File Under: The Job and Its Nonsense
Most of what I do for the various Executive Cupcakes I've worked for during my career has been the unraveling of various bits of administrative red tape. I happen to be rather good at it. The prevailing wisdom is that success at administration involves being overly consumed with details - I'm not. What I can do rather well is translate jargon and convert it into language a Cupcake can then easily understand. It should come as no surprise that the average Executive Cupcake isn't patient enough to sort out jargon for itself; after all, It is busy saving the world, attending important meetings, putting out client fires, plowing the company into the ground, wheelbarrowing their money around or whatever it is Cupcakes do with their valuable time.
But another piece of prevailing wisdom that I wish I didn't have to constantly debunk is that just because I have a talent for administrative work that I necessarily like it. I don't, not at all; it just comes very easily for me. However, true challenges don't show up on my desk very often. With the explosion of the Internet, my role has changed in response. I couldn't function without it, quite frankly. How else would I be able to find a company in England which reproduces antique billiard table lights, map a route from Paris to Calais, or obtain the hours of the Modern Art Museum in Istanbul without ever leaving my desk?
Wise aged veterans may remember that once upon a time the New York Public Library had a reference desk one could call for answers to obscure or arcane questions. Having not used them in at least 16 years, I have no idea whether this desk still exists. Perhaps I'll Google them and check.
I've also gotten very skilled in putting together complicated travel itineraries - after six years of working for the Cupcake Emeritus, who is inordinately fond of frequent flyer miles and who takes several European trips per year, my knowledge increases with little effort. I certainly don't wish to know the fine print of the major airlines' award travel programs and that of all of their partner airlines, but I could probably pass that test with flying colors. I wish I could wipe my mental slate clean after every tortured jargon-translating session with an airline representative. Better yet, if I had dandy gold ingots in my pocket for every minute I've spent during those conversations I would find more to smile about.
The secret to the excellent service I receive is quite simple - I've learned to speak their jargon, and it marks me with an indelible brand of the insider. Also, I always remain reasonable and I win them to my side by talking to them like regular people, not faceless entities. If I can share a joke or make them laugh, it's almost a given that they'll take the time to work a little harder for me.
Never bullshit a bullshitter, so don't tell me I'm doing a fabulous job; I'll automatically doubt your sincerity and promptly speculate on why you believe flattery may influence me - I do a good job because I'm a professional with high personal standards and not for praise.
I butter up folks for a living simply to get what I want out of them, so if you're a reluctant or awkward courtier I will notice immediately and discount your words accordingly. A sincere expression of thanks does the trick - but then again, there's nothing like gold ingots...
posted by Miliana at 8:24 PM
5 Comments:
Stoic-if you were in front of me in real life I'd smack you upside the head. After dealing with the rich and spoiled for so many years, what makes you think I'd willingly take them on?
Anything, anything BUT the service sector (and admin work is definitely in that sector).
Although we should all feel some sense of achievement in our accomplishments, I well recall how difficult it is to feel good about becoming adept at the trivialities smug asswipes and self-annointed kingpins demand but can't be bothered to do for themselves. To me, it always felt like just another form of whoredom...and what is the service sector BUT the providing of specialized but tiresome services to the perverted, the lazy, and the self absorbed. Hooker heaven.
Since our entire economy is headed toward being nothing but service sector jobs (i.e., making and serving hamburgers to each other), it will require not only deviousness but vindictiveness to honestly earn those gold ingots while staying true to yourself. It sounds crude and nasty I know, but perhaps you need to plot out a way to get the gold at the same time you infect all the little Midases with an ersatz form of crabs??
Kaz-some excellent nuggets for thought there (and no pun intended). Absolutely my job is thinly veiled whoredom, and because I admit the truth, at least to myself, it makes it that much more difficult to change it. To change the job would mean only changing the pimp, not what I do. I do have a deep apathy towards the job, however, yet as time goes on that seems to work in my favor more often than not. Apparently fawning is out and apathy is in- for now. And yet I do dream about the gold inots.
Stoic - At the risk of sounding particularly dismal, we seem to have involved into a sado-masochistic society which primarily runs on groveling before some altar of commerce or government or the dollar and its many equivalents. That, in my book, puts us all firmly in the service section - regardless of who are what we are servicing, and servicing in this instance is the same as prostitution or whoredom.
Again in the dismal category, since our collective days as a manufacturing giant have groaned to a close with NAFTA, CAFTA, and corporate globalism and political shennanigans, that is far more another S&M flavor rather than in country or even in product self-reliance. Instead, we're all corralled into interlapping and interdependent circles of serfdom, groveling to serve some unseen master while never conferring or having eye contact with our peer slaves in other circles.
As to Thoreau and/or self-reliance, we can achieve such self reliance only when the environment we inhabit ALLOWS it, and our's no longer does. We can't even escape to the pond to reflect on where we went wrong, because that water has been contaminated by noxious fumes and sludge. Personally, I always thought the real reason for Thoreau's removal of self to a temporary state of primitivism was up for grabs, depending on which literary guru was discussing the point. Was he seeking self-reliance or an alternative view - or was he merely seeking to distance himself from the possibility of jail?
Kaz-you must put down the musings on Thoreau gently and back away very slowly - I fear that Stoic is somewhere in the background feverishly looking up literary references to his champion, aka Nature's Crybaby (tm a very smart woman!).
He has invented a new version of Godwin's Law (go to wikipedia and look it up - I can't figure out the linkage from inside the comment box) where one can practically count the sentences he'll write before inserting Nature's Crybaby.
Stoic - Kaz really does have a point here that I can see quite well and damn, wish I had been able to articulate it. Perhaps my overarching despair with the job that is vs. the other ones out there is that I just can't believe it will be that different anywhere else. I'll be dogged by Cupcakes of sorts forever, I think.
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