Office Sherpas

Office Sherpas

One of my friends was on the phone this morning, complaining about her job. She finishes her work fast, despite the fact that she has the most to do, so they doubled her workload. There won't be a raise and the bonuses/promotions will still be nonexistent. I told her that before she quit in indignant rage, to consider the possibility that many corporations employ a similar philosophy. She might just jump out of the frying pan and into the fire. Like I did way back when.

Which led to retrospective job angst. Just for a moment though, until I could remind myself that those days were behind me.

Back in 1997 I started working for a company, we'll call it the Bational Nasketball Association. They hired me as one of the low-paid sherpas who do the grunt work at the bottom of the company ladder. For two years I labored in their Public Relations department, working over 70 hours a week for some of the rudest people on the planet. The kind that think anyone beneath them isn't an actual person, but some kind of wild animal to keep around the farm because it eats rodents. While I and others worked and worked, smarter people left and their responsibilities were divvied up between the remaining employees. Because why pay new people to come and work for the company, when you can just dump their work on the people left.

In the spring of 1999, two higher positions opened up in my department. One of them was doing what I had already been doing for the department, and doing well according to my evaluations. They didn't even tell me about the open positions. They hired two recent college grads with NO WORK EXPERIENCE and I trained them. To do a job with a better title and more pay. Does the Bational Nasketball Association have balls of pure fucking steel or what? Or should I say, nalls of steel. I understood one of their hires, his father was THE sports editor for a major New York newspaper. Nepotism is a fact of life in Corporate America. But the other person hired didn't know a single thing about basketball and she would be responsible for web content. So... no work experience, no college degree from a top college and no basketball knowledge, but still hired over someone who had been helping create content for um, BNA.com for two years. And lest you think the degree did it, I have one as well. Except I graduated in 1997, not 1999.

I was steaming, but now it became some sort of mission. A smarter person would have fled the company too fast to let the door hit her ass on the way out. I however, doubled my efforts to get a promotion. But when the next round of positions opened, it was obvious they weren't even considering me. One of the managers pulled me aside and said it was the curse of the competent, she went through it herself until she left her old company. I had always known it but hearing it out loud opened the floodgates and the bitterness set in. A month later, I sat through one of their fake "hiring from within" interviews and went through the motions, knowing there was as much a point to it as there was to arranging my pens by height order.

They let the newest manager clue me in that "my attitude in the last month" was the reason I wasn't being considered for the promotion. Hmm... and what was the reason for all the other times, in the two years that my attitude was perfect? But yes, the guy telling me all this used to leave his door open during work hours and exclaim in great detail how great sucking dick was. So his attitude was a lot better than mine. The head of another department noticed my misery and picked me off the way a lion indentifies the limping zebra in a herd. I took the promotion into his department, but not until the head of my own took me out "to discuss my work needs" and I managed to put an entire bottle of wine on her tab.

Moving into the new department was like moving from a sinking ship, into the water. You tread water and hope, until you realize you're going to drown with imploding lungs. But that's a story for another day.