Since the beginning of the week, I have started working, for the first time in my life, for a large corporation. Don’t be alarmed though - for the moment this is a temporary thing.
It is with great fascination that I observe this mythical environment first hand: the corporate office-space. Great fascination, quickly followed by gaping boredom.
There is a certain myth that corporations are deeply evil, ruthlessly efficient, money making machines. “A single-minded money-making machine” - I recall that the documentary film, The Corporation, described the entity in terms such as these. But I can now report that this is a myth.
The place where I am now working is the least efficient, least “well-oiled”, laziest, most wasteful and absurd place of business in which I have ever found myself. People sit around chatting, playing poker on the internet, or fantasy football. The sharper and more intelligent workers read the newspaper. Nobody knows the answer to anything - in fact, they spend most of their time passing emails around among the 25-odd members of “the team”, trying to work out what the question is. When they think they might almost have it, it turns out that a key member is away on travels until next week, so everybody gratefully puts it off again.
Since I started, I have not yet done any work. My computer does not have the software required, and the project is still undefined, and the bugs have not yet been worked out, and the management are still “hammering out” the goals and “deliverables”, and establishing the scheduled date which they will of course later push back. Everybody I have met so far is openly indifferent to actually getting anything done.
You can go home at 5pm on the dot (many just leave around 4), holidays are easily obtainable, and we are better paid than we would be in smaller, less capitalised companies. Can this really be the face of modern evil?
Or is it just the black humour of a tragic farce?
Comments 3
Try working for the government. Then you know the true pain of sloppy work.
If the company your work for is still in business with such poor practices, the profit margins are obviously very wide. They have a lot of fat that could be trimmed.
Ever think about doing that fat-trimming yourself, by starting up your own business to compete and destroy them?
Posted 18 Aug 2006 at 5:09 am ¶Interesting - my sister made exactly the same suggestion: that I should start up a competing business and undercut them. She said, “It works for Richard Branson.”
Thanks for the idea, but (a) I just couldn’t be bothered (funnily enough, much like the rest of the employees - must be something they put in the water cooler); (b) the company’s line of business is one that would require a very large amount of capital to enter the market. Hundreds of thousands at least, I would guess.
Posted 19 Aug 2006 at 1:03 pm ¶So you’re not happy, but not unhappy enough to do anything about it. Ouch. Sounds like you’ve got a nasty case of ’stinkin thinkin’… ( http://www.suite101.com/article.cfm/mental_health_issues/25639 )
Posted 24 Aug 2006 at 6:34 am ¶Post a Comment