It’s
a shame, isn’t it, when you return home from work so angry, tired
and disillusioned that you can’t even find the energy to cook a
delicious meal, let alone engage in any of the hobby based activities
that make your life worth living? It is, it’s a shame. Yet that is
the case for many, many people because their employment is
increasingly joyless, two faced and bureaucratic. Not mine or yours,
obviously. I’m sure we’re much more sensible than to allow
ourselves to be caught in a perpetual nightmare of staples, poorly
designed and implemented software, and morons. It starts out well
enough. A small, close knit company that truly cares for its staff –
for you – and values the turning of each and every cog, in some
cases even rewarding people for their actions. Let’s call the
company Pedro* and talk of him as if he were folk.
Pedro was a kindly, slight man, full of energy and spunk. The metaphorical kind of spunk you understand, not literally full of actual spunk. That would be disgusting, and most likely detrimental to ones health. He surrounded himself with intelligent, hardworking, friendly people. People he became close to and valued on their individual merits, rather than seeing them as one mass of writhing, helpless automatons. Pedro liked his food. He would cook stunning meals of exotic fayre, meals that he would share with his friends before they all skipped merrily around the local meadow, hand in hand, discussing the benefits of an open market and the risks involved in hasty expansion. It was basically pretty awesome. Of course, Pedro became complacent and greedy. Before too long he started eating all the food himself, and with alarming regularity the consumables of choice became fatty and unhealthy. He lost sight of what made a good meal and could only see the eating.
With
time Pedro piled on the pounds. People would look at their feet on
the bus, in the hope the fat bastard didn’t sit by them, because he
stank of grease, sweat and, on several occasions, his own excrement.
He started to ignore his friends, contacting them only by email, then
text, then hardly at all. People would talk about the old Pedro,
‘whatever happened to Pedro?’ they’d ask, and Pedro would say
‘I’m here, it’s me’ and the people would reply, ‘well that
can’t be, because Pedro wasn’t a massive shit, interested only in
himself and his continued growth. Pedro would talk to us as equals.
He would ask for advice, and on receiving it he would take it on
board and act on it, because he knew that his friends knew him better
than anyone’. Pedro would look at them, confused and angry and
plead for recognition ‘yes, that’s me. It’s me. I am Pedro’.
But the people would simply laugh, ‘no. Because Pedro was a dude,
and you’re a shit. A massive shit’.
In
the end the only people Pedro wanted around were the ones who
pretended he was still alright, the ones who eagerly agreed and
didn’t question him. He would continue to trade on the memory of
what he was, churning out lower quality goods in nice looking boxes.
By this point he was so obese he was pretty much unstoppable.
Unmoveable at least. And people who didn’t know him, people who
only knew what he had been, carried on dealing with him, from a
distance, under the mistaken impression that fat, selfish, deceitful,
robotic, hierarchical, power hungry, bastard Pedro was still small,
kind, personal, polite, relatively honest, even, nice Pedro. Didn’t
bother Pedro though really, because fortunately for Pedro the world
seems quite happy to accept what it is told, carry on whilst maybe
mumbling something under its breath about how it’s going to look
for a new friend, and just let Pedro get on with it. After all, he
must be doing something right to have got where he is.
Sadly,
everyone else knew that what he had done was sell out all of the
important values he had once stood for, standing instead on the
rickety trestle table of false promises, over expansion and back
stabbery. Thing is, it doesn’t matter what you’re standing on,
just so long as you look taller
than everyone else, everyone else will assume you are. They’ll
quite happily ignore the corpses under the table, the ones stopping
it from buckling under Pedro’s humongous weight, the ones that are
really doing all the work, and congratulate Pedro for succeeding.
What
I guess I’m saying is that fat people are dreadful to work for. No,
that’s not it. Um. Tables, trestle or otherwise, are no foundation
for an honest success? No, not that either. Oh yes. Rapidly expanding
companies tend to lose sight of what made them expand so rapidly in
the first place, what made them different from all the other fat
pricks standing on folding furniture, until the people who helped
them get where they are through quality, effort and interest, fuck
off, leaving just the financially driven fast boys who couldn’t
give a toss whether anything works properly or not. Yeah, that’s
it. So, Pedro, shape up and stop being an arse, because although you
might be popular with the idiots who swallow the bullshit and believe
the advertising – at least for a while – those who really know
what’s going on will hate you for ever and ever and ever.
And
in some cases may even start small fires.
* any
similarities to actual people called Pedro, or to actual companies is
entirely coincidental. Or that’s how the world works, but probably
coincidental
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