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martyrocracy
Thursday, September 23 1999
It's getting a little hard for me to take sitting here next to our beleaguered Data Analyst, the girl who couldn't go to Hawaii with our colleagues (including her own boyfriend) because of a last-minute data audit someone sprang upon her. I suspect the girl has something of a martyr complex. She practically lives in this place, doing absolutely all the work that gets put upon her. Indeed, she works so hard and takes on so much that she frequently fails to do anything to anyone's satisfaction. One thing I've learned about this sort of environment (and that Dave Van has pointed out to me) is that corporations, especially little ones, come to expect their individual workers to do exactly as much as they are willing to do. Being industrious wins no medals or significant accolades, just additional work. The Machiavellian ideal here is to look extremely busy while actually accomplishing less than one is able to. In fact, if it's possible, one should try to make his own personal business look like company business. That way, the employee stays late, the employee looks busy, but the employee is actually not taking on so much work that people come to expect him to accomplish herculean miracles. It becomes a classic example of seeming altruism actually being to a social-manipulator's personal advantage, just like Bill Gates giving away a billion dollars worth of Windows machines to impoverished school districts.
At this point it's important for me to tangentially note that I've probably contributed more to Apple Computer in my day than the value of the three Macintoshes I stole back when I sociopathically craved computer knowledge in the early 90s. Throughout that time I was as good a Macintosh evangelist as anyone could hope to find, and I know of several people who bought Macintoshes because of my influence. Of course, later on I jumped ship when Windows machines finally graduated to "usably retarded."
Of course, by now the ordeals of our thankless Data Analyst have entered into company folklore. There's a steady stream of people coming by offering their condolences, tickets to ball games, invitations to bars, you name it. Certainly a lot of this has something to do with the fact that she's an attractive young woman, but it's also just yet another aspect of the sickening martyrocracy running the place.
Today marks the Randomly Ever After one year anniversary and possibly the autumnal equinox as well.
I just wrote an account of a particularly funny incident from the days of Big Fun. I hadn't written this story up until now because for a long time I feared the matter was still under police investigation.
This morning when the alarm went off I was in the middle of a miserable dream. My face had just broken out severely for the first time in years, and as I was squeezing out the contents of a pimple, the damn thing proved inexhaustible, a veritable unstoppable gop stopper of the zit world. Not only that, but Kim didn't seem to like me any more. She was being cold and indifferent to me, something I've never actually experienced from her in real life. These were just some of the ordeals this dream series put me through. Another scene had me riding the bus to my old high school. I was the same age I am now, surrounded by the usual schoolbus assortment of school-aged kids. An inexplicable janitor (placed in the dream seemingly to fill the role of "outside observer") leaned over my way as he stooped to pick up some trash and told me that I looked about 40 years old. He asked what I was doing still going to school. I had no face-saving answer.
The other day I had another dream that was absolutely horrifying. It featured as its chief evil protagonist none other than my company's Director of E-commerce, who in real life is a somewhat dandified Iranian expatriate. In my dream, he had created a "pit of anguish" within an excavated hole in the stream directly in front of my childhood home. Within this hole he'd placed crates containing hapless little turtles, all of them with their mouths wired shut. By the time I stumbled upon this "pit of anguish" most of the turtles had starved to death. (The boundless cruelty of the imagery from this dream still sends shivers up my spine!) I was so horrified that I alerted the whole company and told them what had happened at the hands of their Director of E-commerce.
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