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a motivational opportunity
Tuesday, September 7 1999
There was a sickly surreal moment this morning at the weekly company meeting. Our own Grand Pooh Bah, ever the showman, was decked out in full Native American headdress. He was introducing a new company accolade, "the [corny name of proprietary management system] Chief," to be awarded on a weekly basis to those who have gone "above and beyond the call of duty" in making the system work. The first-ever winner of this award was none other than our Senior Editor John, freshly back from a long weekend at Burning Man (it must have been nice!). What John had done, the Grand Pooh Bah explained, was put $700 of his own dollars into an effort to get a crucial project done on time. The Grand Pooh Bah didn't explain the details; evidently his goal was to leave people with the impression that John had selflessly put $700 of his own money into an urgent effort to finish a project. Of course, like everything you've ever read in the newspaper, like anything anyone you will ever hear at a weekly company meeting, this wasn't the whole story.
Those who have been keeping up with this story know that I was the person who had created the aforementioned unexpected $700 demand. At the time, the issue had boiled down to one of dignity. My girlfriend was on the verge of a prolonged & costly jealous fit. The Excel spreadsheet had been leaked and everyone knew what the new guys were earning. Though we'd been working late nights and weekends, not a single engineer had yet earned substantial money from a bonus. What I was doing was throwing down the gauntlet with what little power I command in the company, my ability to get shit done. I knew the company had money. I was saying, "If you must destroy my private life, you can at least pay me up front." By the way, I would have never accepted money from Senior Editor John's private bank account. It was a dignity issue between me and my employer, pure and simple.
The result of my demands (and the work that their fulfillment unleashed) was that the redesign actually did go up on time. True, bugs had to be overlooked, specifications had to be downsized, but those who arbitrate such things saw to it that John wasn't punished for his gamble. In the end, I was actually the one who was punished. You see, for accepting $700 in wages, I was denied $1200 in completion bonuses. But the way I see things, if I hadn't done what I'd done, the outcome would have been different. The deadline would have arrived and the redesign would have been judged incomplete. No one would have received any bonus money. It would have been sweatshop exploitation as usual. I can't be sure of this, of course, but in general it's been my experience that exploiters will continue to exploit until they meet resistance. After all, why change when you're getting a good thing?
But I never expected the Grand Pooh Bah to capitalize on this series of events quite as shamelessly he did. This morning he turned it all into a motivational ritual, with John held up as the example of goodness. (The source of evil and discontent, I, was politely left out of the morality play.) The greatest irony of all is that, under the rules of our management system, John was actually free to pocket the difference between what I made and what I could have made, despite the fact that my demands were almost certainly the catalyst for the bonus being awarded in the first place. In the end, though, I also won. I received a 33% raise that subsequent week.
We Americans with our manifest destiny keep marching towards whatever it is that hasn't yet been reached. We creeped across a continent, played empire in the Pacific, and when that proved ridiculous, we turned our attention to space. It turns out, though, that big expensive bureaucracies will never be able to colonize anything. The spirit of colonization lies in the heart of pissed off teenagers, dirt poor desperados, religious nuts, and crowd-shocking thrill seekers, the people who can decisively march into the sunset without any real idea of where they are headed. NASA had none of that energy, and now it struggles to assert its legitimacy.
But the internet is a new kind of space, and it's a lot more like the wild west than outer space will ever be. A smart teenager can sneak into a college computer lab and build himself a web page in a few minutes. A sweating, overweight spammer can enrage millions from the comfort of his musty basement. With my modest internet power I can reliably send a hundred different people anywhere I choose.
I crossed this continent in the Conestoga of my HTML skills, and here I am, in sunny San Diego, a stranger to the sun, toiling away for long hours building the sprawling strip malls and arcades of this new endlessly virgin landscape. I'm a long way beyond rustic HTML now, but still, everything I do taps into the energy that got me started in this direction. Some of the structures I build are admittedly shoddy, but they're good enough for now and I have confidence that I can fix them "pretty soon," even after people move in (possibly without even excessively violating their privacy).
I was at work until 1:00am this morning getting an oursourced web page building system live. It took a lot out of me, but in the end putting it live was an extremely satisfying experience, especially since it's the last big thing of the summer product-making marathon. Dave the Web Developer drove me home.
I was feeling so energized once I was home that I stayed up fairly late talking with Kim, drinking screwdrivers and smoking bong hits. Decadence has never been so deserved.
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