I get to think of myself as a level-headed, calm, and reasonably patient, sane person for two reasons. One is that I don’t have to drive much during rush hour. If, like today, I have to drive two miles on the interstate and it takes me twenty-five minutes in the pouring rain, I begin to see myself a little differently. Like as a raving, steaming, swearing bitch with an overall negative opinion of her fellow denizens. What makes people drive six miles an hour just because it’s raining? Logically it makes more sense to increase following distance than it does to slow down, but that’s not what people do. What they do is tailgate, but slow down until they can read the odometer in the car next to them.
The other thing that has allowed me to see myself in a mostly positive light most of the time is my detachment from the actual function of and (lack of) collegial responsibility at my place of employment. For the past five or six years, I mostly show up and do my job and stay out of all the shit that doesn’t make any sense, ignore the incompetent fools that complicate things for others, and then I go home. Lately my responsibilities have increased a little, and so has my blood pressure, and not because of the added accountability. It’s people that make it so frustrating. How would a restaurant function if you had eleven executive chefs and two sous chefs? I’ll tell you: There’d be twelve sets of rules, nine different menus, 13 to the nth power personality conflicts, no fire under the burners, an empty dining room, and a walk-in full of spoiled food. The server would die of cirrhosis after a long and complicated courtship with the bartender since there’d be nothing else for them to do.
When decisions are made in the most effective organizations, I imagine they follow some sort of chain of command. I feel like I’m running in Lewis Carroll’s caucus race! How many people are involved in optimal decision making processes, whom do they tell what decision was made, who has the authority to override it, what ramifications are in place for those that refuse to cooperate or just plain don’t do their jobs? A woman I work with has a saying for the newly initiated: ”Whenever you find yourself going, ‘hey, wouldn’t it make more sense if…’ you can just stop right there, because that’s not how we’re going to do it.”
Go ahead and laugh, it’s your money.
It turns out that maybe I am not as sane and patient as I like to think I am. I might be an angry, negative person who is barely holding it together. From what I have seen today (and let’s be real: lots of other days too), I suspect that might be more true than I like to think.
