Today's blog is cancelled due to a blinding migraine.
But before I go, I just need to ask this: why do companies treat their workers so fucking badly? I know it's a big clich to whine about the plight of the American employee (not that I am one anymore), but in what part of business school do they teach that being an asshole makes you more money? Is there some graph with a parabolic curve that shows how mean-spirited you can be per dollar?
I ask this because one of my friends (who shall remain Google search-less, but I'll call him Jeremy) recently survived a merger, wherein his company was bought by a larger company, and he was one of the few that kept his job. Now, anyone who has been through mergers like this can tell you that being the "bought company" almost always spells doom, even if not right away. Jeremy clung on and accepted a new position at the newly-minted supercompany, but only if he agreed to lose all his seniority and thus his vacation days.
Now, I have to ask how big a fucking deal is it for him to have a few days off? In what sense is the company financially impacted when Jeremy takes a couple of god damn days to drive to Palm Springs and get a mud massage? I'd say it was beyond negligible, perhaps even an infinitesimal, cosmologically small fraction of money lost to the company – perhaps something around 45 cents when all is said and done.
Yet because of their broke-dick attitude on this issue, Jeremy is miserable and will no doubt quit 6 months earlier than he would have. The company will be robbed of at least a half year of his brilliance, his professionalism and his ability to bring in clients. And that, my friends, is not negligible.
I'll write more about the crazy dot-com world of 1995-2000 someday (you know, as soon as everyone else stops), but the changeover from "young, fresh-faced entrepreneurs" to "paranoid, fuck-face pricks" was really something to behold in dot-com management. I've always said that the volume of unbridled exuberance was directly inversely correlated to the chasm of mean-spirited evil as soon as the money began to run out. I should have known the day they stopped supplying half-and-half in the fridge; let that be fair warning to all of you.
Posted by at September 19, 2002 8:42 PM