I'm a Slave and I am a Master

I paid off my credit card debt today. It took 5 years after getting out of college, but it’s gone. All that shit I bought in college is finally paid off. I’m unsubstantiated debt free (not entirely true, I think we still have a hundred or two on some clothing cards, Old Navy, etc.) Those are nothing though compared to the thousands that are gone now.

I’m always disappointed in these accomplishments that should fill me with something. Yeah, it’s gone, but now I just need to save more so I don’t fall into credit card debt at some point in the future.

I went to see Kalib on Saturday about my tattoo. When I walked in the door he asked me if I was going to beat him up. I laughed and told him I wanted to set up a hard date for him so he would have to finish a sketch for it. We settled on May second. He told me he had a good idea of what it was going to look like in his head, and that he just needed to draw it out. What he described sounded pretty sweet, and he talked about adding some mechanical gears and stuff in the wings which I thought was a cool addition. It should be bad ass. Although by nature chest tattoos are all bad ass.

When it was warm a few weeks ago, I was wearing short sleeves in the Walmart grocery shopping Sunday morning. Little kids in their Sunday best would give me stares and then ask their moms what was on my arms. Their Mom’s shushed them and dragged them in the opposite direction I was going.

My work rage is coming back. I've been able to put up with things because I'm at the sandbox. I can work out my anger in the dirt, and generally I can see the benefit behind stupid initiatives. This latest one takes the proverbial cake. Opposite of Dog is getting ride of ALL of it's company cell phones. That's millions of dollars a year that will be saved. OK, Jane and Johnny Jackass in the office don't need a company cell to get their jobs done effectively. They are right next to their phones 95% of the day. I on the other hand, am at my desk, in the shop, walking around the yard, driving 3 miles round trip to a test site, climbing up and down dirty slippery machines, navigating rough terrain on foot and by truck. We all NEED cell phones at the sandbox, for safety, and for a huge boost in productivity. Nope, stupid black and white initiative is going through.

Sounds pretty stupid, right? What on Earth could make it worse? Well, let’s put our imagination caps on. Pretend that, after all the rumors have flown and after manager after manager has pieced together bits of the story, you get this real gem of an email from a VP. Even better, pretend it’s full of grammatical errors. I’ll pretend it says something like this:

It is important to clarify the purpose of this change. The bottom line is that by upholding high standards of accountability and to managing the behaviors of it’s employees with regards to their cellular phone usage our company stands to save a significant sum of money.

Prior communications may have contained wording that did not accurately reflect the intent of this change. The intent is to have our employees utilized their own cellular phones to conduct company business. No employee will be required to share their personal information. However, I believe, and this has been reinforced by tens of employees, that the vast majority of company employees are willing to provide personal contact information in order to keep the high level of productivity that we have become accustomed to. The reality of the twenty first century is that cell phones and the ability to connect instantly and constantly are now necessary in our personal and professional lives. There will be no company provided cellular phones.

This change has the full support of the company executives and will allow us to get out of the business of managing cellular phones and will place employees in charge of upholding the before mentioned high standards of accountability and behavior changes. I am appreciative of the support I have received in implementing this change as I believe it to be consistent with the challenges our company faces in today’s economy. As managers, we should lead by example, as the company executives are doing, and only have personal cellular phones, not company provided ones.

Please send this message on as needed.

Vice President

As I’m imagining this letter, my imaginary brain starts to bleed from the sheer stupidity.