Those That Do

Been gone a while. That wages for work concept intruded once again into my life. Another four day entertainment extravaganza. (Just an aside thought: Doesn’t it feel like decades of marketing and advertising has cheapened words like extravaganza and spectacular into uselessness?) Came home at the end of it a choking, human-sized bile duct. Mind you, it was nothing I actually had to do or see at work that left me that way. It was the management of my own organization that left me spelunking the depths of human incompetence while sitting on my couch at 7:30 this morning.

I feel very old when I resort to analogies like this, but I’ve come to believe there are two types of worker in this world. The first are those that do for a living: Driving a truck, mowing lawns, moving furniture, answering phones. At the end of the day they have a work product of some variety that justifies their fiduciary existence within an organization.

The second are those that administer for a living. Not having a product they can articulate using nouns, they merely tend to a given process. More often than not this process is the movement, deployment, and juxapositioning of those that do in this world. Because they lack the metrics to measure worth there is a default to belief that process is reason for existence. Inordinate amounts of time are expended calculating the angles, obliques, and intercepts of the human trajectories within their power. The interpersonal aikido serves two purposes: It gives a masturbatory feeling of power when the process is exercised and it redirects the questioning energies back onto those that do. Worth and competence are benchmarked against how the organization’s human dynamics can be bent and negated within desired parameters.

In my organization these are cowardly, chicken-hearted boys posturing to be like men. We suffer under an astounding weight of management and an appalling vacuum of leadership. In lieu of leadership we endure infantile temper tantrums about our lack of faith to the process. A process that is so empty without flesh-and-blood inspiration that merely being on the clock empties your soul. A form of mental radiation, it lays latent but silently takes away invisible chunks of those in its orbit. The justifications are a one act human puppet show that consists of the refrain “Because I said so” followed by a gesture towards a title. The work product machinations of those that do are a sanctuary from those that administer. This sanctuary, one of the few places on earth where respect can only be purchased from other participants through competence, enrages and mystifies administrators with its lack of manipulatable human levers. Having existed on credit for so long they cannot grasp the mechanics of hard currencies.

Hemingway once wrote “All I’ve got is my cojones to peddle.” Nothing could be more truthful of the doers in my organization. They offer their very existence by showing up. In this shadow stand the administrators, inspecting the stark difference and attempting to bluff what they cannot purchase. Alas, I am not member of their collective. I didn’t participate in The Great Raid of File Cabinet 3 or The Battle of Tuesday Staff Meeting. In lieu of concrete peril they fester over parliamentary procedure. A common, self-justifying mantra of denial heard from on high is some form of “if people don’t like it why are they still here?”, as though you can measure success by the lack of corpses. The absence of flight from those that administer is not a reflection of their competence; it is a testament to people that believe what we do is a powerful benefit to our fellow man. But there is a limit to what men will endure and tolerate.

Ares