[an error occurred while processing this directive]
This is September, 2000...
What a damn tragedy that Olympic swimming was. Aussies really shat themselves in their new fangled body suits. Did you see Brooke Bennett, that American swimmer that kicked Oneil's ass? Now that's cute...
I'm still at JPM. I would strongly suggest you adhere to the policy where you consider all jobs as that boring shit you do for someone else during the day so that you can pay someone to do boring shit for you when you want.
The level of boredom on a scale of 1-10 is probably always above 3, given that working for someone else is still working for someone ELSE and not you, even if you're an arabian harem tester, you're still working for the a-one sheikster.
Let's not forget that being the King does not count in this discussion, since being the King isn't really a job, but rather an extended happy happy childhood. I'm glad we cleared this up.
If you follow what I'm writing, you probably agree that those people at the sewerage farm who get down there with the mops and the hot crap, unless they're shit-junkies, would probably score a 10 for boredom.
On the contrary, the CEO of Shell Corporation, with two secretaries, one blonde, one redhead, who also has a PA to do the real work has a boredom level of less than 4, but he's kind of cushioned becuase he's an old fuck and can fall asleep, and regularly does if the boredom factor goes above 5.
Keep in mind that the CEO was once in the shit-pit with the other guys in white coveralls at one stage, unless he's an ivy-leaguer, then he's always been the King and we can discount him too.
Aside from the level of inherent interest on the job, there are also modifiers, commonly known as benefits. I have quickly learned that benefits can be summed up in two categories, money and useless shit.
Money is salary, stock options, bonuses, retirement fund matching, and overtime.
Useless shit includes holidays, vacation, sick leave, retirement plans where there's no matching, complimentary gym membership, and fresh urinal cakes in the jacks every week.
Money can be quantified purely numerically, and is as such readily palatable to our scale. Each $50,000US chunk of money gives a -1 to the boredom scale.
Useless shit ALWAYS has a modifier of zero. You're probably considering that vacations and holiday should be positive, being that you're looking at this all wrong to start with, you can shut your yap.
A holiday is a day when you're not at work, and that means that unless you're sleeping, you're out spending your money. When you're at work, you're not spending your money unless the boredom factor is so high that you've resorted to online shopping.
So, the niceness of vacation-time is offset by the fact that it's eating into your money, not to mention that airfares suck the big one.
Given the above you can quickly see that the common McDonalds employee in America has a boredom factor of, for example, 8 to start with.
Her vacation and sick leave contribute squat and her pay of $25000US gives her half a point back. So she's sitting high up there at 7.5 meaning she's got a damn right to be an ass to you.
The owner, otherwise seen as the well dressed burger guy who's always smiling, rakes in a million a month in profits and so commonly has a -5 on the boredom scale.
I'm not sure where I fit in, but my pay gives me about 4.5 points back, so I'm not as upset as I was before when I was at CareerMosaic.
JPM has always has the same stupid dual heirarchy where there's the managment consisting of JPM staffers, and there's the IT people who are actually employed by CSC.
We're all expected to act like employees of JPM, but it can't work like that because CSC is always trying to bill new projects and get more budget for existing projects. Can you read CONFLICT OF INTERESTS?
I work for the CSC half of the partnership, and the people who actually do the work do also. However, it's very top heavy. As well as me there is Tom, a truly angry Irish immigrant from Galway, who's a complete nutter, but quite good at what he does and very easy to be around. That's about where it stops.
Otherwise, we have 14 project managers who constantly wake up and decide that they have to revolutionise the storage-area-networks project with their god-like organisational skills.
We have a plan that was handed to us by the real boss, from CSC not JPM, and we are sticking to that, however, they make us dodge hails of political drivel about who's going to have their ass in a sling if this or that aint done.
I'm getting good at doing this meeting thing. The one guy we have to provide hard answers for tries to corner us individually at the weekly staff meeting. I got asked today to limit my status explanations to five minutes by the whole crew. Both myself an Tom ear-bash the guy until he's sick of hearing what we've acheived.
Sounds terrible, but really, I do a shit load of work and don't particularly feel taxed by it. I agree with a self-management policy. I am totally self-managed, and pretty much direct the flow of my part of the project based on the research I've conducted. I don't understand people who sit on their date all day and wait for orders.... must have worked at McDonalds.
So for now, I'll put it down to them being more like imitation people, cardboard cutouts that I needn't see more of.
Anyway, you probably wouldn't recognise me if you knew me in Australia. I'm in a totally different world, mind and workplace, than I was before. There's a hell of a lot less at stake, in that I'm very confident that even a catastrophe isn't the end of the world.
I always tended to be afraid of failing, which meant I heard footsteps and was generally nervous. That's all gone now, and I just let the world drift on by watching people do as I did for so long well in to their old age.
Age, now there's a topic for exploitation....
©Copyright 2000, Jayson Hawley