In many ways, life is more difficult than it has to be. I think that with a little foresight, planning and thoughtfulness, humanity can eradicate at least 33% of the BS we have to endure. On the other hand, I also think that those three qualities might be too much for the general population to maintain. So until people can manage a bit of responsibility, we’re all going to be stuck making each other miserable.
The situation at where I work is a perfect example where none of the required BS-avoiding qualities are exemplified. At times, there seems to be no rhyme or reason to anything we do. This is ironic, of course, since the owner of the company constantly forces the staff to recite a litany of tenets; one of them being “think things all the way through.” As it is, most answers given to the question “Why?” are some form of “I don’t know.” So now each day is like the first day on a job: You can’t be sure what to expect. One day, I’m working on product videos. The next day, I’m building a Web site from scratch. And I’m a copywriter!
As you can imagine, this is not the way to run a company that is hurting financially. Just today, a coworker of mine slipped on an oil slick that had formed from the drippings of a leaky forklift and he hurt his back. Company policy, which I think is standard for most companies, dictated that the accident be reported to Human Resources.
A quick side note:
I’ve worked for many companies and have found the respective Human Resources departments to be an employee refuge staffed by people that actually cared about my wellbeing. Not so at my current workplace. This is the probably the most anti-human/anti-employee black hole of a department I’ve ever experienced. Human Resources here is a place of punishment. The staff openly displays their aggression towards you, glaring at you, ignoring you when you greet them and blaming you for any discrepancies on your paycheck. In fact, the HR Director commonly stalks the halls dressed in black every day, sporting a Darth Vader helmet-shaped hairdo.
Anyway, when HR was called, they actually did their job – probably motivated by fear of litigation – and sent my coworker to the company clinic to get checked out. When I burned my hands at The Old Spaghetti Factory on the second day working, my manager did the same thing. When my coworker got to the clinic, he was turned away because my company hadn’t paid their bill with them. Now I’m not sure if a business is supposed to have a company clinic available for insurance purposes, but whenever a company skimps on paying for something related to an employee’s health red flags explode out of my forehead and hang over my eyeballs. In my opinion, there are definitely other things in the company that could go if they were trying to save money.
With that said, I sent off another résumé tonight. The position is located in Huntington Beach. If I had more time on my hands, I’d love to see some kind of graph that plots the driving distance of the jobs I apply for over time just to see many inclines and plateaus and dearth of valleys.