Manage it

BLM WHM SMN SCH THF RNG BRD MNK WAR DRK PLD > 99

A common theme among Citibankers is how much money is wasted.  I used to wonder at this is how could we afford so much stuff.  Whole rooms would be filled with seats and a long table and a huge dry-erase board all just sitting there waiting to be used, days on end.  Sometimes, I would go up to the top of the garage and wonder at the spectacle of the place, believing that I didn't need to go any further up the ladder.  What could true responsibility teach me that I hadn't learned already.  Besides, I HAD the knowledge and experience of an executive and by just staying where I was, earning low pay, and spouting out words of wisdom, I could be the SPY executive that didn't need to earn high pay but could still help the company by providing truths that kept customer service honest.  

I would sacrifice my ambition for the sake of the company and people would respect me for it.  

I have wondered often WHY I wasn't made manager.  In my head, it was plain to me that I was working hard and biding my time, but even my co-workers started to harass me about it.  They would ask me HOW LONG have you worked here, to which I would say 18 years and they would sit there astonished like I had done something wrong or like I should be ashamed.  Eventually it started to annoy me, but that just seemed to make them ask me the question more often.  This I wonder at.  Is it shameful to plod along and NOT be ambitious?  

I have served as an example to my younger two siblings for all of my life and just this once I thought I would not make them seek a higher office.  They have made it clear to me often that if I strive at success, that my parents just point to me to make them try harder at stuff.  But after a while I changed my mind about ambition.  I would stop trying.  I would make being middle acceptable since seeking to be CEO would make EVERYONE seek to be CEO and that isn't really possible.   What's more, ambition makes us into an us/them society right?  If I get promoted often, I start to "take" positions from otherwise satisfied people that were perhaps "calm" or better said, not expecting me or people like me. 

Remember the world is 50/50, if you are too calm, you are begging to be betrayed, right?  You are slowing down ALL the people that admire you, not the least of which are the young people that are... much less calm.  

I remember one time, I was given a task to distribute call lists to my team.  I was serving as a coach and given this project where we would call our customers to find out what they thought of our calls.  Calling out is so disturbing that you can't believe it's normal.  People would often answer irate, upset that they were called by someone they didn't expect.  By that token, our workers became more stressed since it was their job to call people that didn't want to be called.  And here it was my job to distribute this work.  So I get to my friend, who is a top performer in customer service and he refuses to do the work.  Taking calls is much easier than calling out and this guy was a high performer mostly because he hurried people off the phone that had called in for help so he was already "not so nice" so to speak since he had best call times(shortest) on the team.  But I didn't have enough work for everybody so I skipped him one day and told him that he would have to work it next time.  Well, what do you know and next time comes around and here he is refusing to work again, so I dropped the stack on his desk and walked off and sure enough he takes up the work and starts to do it.  

I later told this story to my boss about how I shoved work into the face of our highest perfomer that had the most respect on the team and she was like GOOD JOB.  She suggested I should be a manager.  And this was like after 1 or 2 years of working there.  Who knew that making people miserable could make you a better manager.  Later she took my brother's job.  Good job, right?  I really have a lack of respect for managers that have no skill except when it comes to firing people.  I believe there are whole groups of people that think that THAT'S work.  

Hmmf.  

Anyways, sad story yes, 18 years later and I never became a manager, well what I wanted to point out is that it's difficult to know what the value of things are.  Just today I was cleaning out my mouse and I remembered how we started out using really filthy mouses.  The desks would get so dusty that I would have to clean them repeatedly to get the equipment to work right.  My fingers would itch and sometimes I would get zits and irritations from scratching at my face.  One time I had this growth start down the side of my neck under my ear.  It was really nasty.  It wasn't zits it was like a growth and as soon as a bump would form I would squeeze out that growth until I drew blood.  This way it would dry up and heal.  But then I started to do it a lot and soon my whole neck area was filled with scars from this "practice".  

People started to look at me and then LOOK at my neck area like there was some way I could stop that from happening.  

This is why it's so important to clean your desk.  After I started cleaning the area, by scraping off that grime or dust on the roller rings that played off the mouse ball or by shaking out the keyboard, I started to get better.  I eventually started to pour soap and hot water on top of the desk and let it sit there a while and then dry up the whole area about once a month.  I couldn't believe the difference.  Not only did my sores go away but it was like my face was no longer twinging as I sat there for some reason.  It felt like there was less stress there even though you couldn't see that there was any difference.  

It was funny because we didn't always have the roller ball mouses.  A while back we had laser ball mouses that didn't need to be replaced like the regular mouses.  Since we didn't know back then how to clean the roller balls(seriously the mouses would get dirty and stop working and they would buy us new mouses), they upgraded all of us to laser mouses that read off of this specialized mouse pad that had a grid on it.  This way it never needed to be cleaned.   But that led to other problems since people would destroy them.  Don't ask me who but I would get to a desk and the mouse pad there would be all stripped away with scratches or it's edges would be peeled off or they would be bent for some reason making reading off of it imperfect.  It boggles the mind how having a nice mouse pad translates into someone wanting to OWN it.  So back we went to roller ball mouses and as it turns out, they are easy to maintain by just popping out the ball and wiping away the roller rings of the inevitable dust that will accumulate.  

Now some people will say that that's the company's job.  Some people like to think this about their teeth or about their lungs or about their cars, that you should just chew away at whatever or drive how you like or smoke up a pack of cigs a day without regard to what you are doing since that's what doctors, and dentists, and mechanics are for.  

But instead of replacing the whole mouse, which is probably what the company would do rather than hire some expert to figure out how to replace the roller ball, that would somehow need replacing once every six months so that he could keep his job, maybe YOU can figure out how your body or your mouse works, just a little bit, so that you are able to... manage your SHIT. 

PS: Sorry I said... ass? And oh, MSNBC, don't worry about cutting off your commercials while they read the "side effects" parts to medication advertising, I mean, what could happen?