Career Day

Apparently, I’ve been with the same company for nearly a decade, which I guess is just barely enough time to say that I know a thing or two about it. This doesn’t guarantee, of course, that I know my job well enough, probably why I receive the same whipping from my boss on a weekly basis. (Obviously, this week isn’t looking any rosier)

Interestingly enough, I was writing down the company history for a brochure I’m putting out when it dawned on me that in over 3 decades that the company has existed, there have been 3 “eras” that it has gone through, 3 generations with different sets of backgrounds that have held the reins of how the company sells itself.

Okay, fair warning, this is a really boring post where I talk about work and stuff that you don’t really give a crap about. There, now that that’s out of the way…

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Back in the day, when I was literally just a microscopic sperm cell in my dad’s nether areas, the company was founded by one man, with a strong sense of destiny. He was a metallurgist, with big dreams of turning dirt to gold, (or steel, or ferronickel, or bronze, or silver, or whatever he could sell, really) waiting for his chance to exploit his stellar education and bourgeoisie background to become a famous and highly regarded industrialist. So he put his name on the wall, and took on all takers. It didn’t matter what they asked him to do, as long as they paid him, it was going to be done.

He was successful at first, he peddled his name around and found friends and acquaintances who gave him projects here and there. One sweetheart deal after another, his fame and riches grew, banking on the Old Boy’s Club, of which he was a card-carrying member, of course. He soon found himself a millionaire, with a staff of professionals at his beck and call and pursuing his dream of even more fame and riches.

Soon though, a revolution was brewing, and when it came, he found his Old Boy’s Club in shambles. His friends, which were his best clients, had hied off elsewhere, taking their money and power with them. Now, the work came in trickles, and this was barely enough to pay the staff. One by one they left him, until he had but a handful of his most loyal employees with him. When the money wasn’t enough to pay them, he gave them promises of a better future with the company, giving them their very own stake in his name.

From out of this mess, one of his chemists took it upon herself to come up with a solution. She called on her colleagues, fellow chemists working in different companies and asked how her company could find work for them. They told her of a new field that was new to the industry but was about to get big, and soon, the company shifted from alchemy to environmental testing. She came to her boss with this new direction, and in a short time, work was flowing back into the company again. So began her era at the helm.

For the next two decades, the company grew slowly but surely. The fraternity of chemists had sustained it with small but continuous work, each looking out for one another, and as long as each delivered their own end of the bargain, an age of progress and stability came forth. She made sure every client got everything they asked for and more, that the lab was humming as a well oiled machine would, and everybody was happy.

She had climbed the corporate ladder to oversee the whole company, with the old boss content to play golf with his buddies, see his name still in bold letters across the façade of the building, and collect his dividends. Of course every once in a while he’d show up and make sure everything was going smoothly, but for the most part, she ran the show and ran it well. That is until they realized that progress was ironically about to tear them to pieces.

You see, as the company grew, more and more people took notice of how successful it was. Thus, more and more people thought it would be a wonderful idea to do the same thing! Soon, the company’s piece of the pie got smaller and smaller, nearing disastrous proportions as the shrinking pie would eventually fail to satiate the company’s growing appetite. Prices were dropping to keep up with the competition, but no new business was coming in. The new boss needed help, and they needed it fast.

Several attempts to get another warm body to stem the tide fell in vain. They first looked to the guild of chemists to recruit somebody from the inside that would give them an advantage in securing sweetheart deals, but this didn’t work. Lab rats, by nature, were bereft of the natural instinct to feed off the work of others. Next, they tried to look for professional sales people to bring in a bigger piece of the pie, but these animals were too greedy, wanting more of the pie for themselves rather than sharing it with the others. So that didn’t work out either.

Then, as panic ensued, the boss-founder stepped in to get a handle on the whole situation. He knew what he was looking for, a species of sewer rat, with the lowest morals, easily trained to steal and cheat, possessed with a cunning ability to weasel his way out of the tightest spots through deceit and lies, yet dumb enough to live off crumbs. So he hired me.

It was chaotic at first, the lab rats detested this sleazy dark creature which did nothing but grow his balls (figuratively) and snooze the day away (literally). I was put under the charge of the new boss while mentoring under the old one. While the new boss didn’t want anything to do with me, the old boss was honing my inherent skills as a lowlife, instinctively feeling that this was the new direction that the company needed to take.

Eventually, I was tasked to get more clients. I didn’t for the life of me know how, but I tried anyway. Of course, I failed the few first hundred times, and basically collected crumbs for nothing. This was about to change to everyone’s surprise, though, even myself.

While in the past 2 decades, the company made sure it did the best it could on what it did, I on the other hand, realized how easier it was to do what the company didn’t. I subcontracted all the work that we didn’t do, and made it look as if we did it ourselves. For the same lazy reason that I did everything else I did, it was a heck of a lot easier this way. Because of the overhead that our company was burdened with in comparison to our smaller upstart competition, I couldn’t win any new projects based on price alone. To win I had to regale them with our technical superiority and unparalleled quality. Of course, I had no idea how to do that on my own given I wasn’t a lab rat nor even remotely familiar with what the company did exactly, so fat chance. I found the only jobs I could win were those that we didn’t do, primarily because that meant the competition didn’t do those as well. So all I had to do was look for someone who could do what was required, pass the work on to them, add a sizable margin of profit, and pass it off as if we did it ourselves. Simple, easy and best of all, it worked!

Is that evil? To some extent, perhaps, but it is a business and not a public service so all’s fair.

Well anyway, I did get the hang of the business, but not of what we actually did, and this started the new thrust of the company under this evil new direction. It wasn’t about the Old Boy’s network and sweetheart deals, nor about colleagues helping one another out, this is cutthroat competition at its most basic. I was exploiting the people that did all the work and selling them to the highest bidder. Quality of service and all that crap took a backseat to how to get the other guy’s money in the most efficient and cost-effective way possible. Threading the thin line between satisfying and disillusioning the customer is the real challenge, exceeding expectations is considered wasteful and an opportunity lost.

Maybe it was a mistake hiring someone to sell what he couldn’t create, one whose basic principle was to get the most out of what the other guy did. The lab rats sure detest me now, but the bosses take a look at their shiny new cars and that excessive expense account the company could now afford and seem to enjoy what I do. The company has grown five-fold since this change in direction, and already, the pressure is on to keep up the pace lest the others keep up.

Make no mistake, this is not a Jerry Maguire-esque epiphany. The evil I do is necessary to keep jobs and turn a profit. If it weren’t for what I do, the turtle-paced growth would surely have stalled, putting it all in a precarious state of life or death. Without hell, heaven is useless, and the absence of greedy bastards like me would see humankind still wandering in the desert, chasing after what the vultures left behind.

Do I like doing my job? No. But do I like having one that pays the bills? You probably know the answer to that.