Plans

[degringolade]

New Realism (American Realism) / Edward Hopper/ Tables for Ladies

Went over to cruise around Vantucky yesterday to try and find a crash pad.  Think I may have found one, but it has stairs, so it is less than optimal.  But it is a size upgrade (one-bedroom) and now I have to reconsider my “decor” options (The effing couch).

I figure that holding onto the job for the last twenty-one months is going to be getting progressively more problematic but easily managable.  The world of large organizations is not getting more rational.  The real world is a contradictory and humorous place and authoritarianism and groupthink is going gangbusters nearly everywhere. I try not to take myself too seriously, and I pleasantly while away my hour sticking pins in folks self-image and laughing at the foibles of a failing system.   But I live in an age and work in a system where the vast majority of people around me believe they have an inalienable right to be taken seriously, even if, especially if, they’re idiots. Too much time is spent by folks in the system vomiting up empty slogans propagated by the mass media and repackaged by the idiots above them in the pecking order to get any serious work done.  Most of these slogans are of the “the one they just heard for the first time fifteen minutes ago” variety.

Luckily, being a reasonably long term federal employee, I feel that I probably can probably fall back on the reality that I can easily outwork two of my co-workers.  While the managers have (for the most part) already drank the KoolAid, they still need to answer to their masters and having the work done seems to make that easier regardless of withering sarcasm and devastating bon mots attached to the process.  This in itself gives rise to me the dual pleasure of watching cognitive dissonance in my supervisors and thinking that I will get through to the land of genteel poverty that is retirement in the post-industrial age.

Comments

SLOGAN COMMANDS

[mschmidt]

Imagine you are a dog, type TBD.

The workplace slogans you hear are command words, to which you are supposed to respond, to get a treat/paycheck.

If you were a young Golden Retriever from pet bloodlines, when you heard the latest slogan words, you would get all pepped-up and spin in circles and then rush to do the task – whatever it might be.

On the other hand, if you were an aged German Shepherd/Rottweiler mix from working bloodlines, with an arthritic hip, and you had enough food without the conditioning treats, how would you act?

You would act like you did not hear the slogan words, you would do the task slowly but finish before the Golden Retriever anyway due to their spinning and tendency to knock things over, and people would get the sense that if they pushed you to do something that you did not want to do, that that would be a bad idea.

People will say the energetic Golden Retriever is a great performer compared to the old mix who seems to be immune to treat-based operant conditioning; but being a long term judger of dogs, the old mix knows an idiot when they see one.