I want to concentrate on reading this week, I have the time to do that now that I am retired, and reading has always been one of my main pleasures in life… It is a luxury!…I got a whole bunch of new books from the library, I like the one on the Normandy Invasion, it is a whole book about the last 24 hours before the invasion of how the Allies went about establishing the beachhead and all the planning and prep work that went into it being successful….The Normandy invasion changed the course of history and enabled America and it’s allies to win WWII….

The other book is about Prohibition, the greatest recorded failure to legislate morality in American history…The plain fact is that people will do what they want to do, no matter how many health Nazis try to force them to do what THEY want, it is just human nature….I am also re- reading “Blackout” by Connie Willis, I really enjoy re-reading books that are good, because I get so excited the first time through i miss a lot of the subtleties of the plot and the characters….

OMG! Being retired, every day is much the same as the day before and the day after, I have to make a conscious effort to look at a calendar to keep track of the actual dates these days… And reading all day today, it’s all about the ingrained habitual routine of sitting in that damn easy chair in the West Wing of my 1 bedroom apartment, just like I used to do when I was a fully credentialed member of work world…..

I have my feet up, my tv on for company, sometimes my cat sits on my lap and naps while I watch tv, but usually i am too jumpy for him, I get up and down too much for his liking, he likes to flop for long periods of time….I am starting to feel the strain of too many bills and not enough money, I just need to come up with some money making ideas… Any kind of outside job is out of the question, unless I can work from home, I will NEVER go back into work world…I know that some people love their jobs, but for me work world was always a nightmare of obligation which I dutifully participated in for 45 years……

Actually at my advanced age I couldn’t do it anymore anyway, the economy is still messed up, all sorts of young bright ambitious people are looking for work and I have taken my last orders from snobby, incompetent, ignorant self serving “bosses,” a class of people that if they were eliminated from society today in one fell swoop I don’t think anybody would notice….or care…

My last job before I retired was a corporate job…Before that white collar, suit and tie reincarnation of myself I was a life long blue collar worker, like 20 years as a truck driver, but I hurt my back and was forced to re-invent myself out of economic necessity…

I actually felt almost like a sort of spy, not anything glamorous or exciting like industrial espionage or anything like that, just a different view of the world from my blue collar perspective when I worked in the corporation, so I will share some of my observations with you…

 

The American corporate model is a sham and a travesty of productivity, at least from my experience….I worked for well over a decade at a large residential apartment complex as an administrative assistant/ customer service representative….It seemed that the lowest common denominator of intelligence was rewarded the most…All the innovative, creative ideas were dismissed, and only the “yes men” advanced in the corporation…

The bosses I had the last few years at my corporate desk job sucked all the joy, all the fun out of going to work, removed any and all incentives to try to improve the work place or the quality and ethical representation of the company itself to prospective apartment renters…. They would write up all of us, the regular “low level” employees for false “violations” that served their purpose, and fire them off to the sacrosanct almighty Corporate Headquarters, lies and misrepresentations and distorted truths that served their purpose of keeping us in line…

These pitifully ignorant, selfish, piggish bosses didn’t like us mere employees to socialize, and we were even forbidden to talk to each other! For a place that I spent 50 hours a week, being there and going there, for almost 12 years and being paid as low a wage as possible, (the most I ever made was like ~$18/hour,) in the end it just wasn’t worth the effort….It was a living hell, and I dreaded going to work every morning, but I still never missed a single day of work…….

In fact, this fascist attitude from management only reinforced my anti-social personality….The almighty, antagonistic bosses trying to crack down on us helpless, defenseless workers would make me want to do LESS work because of their constant meddling, harassment and outright lies, and to get even I mostly coasted through the last 2 years there doing as little as humanly possible, skipping assignments whenever I could and doing absolutely nothing as much as possible in retaliation for their heavy handed overbearing attitude….

I would spend hours tracking down and printing out my work benefits, work hours, vacation time etc…I was clever, because they would always seeing me doing something on my computer, but stupid bosses incite stupid reactions, and they never had a clue, because they were essentially vapid, insecure and virtually incompetent, useless individuals, the kind I would never even talk to on the street or in a social setting….

Let me put in one disclimer here…The old boss there, when I first started, was an exceptional boss, intelligent, friendly, engaging and caring, and he made work fun as well as productive, he was a proponent of the “collegial system” of management and was genuinely engaged and receptive to our ideas and input on how to best improve the company, and he was rightfully and justly promoted up the corporate ladder…

He attracted, fostered, promoted and rewarded the best and the brightest, and we all cheerfully worked extra hard for him, because we felt like we had a real stake in the company’s success…But once his replacement, the fat ass new boss was put in charge, everything went downhill…

This new boss believed in the “Hierarchical System” of management, with him on top and everybody else way below him…He was nothing but a stupid bully who surrounded himself with money hungry direct subordinates who did all the real work, he was clueless about almost everything!

He only kept his position at all because in San Francisco the demand for housing is always greater than the supply, so he made money (despite his near total ignorance) for the corporation, so the corporation kept him on year after year….After all, profits are always the bottom line in corporate America….

However this fat ass bully eventually drove all the good people out, slowly but surely, managers and key players who were productive bosses but too friendly with the workers, too genuinely concerned with and involved in the community….The level of customer service invariably plummeted under this ridiculous restrictive pattern of ignorant policy as designated from the top down…

The decent workers and good bosses were driven out by the new boss and his petty, vindictive management style and as they left, he replaced them, one by one and surrounded himself with a constant supply of revolving door sycophants, toadies and kiss asses of even lower intelligence than himself, if that were possible….In fact, these replacement people’s main asset to the new corporate hierarchy was that they WERE professional ass kissers, toadies and yes men….

I finally had enough of the BS and hypocrisy and outright lies when I was targeted and started receiving multitudes of so called false, erroneous“disciplinary write ups” which were a patent effort to force me to quit…I was being called into the general manager’s office to listen to these phony misdeeds more than a kid getting called into the principal’s office, with my moronic immediate supervisor lady boss smirking away the whole time….

Because of a fortuitous set of circumstances, I was able to opt for legal retirement when these pitifully incompetent local bosses finally “suspended” me, thinking they had “won”….But as it turned out, I was the real winner because I got out from under and escaped an intolerable situation, so it all worked out in the end…The irony was, I WAS guilty of under production, in reaction to their “iron fist” policies, but they never noticed that and instead fabricated lies and misdeeds out of thin air…

But through my expertise at understanding and working within the system, I ended up with a fair and equitable settlement from the corporation itself, by talking to THEIR bosses, going over my immediate supervisors heads, and the top level corporate bosses all agreed that the shoddy way I was being treated was NOT part of the professional corporate work ethic they wished to foster…..

I ended up retiring with a fair and decent severance pay package , and I will state for the record that the top corporate levels of this particular company did right by me, no matter how corrupt and incompetent my local office moronic “big boss” and his ass kissing cronies were…

I still harbor the secret hope they have done something illegal, “cooked the books” as it were, but I have no direct proof whatsoever this ever happened, although they certainly treated themselves to fat salaries and extra perks, like free penthouse apartments…But since I was certainly NOT “in with the in crowd” and therefore had no access to or information about what ever they did behind closed doors, this is only a personal fantasy of mine right now…Still, on a purely visceral level, I would LOVE to see them busted and doing the “perp walk” on tv someday!….

Well revenge is a dish best served cold, as they say…….It has been over 3 years now since I left the living hell that job had devolved into, and when people ask me how is it not working anymore, I always respond “I can’t believe I ever did it at all” …Work world was a complete and total waste of time for me, most specifically my last corporate job, precious time that I will never get back….. I wonder if my experience is common or an aberration, I would like to think that other companies and corporations are more upright and professional and competent than my last job, God help America if this is really “all that there is!” I am an optimist at heart, so I hope that this is not the case…If this blog helps even one person understand the futility and dead end of rewarding incompetence in the long run, I will die happy….

Well, for better or worse, I am off the merry go round of work world…. I NEVER have to deal with that office BS again, the corporate power struggles, the beady eyed back stabbing people…The ones that try to look good by making you look bad, even some of my co workers….. Mostly what irritated and disgusted me the most was the mind set that the executive level bosses have about being productive and their medieval habitual thought process of grinding everybody under their heels as they try to climb that slippery ladder to success in the corporate world, at the expense of decent, hard working people…..

And the total final piece of irony, which they will never ever grasp, is just like the song says, “In the end, it really doesn’t matter….”