Staples, Poorly Designed Software and Morons

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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