corporate America: April 2008 Archives

Wanna know what’s wrong with us, collectively, as a nation of workers? Let me give you a quick story of the ‘elevator’ incident recently.

 

I work in the home office of a large financial firm. The ‘campus’ has 4 towers. In each tower, there are employee elevators and service elevators. It’s pretty obvious which ones are which. In my tower specifically, there are 4 employee elevators and 1 service elevator.

 

Recently, the building management had to put signs up next to the door of the service elevator (on each floor, no less), explaining the purpose of the elevator, and reminding employees that they are supposed to use the regular elevators. Mind you, they aren’t that far away from each other. But the general laziness of people caused them to save themselves the extra 15-20 feet of walking by using the service elevator, thus causing the people that actually needed it to be constantly delayed.

 

So the signs went up. And the people, seeing these signs, got pissed off! This is a true quote, heard with my own little ears: “I can’t believe they put that up there. Those service guys are a**holes”. Obviously, it was the fault of the service personnel wanting to get their jobs done, not our laziness.

 

I will say that I used that elevator occasionally. Usually, at the end of the day when there was a group going down, or I knew the regular elevators were out that day. It’s even closer to my office, so I would be saving some time (at least in my mind). But for the most part, I didn’t use it, for that very reason. I respect and appreciate the jobs of the service people, and didn’t want my lack of motivation or laziness to get in the way of them doing their jobs. But most people took it as an insult, as though they were being inconvenienced in some way.

 

How often do we do that? We, as a people, are self-centered to the core. If it helps me, then it’s important. If it doesn’t, who cares. It’s that mentality that keeps us where we are. Doesn’t matter what generation you’re in. We all take for granted the amount of services, devices, or other items that allow us to be self-centered and, dare I say it, juvenile. Toddlers whine and complain when they don’t get what they want. And we do it, too. Fast food isn’t fast enough. Broadband isn’t fast enough. The list goes on.

Hillary won Pennsylvania tonight. Which, from what the people who know these things have said, make the race viable again.

Hooray. More time spent on things I don't care about.

I'll just come out and say it. I don't care about the election. I don't care about the candidates. And, to be honest, I don't care about the system anymore. It's not a red vs. blue thing. It's not a liberal vs. conservative thing. I've come to this realization lately. The system is broken beyond repair. So whomever wins, whether it's Hillary, Obama, McCain, or Burt Reynolds, is just perpetuating the same BS that we've been force-fed since...well...as long as I can remember.

For those of you who care to expand your historical knowledge, I recommend the book Everything You Know Is Wrong, edited by Russ Kick. It's quite the eye opener. Now granted, I've always loved to read and learn about the other side of things. History, sports, life in general. Because as we all know, history is written by the winners. But I'd like to know what the losers had to say.

We're all playing with a stacked deck. The machine, as Abby Hoffman so eloquently put it, moves on regardless of who's in charge. Parties no longer matter. Ideals no longer matter. Too much is at stake, too many people have a vested interest in things staying as-is. Do you know that many large corporations pay little or no taxes? That the "activist" shareholders of Washington Mutual had to fight to have the recent sub-prime write downs factored into the executive bonuses? Or that Merrill Lynch paid out more in bonuses ($37 billion) than they did in profits last year, even when they had to adjust down billions upon billions of bad debt? What's wrong with this picture? And why aren't people upset?

More people care about abortion than they do about healthcare. About immigration than government spending. About the price of fuel than the fractured education system.

I know I sound bitter and angry about the whole thing. You'd be right. But the thing that I'm most upset about? That I'm in the minority.