Work Daze

Question: if you were asked to develop a test to show which employee is the most likely to succeed, what would you propose? You could suggest an aptitude test, a measure of how a specific person’s skills jibe with the needs of the specific business. This way, the most compulsive, compulsive liar could immediately start their climb to fame in politics. Or, you could prescribe a battery of psychological tests. Or, simply, a battery. Nothing like measuring your response to a beating to determine how you will fare in everyday corporate life.

Personally, I pooh-pooh these typical testing options. What I would do is march the group of candidates into a conference room, making sure that before they entered, a platter of Saran-wrapped donuts sat on the conference table. Then, hidden behind a one-way mirror, I would observe the behavior of the participants. I’d want to see who, ignoring all the cries from the wimps and wonks that the tray, being wrapped, is obviously for a later meeting, takes the first donut anyway.

This person is clearly a leader, and I would never hire her or him. [The last thing I want in my company are a bunch of hard-driving, success-oriented people who will make me look bad.] The donut snatchers that follow are just that – followers. These are people who will never question authority. In other words, great candidates for the HR department.

But the real star in the crowd – the one person who you know is headed for greatness – is the person who takes the last donut. This person doesn’t care about being polite or generous or caring. All they want to do is stuff their face with fried dough and confectioner’s sugar, and let the consequences – and the cholesterol – be damned.

Considering my workplace entrance exam, you will not be surprised to learn that I have little interest in promoting the latest entry on my books-I-won’t-be-reading list. It’s called “DON’T TAKE THE LAST DONUT: NEW RULES OF BUSINESS ETIQUETTE.”

The author of this well-meaning, but tragically misguided tome, Judith Bowman, does understand the power of manners. “The dining table is a great stage from which to share your personal side,” she explains. “It’s a moment when you can display your proper attention to etiquette, protocol, manners, and a myriad of details that can set you apart and distinguish you from the competition.”

True enough, but if a potential client or manager sees you playing “After you, Alphonse, with the last crueller, they will certainly not hold you in high esteem. Instead, they will logically expect you to demonstrate the same selflessness when the going gets tough, like when you’re moments away from selling a customer a product he doesn’t need, you surrender to the dark side that is integrity, compassion, and self-sacrifice.

Hey, good guys not only finish last, they don’t make their third-quarter numbers.

Ms. Bowman’s business etiquette book is full of good bad advice, and I can recommend it as a perfect gift for co-workers who you want to recast as lovable losers. For example, Bowman recommends that when out for a business dinner, you don’t order the lobster because it is not easy to eat. This is true. A crustacean does take a certain finesse. But if you think a lobster is difficult to eat, remember that it’s even more difficult to pay for when you’re not on an expense account!

Besides, if you can’t figure out how to separate a dead lobster from its succulent flesh, how are you ever going to separate a client from his money?

Assuming that you’ve given up on exploring the world of over-priced entrees on the company’s dime, Bowman also has a rule for eating hamburgers. “Eat a hamburger like sandwich; cut it in half.” This is excellent advice – if you work for Tea Party Magazine. [Yo! Judy! Why not ask the waiter to cut your burger for you, and while he’s at it, to run your french fries through the blender?] If you must order a hamburger, order two, one for each hand. Each of these you will eat in one gulp, separated only by a burp. And if you really want to impress, don’t order them rare, order them raw.

Remember – in today’s rough a tumble business world, every successful businessperson has to be an animal. The question is – will you be a gorilla or a parakeet?

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.

You’re not going to believe this, but there are people who actually look forward to the day when they won’t have to go to work. That’s right! Instead of cracking at the wake of dawn; brushing your teeth and flossing the dog; popping down a Pop-Tart and starting the agonizing commute to the workplace for a day of tedium and torture, these whackos actually imagine themselves spending Monday through Friday riding racing bikes, carving duck decoys, or watching the sunset on Pongo-Pongo from the comfort of a hammock.

It’s called retirement, friend, and if you think you could actually be happy without your Blackberry, your laptop, your monthly sales goals, and your manager, you’d better start thinking about how you’re going to accomplish it – because unless you’ve got a load of Lira in your IRA and an even large bundle of Bahts buried in the backyard, your chances of affording a fun, relaxing retirement are about one in 250.

I get that number from a new book, “Your Complete Retirement Planning Road Map,” by Ed Slott. In his new book, Mr. Slott discusses more than 250 possible blunders that could scramble your retirement nest egg.

If I know you, the entire idea of retirement makes you nervous. As frustrating as your job can be, how will you ever fill those 10-hour days you currently spend sitting on your behind, behind your desk, pretending to look busy?

Using all that quality time for hobbies is one idea that many pre-retirees prefer. But even the most exciting hobbies, like basket weaving and fly-tying and tie-flying and building life-size replicas of Jessica Simpson out of toothpicks can become a bore when you have nothing else to do. And when your hobby is relaxing after a hard day’s work, how will you justify logging all those couch hours when you have no work to relax from? [I suppose you’ll simply have to explain that you’re relaxing after a hard day of relaxing. If anyone can sell that, it’s you.]

Travel is another popular concept for the retiree, as if the misery of hopping on a crowded, delayed, overheated airplane will be more fun if you actually pay for the ticket yourself. Of course, you can choose your own destination when you’re not flying on business, but where in the world do you want to go? Europe is too expensive, Africa is too hot, Asia is too hectic, and South America is too buggy. Plus, you’re an American and there are many folks out there who don’t like you. And even if they do like you, they could rob you or kidnap you. You know what it’s like to spend every day in a strange environment where everyone is out to get you. It’s called work.

Author Slott’s angle on retirement is strictly financial. He goes past the basic argument of how you are going to live to focus on how you’re going to pay for how you’re going to live. Most people consider their 401(k) plan at work as the primary financial engine that will power their sunset years. That’s why we’ve been putting a percentage of our puny wages into these plans since we started working. For many of us, our companies match these contributions, building an even bigger nest egg for our retirement future.

But check the financial pages! The eggs our companies have been nesting for us have mysteriously shrunk from ostrich to quail. Other companies have leaped into bankruptcy, forcing their employees to follow them. Even if the government does manage to keep your retirement funds secure, you do have to count on the stock market, which can be rather squirrelly at times. [The news that South America is buggy could alone cause a 300-point drop.]

My recommendation? Skip the 401(k) and create your own retirement fund. Photos of the CEO playing naked Twister with the office manager would make an extremely secure retirement vehicle, guaranteed to pay off big time any time you need a cash infusion.

Or you could just keep doing what you are doing: avoid all work, and detour around all new assignments. By doing nothing and getting paid for it, you are basically having your retirement right now, when you’re young and healthy, and can really enjoy the free time.

So good ahead! Start your retirement. When you turn 65 and quit, you can go out and get a real job.

Do people think you are as dull and boring as your job? Are you searching for a way to express your true nature as fearless and desirable superhero? How about trying on this identity – corporate rogue.

That’s you, reader. No more Mr. Follow-The-Rules. No more Ms. I’ll-Do-It-Your-Way. Instead, you’ll be one of those office outlaws “The Wall Street Journal” characterizes as Enemy #1 to IT departments “who make the rules and track down the rogue employees who break them.”

Or so I have learned in a recent Journal article irresistibly titled “Ten Things Your IT Department Won’t Tell You.” I initially thought this piece of investigative journalism would reveal such not-very-shocking facts, such as #1, IT people don’t really care if you’re happy, or #2, IT people think anyone who doesn’t know how to write code in C++ is a life form lower than the sea monkey.

But no – the Journal’s reporter, Ms. Vauhini Vara, has actually scrounged up some extremely useful info on what IT doesn’t want you to do and how to do it, anyway.

Before you loose the basic animal desire to surf the web for the latest news on Lindsay Lohan, or send personal fan mail to a flounder from the company’s Blackberry, here are a few of IT’s Top Ten Rules and how a corporate rogue like you can break them.

1. How to send giant files.

I don’t know about you, but I never wanted to send giant files until I learned it wasn’t allowed by the IT Ayatollahs who “want to avoid filling up their servers, and thus slow them down.” Of course, the real reason the IT nerds want to preserve server space is so they can occupy those extra electrons with their own collections of downloaded, overheated Japanese anime, not to mention the naughty snaps of nerdy hi-jinks from the latest Star Trek convention.

The solution is to use an online filing sharing service, like YouSendIt or SendThisFile, which allow you to post elephant-sized files on the Internet for peanuts. This is a great solution, unless you have nothing to send, in which case you can surf over to parezhilton.com and download a complete transcript of Paris Hilton’s prison poetry. Now that’s how a corporate rogue wins first place in the “my file is bigger than your file” competition.

2. How to use software that your company won’t let you download.

As a good corporate citizen, you know better than to tell your IT professional that you’re less than 100% satisfied using a version of Word Perfect which hasn’t been upgraded since the Nixon administration. But somewhere, deep, deep inside your rogue nature, you suspect that there may be newer and better software programs available.

A corporate wimp would wait patiently, but a rogue uses web-based alternatives. If downloading Instant Messenger is a no-no, rogues can go-go to Google Talk, and IM to your heart’s content, free from the bounds of authoritarian IT types.

If you’re really feeling evil and vengeful, you can even use a rogue web site to IM to IT, challenging the totalitarian trolls to track you down in the digital domain where rogues like you run free. Just don’t be surprised if you come in one morning and find your telephone replaced by an orange-juice can and a string. Those IT types are weird, but they do carry a grudge.

3. How to visit the web sites your company blocks.

Yes, we’re talking about those web sites men like, like ILoveMacrame.com and GreatGazpachoRecipes.net. Just put the tail of your mouse on one of these forbidden sites and you could find yourself in an IT inferno for life. According to Ms. Vara, office rogues suggest using a “third-party site, called a proxy” which allows you to see a web site without actually visiting it.

Another way rogues circumvent the corporate rules is to use the free Google foreign language translation service, asking it to perform an “English-to-English” translation of a taboo web site. In the course of translating NaughtyBitswithMyLittlePony.com from English to English, the translation site will act like a virtual proxy, making available to you 24/7 all the seamy wonders in dark netherworld of My Little Pony.

We’ve run of space for rules and rule-breakers, but it does occur to me that there could be another useful application for Google’s translation service. Why not run the scolding messages from your IT department through a Nerd-to-English translation. That way corporate rogues would know exactly which rules they want to break.