Work Daze

Let’s start with the positive – for those of you who have been making a hash of your job duties while demonstrating a totally toxic attitude towards your managers and co-workers, you have my congratulations. Your refusal to even pretend to participate or cooperate is helping us reach our noble goal of driving our managers moo-moo-goo-goo.

But I must be honest – you’ll have to do more. As bad as employee as you’ve become, you will need to become even worse in the months ahead if we are to see in our working lifetimes, a complete management melt-down and total office anarchy.

Why do we require this additional sacrifice? Because our bosses now have at their disposal a dangerous paperback from the American Management Association. The book is called “A Survival Guide to Managing Employees from Hell. Handling Idiots, Whiners, Slackers and Other Workplace Demons.”

I must admit I find this volume personally offensive. If anyone is going to write about workplace demons, it should be me. After all, my readership is composed of idiots, whiners and slackers. How could the AMA turn to Gini Graham Scott, Ph.D. when they could have Bob Goldman, GED?

I would probably bear a grudge over this impertinence, but I left my grudge at home, and I’m too lazy to go back and get it. Besides, I find myself recommending that all of my idiotic, whining, slacker readers rush out and buy Dr. Scott’s book. Her methods for improving our bad attitude or neutralizing our bad performance will never work, but she does provide us with an invaluable resource. In cataloging the subversive behavior of her “demons” she has given us a panoply of great ideas on how to make our workplace even more noxious.

For example, consider the case of Vivian, the hard-working nurse who upon being promoted, becomes a “Prima Donna.” It is immediately clear why a demon like Vivian must be exorcised. “Everyone loved her. Every week she was doing different things to make the staff happy, like giving them extra time off for travel. Also, she would spend time joining the other nurses on their rounds and talking to them, getting to know them.”

Making the staff happy…getting to know her direct reports…clearly, this Vivian is an employee from hell. The task for Vivian’s manager was straight-forward. He had to stop her endless pandering to the desires of the employees, and help her focus instead on producing the mind-numbing and senseless reports the company demanded. And who could blame them? It is so much easier to work with a neat, well-written report than a bunch of sloppy, happy employees.

Author Scott offers a wide variety of solutions for dealing Vivien, including the suggestion that Vivian’s boss report her to the police for the crime of using the credit card he had given her to order supplies to buy lunches for the staff. As our author points out, “If an employee lets the new power of a promotion to management go to his or her head, you may have to cut off that head.”

No argument there. The last thing we want around the workplace is a bunch of happy employees feasting on free Big Macs.

Or take the case of Gregory, a demon employee limned in the section of the book headed “Incompetent.” Gregory was hired as an executive assistant to Elsie who ran a small carpet company. Described as “charming and personable,” Gregory was great at relating to customers, but was soon revealed to have a certain hellish flaws. Shocking as this may seem, Gregory “didn’t seem to have a good memory for the different types of carpeting the company sold.” And if that isn’t enough to swing open the doors to the unemployment office, he was new to the company’s computerized order system and did not use capital letters when writing up contracts. [Naturally, illiterate Elsie never considered that Gregory could have been writing up a carpet contract for the famous, lower-cased poet, e.e. cummings.]

As with most problem employees, Gini Ph.D’s solution for handling Gregory is to hand him over to the unemployment office. “Don’t let a good-natured, personable employee turn you into a pushover,” she counsels. “Instead, push back when it’s time to say goodbye.”

Again, another home run! If there’s anything worse than happy workers it’s a good-natured, personable executive assistant. That’s why we foul-natured, disagreeable malcontents have it made. We may be hell to work with, but no one is ever going to fire us for being pleasant.