Not a day goes by at my job that I don't wish I could scream the following:
I AM NOT A FUCKING SECRETARY.
I was not hired to answer phones. I was not hired to handle "customer service" or direct callers to different departments or assist callers with their problems. I was not hired to organize paperwork or master the intricacies of filing and record-keeping. I am manifestly not a people person or an organizational wizard, which should have been obvious when you hired me — FOR A JOB THAT IS NOT SUPPOSED TO REQUIRE THOSE SKILLS.
I do certain tasks very, very well. Those tasks involve very little interaction with anybody other than my immediate coworkers, and require little understanding of the corporate hierarchy, or the correct flow of paperwork, or of the endless arcane details of record-keeping. I was hired specifically to do a certain set of tasks. If you need someone to perform secretarial duties, I suggest you hire someone to be a secretary.
What's that? You said times are tight? You have to cut back, so you can't afford to hire a secretary? So "other employees" ought to just pick up the slack?
Fine. Then be prepared to accept substandard performance of secretarial duties. I was not trained in secretarial tasks and have no skill in performing them. Because believe it or not, "secretary" is actually a position that requires a certain skill set. The position of "secretary" developed because there was a specific need for individuals who could perform these tasks; it was found that people in certain job categories, while skilled in the specific area of their occupation, performed poorly at other essential duties. "Secretaries" were hired for this purpose. Because, believe it or not, employees are not identical, interchangeable parts.
I'm not sure where we developed the idea that employees, all employees, are supposed to be equally competent at a broad range of tasks, able to step in at a moment's notice and seamlessly replace missing colleagues. I suppose it developed from the notion that companies are supposed to be "lean and mean" in order to function in the highly fluid global economy. It sure is a great way to justify firing a bunch of people and driving the remaining employees like galley slaves, though. Because a worker is a worker, right? And anybody can answer phones, right?
Well, no. Oh, I can pick up a phone and announce my name and ask "how may I help you?" But it strikes me as deeply insulting when companies appear to assume that this is all a secretary does, or that all secretarial tasks can easily be handed off to other employees. In this line of thinking, "secretary" was a position invented to provide make-work for women.
Why aren't more people, especially women, offended by that? "Secretary" was not always a job associated with women, you know. There was a time when almost all secretaries were male. When that was the case, nobody had any trouble understanding that this was a key position in any healthy business, and one that couldn't be easily discarded without compromising quality. Take answering phones, for instance: Like I said, I can pick up the receiver and introduce myself. But unless the person on the other end has a question specifically related to the job I perform, I'm pretty helpless. I do not have a deep understanding of the company outside of my department, so I'm not always very sure where to transfer them. Nor can I fake it or deal extemporaneously with unforeseen issues; I lack a natural intuition for social situations. Hell, maybe that makes me a horrible employee. Fine: then fire me ... IF you think you can easily find a person who will be able to perform all the duties you expect of me, at a level at or greater than my own, for roughly the same salary I meekly accept.
But it is simply a fantasy that these talents can be willed into existence by insisting that employees "dedicate themselves to customer service." I like to think that I AM serving the customer: By doing the job I was hired to do and doing it well. But "customer service" is seldom used in that sense. Instead, my company (and a lot of others, I assume) treat it as a euphemism for "asking employees to perform the sort of human-relations tasks that used to be performed by secretaries." Which, rather conveniently, allows the company to trim its expenses by eliminating secretaries. Ever notice how you can make a nice career by providing companies with plausible-sounding excuses to do what they'd like to do anyway?
And that's just answering phones. There are other tasks performed by secretaries that I am also unskilled at. Which ought to be okay, because those tasks shouldn't really be part of my job. But they ARE part of my job, and because of that, those tasks are performed poorly. On top of that, the MAIN part of my job — the part I was supposedly hired for — suffers too, because I am unable to devote myself to that part as much as I'd like to.
IMHO, this degrades the quality of the final product. I'm no management expert, but shouldn't the quality of the final product be the primary goal? Wasn't this Deming's central insight? If management needs more work done, management should hire more workers. If additional workers are not practical or not available, the product should be scaled to fit the optimum productivity of available workers. Scaling down the employee footprint while leaving the final product unchanged seems like it would lead to slow-motion corporate suicide, because realizing that a task that should be performed by three people can, in a pinch, be performed by two people ultimately leads to the conclusion that it can — in a pinch — be performed by one person. Which ultimately leads to the question of why the task is being performed at all, if it cannot easily be performed well. If your ultimate goal is to cut costs, you'll eventually realize that you can eliminate all of your costs by just going out of business.
Making profit not only the primary goal, but the only real goal ultimately seems to raise some uncomfortable chicken-and-egg questions about the nature of capitalism. I am a firm believer in capitalism because I think capitalism ultimately benefits everybody, including workers. I am not in favor of capitalism for the sake of capitalism, free markets for the sake of extending market logic into all spheres of existence — doesn't that line of thought ultimately undermine the benefits that capitalism is supposed to provide? My embrace of capitalism is functional and pragmatic, not ideological, because ideologically, it's hard for me to see how following capitalist logic to its ultimate conclusion doesn't end up leading to some modified form of widespread slavery. I'm as pro-free-market as they come. You'll never see me stumping for Marxism or socialism or communism or anything of that sort. But I'm not going to march down the road to serfdom, whether it's brought about by central planners or free-agent barbarian marauders.
Again, I'm no expert here, and I assume some smarty-pants types have already thought Deep Thoughts about all this stuff and come up with good answers.
I bet they got paid a lot of money for coming up with those answers, too. Maybe not a fortune, but I bet they live a damn sight more comfortably than I do. And I bet, while they were coming up with those answers, they had a goddamn secretary.
Friday, June 3, 2011
The bad sleep well
Terrific. Just terrific. How shitty are things right now? Well, basically, Madison Avenue has decided it's no longer worth it to market goods and services to the middle class, because they're too damn poor. The only consumers that count, it seems, are those making $200,000 or more. If that's not you, then you're "irrelevant." To quote the article:
In the future, if current trends continue, no one else but the rich will essentially matter — to Madison Avenue.
Great. Just fucking great.
Maybe I'm not the only one...
I found this story about "The Death of the American Dream" to be interesting. I often feel depressed because I feel like the American dream that was promised to me all my life seems to be slowly slipping away. According to this article, it's not an illusion. On the bright side, it's not the first time in American history that this has happened. The author points out that the dream of owning a family farm was what preoccupied the first half of our nation's history. It was replaced with the ideal of life in the suburbs. Now that dream, too, seems likely to die. But perhaps it will give birth to something new...
Thursday, June 2, 2011
Daily workout log
50 x 2 crunches
20 x 4 push-ups
12 x 2 arm curls, 20 pounds
12 x 2 arm curls, 20 pounds
40 minutes on the elliptical machine
Always feeling trapped
The thing that has always frustrated me about my depression is that I can't reason myself out of it.
My Dad was an engineer — hell, he worked on missiles, so I guess you could probably say he's even a rocket scientist. I evidently didn't inherit his facility with math, but in many other ways, I am very much my father's child. We're both natural skeptics, natural pessimists, and we tend to approach problems in a highly logical fashion. Indeed, I am drawn almost magnetically to puzzles. The other day at work somebody left a little three-dimensional wood block puzzle on the counter, and I picked it up and literally could not put the damn thing down until I'd solved it. Here's the result:
Nifty, huh? Anyway, that's kind of how my mind works. I see a problem: My instinct is to find a solution.
Sometimes I will sit down and take an inventory of my life. And while I am perhaps not everywhere I would like to be, and perhaps haven’t accomplished all I’d like to have accomplished, I suspect you'd find few people who don't grapple with that. They learn to deal with it. Looking at things objectively, I have no good reason to be depressed at all. My life has suffered no severe, outsized tragedies. I face no deep threats to my life or health. Financially, things aren’t wonderful for me, but I am not wrecked or desperately hanging on by my fingertips. Relationships? Well ... from the outside, things would appear fine. I have friends. Occasionally, I have lovers. I don’t struggle with loneliness. I really shouldn’t have anything to complain about.
If I were looking at me from the outside, I wouldn’t feel sorry for me. In fact, I might find my deep, gnawing depression kind of pathetic. Weak. Ugly. The world is full of people who would be grateful to change places with me. I’d tell myself to man up, look on the bright side. Be happy with what you’ve got. Be grateful. And so on.
But if it looks that way on the outside, why does it hurt so much in here? Why do I spend so much time wishing I could die? Why do I dream of going to sleep one night and dying peacefully, never being forced to rise and face another day? Why is my rationality totally incapable of unraveling this constant feeling of self-hatred?
I hate that about life. I hate that I cannot crack open my head and trap my feelings. I cannot dismantle and destroy them through careful thought. I grasp them tightly in my mind’s fist, and they slip out through my fingers like smoke, reassembling themselves and mocking me to my face. And again they crack the whip.
One might conceivably take refuge in the idea that all these things we call "emotions" are lies. Since they are so powerfully resistant to the attack of reason, perhaps they do not exist in any meaningful sense. Maybe, like the shadows in the cave, they are just ephemeral garbage, the unintentional byproduct of more meaningful things; they lead us astray because we mistake the shadows for the truly beautiful things that cast them. To achieve one’s full capability as a human is to learn to see emotions as illusions.
Indeed, I think that’s essentially the view offered by Eastern religions such as Buddhism. In a roundabout way it’s at the heart of the monastic tradition in Christianity.
But I can’t quite take that view; it seems to leave out a large chunk of what it means to be human. To define oneself into victory over emotion is a neat trick of ideas. But I’m an old skeptic who believes sweating, bleeding, crying people are more important than intricately constructed theories. I have trouble buying into any doctrine of human fulfillment that dismisses the role of feelings and sentiments. Indeed, aren’t emotions the very engine of human life? They drive the world. How much of the important work of our species has been inaugurated by the phrase, “come, let us reason together?” Very little, I'd wager. But how many great chapters have been heralded by the insistent exclamation, “I feel...” followed a passionate flood of natural emotion?
Acknowledging the validity of my emotions doesn’t really help me, though, as long as those emotions continue to hurt me. I am still faced with the fact that I am deeply unhappy. Where is the path that will lead me out of this awful pit of despair?
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