceivably–if the president died or retired soon enough–have moved to the top spot. Phil knew that.

He worked six days a week, five of them until eight or nine at night, during a time when his own company had begun the four-day week for everyone but the executives. He worked like the Important People. He had no outside “extracurricular interests,” unless, of course, you think about a monthly golf game that way. To Phil, it was work. He always ate egg salad sandwiches at his desk. He was, of course, overweight, by 20 or 25 pounds. He thought it was okay, though, because he didn’t smoke.

On Saturdays, Phil wore a sports jacket to the office instead of a suit, because it was the weekend.

He had a lot of people working for him, maybe sixty, and most of them liked him most of the time. Three of them will be seriously considered for his job. The obituary didn’t mention that.

But it did list his “survivors” quite accurately. He is survived by his wife, Helen, forty-eight years old, a good woman of no particular marketable skills, who worked in an office before marrying and mothering. She had, according to her daughter, given up trying to compete with his work years ago, when the children were small. A company friend said, “I know how much you will miss him.” And she answered, “I already have.”

“Missing him all these years,” she must have given up part of herself which had cared too much for the man. She would be “well taken care of.”

His “dearly beloved” eldest of the “dearly beloved” children is a hard-working executive in a manufacturing firm down South. In the day and a half before the funeral, he went around the neighborhood researching his father, asking the neighbors what he was like. They were embarrassed.

His second child is a girl, who is twenty-four and newly married. She lives near her mother and they are close, but whenever she was alone with her father, in a car driving somewhere, they had nothing to say to each other.

The youngest is twenty, a boy, a high-school graduate who has spent the last couple of years, like a lot of his friends, doing enough odd jobs to stay in grass and food. He was the one who tried to grab at his father, and tried to mean enough to him to keep the man at home. He was his father’s favorite. Over the last two years, Phil stayed up nights worrying about the boy.

The boy once said, “My father and I only board here.”

At the funeral, the sixty-year-old company president told the forty-eight-year-old widow that the fifty-one-year-old deceased had meant much to the company and would be missed and would be hard to replace. The widow didn’t look him in the eye. She was afraid he would read her bitterness and, after all, she would need him to straighten out the finances–the stock options and all that.

Phil was overweight and nervous and worked too hard. If he wasn’t at the office he was worried about it. Phil was a Type A, heart-attack natural. You could have picked him out in a minute from a lineup.

So when he finally worked himself to death, at precisely 3:00 A.M. Sunday morning, no one was really surprised.

By 5:00 P.M. the afternoon of the funeral, the company president had begun, discreetly of course, with care and taste, to make inquiries about his replacement. One of three men. He asked around: “Who’s been working the hardest?”