"... where they could arrive early, leave late and spend a lot of time looking busy. ... 'I remember in the early stages of the pandemic when a client said to me, "Without the office, how will I pretend to work?"' Some bosses don’t believe people are really productive unless they see them at their desks — which infuriates remote employees who want their work to be what counts...) At the beginning of the pandemic, [Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, professor of business psychology at Columbia] thought remote work would be a great opportunity for managers to focus on performance and not on office politics. Now he’s worried that hybrid work will create a two-tiered system. 'Those who are optimizing for politics are going to be back at work, and those who are not able to leave their homes or they enjoy focusing on output are inadvertently punished.... Because, even though you say that it doesn’t matter where you are, there’s still a premium for being in the right place at the right time, telling the right things to the right person. And so who’s going to be at the office? More likely men than women, more likely majorities than minorities, more likely high-status or rich people, more likely extroverts than introverts, and more likely people who are ruthlessly focused on advancing their career.'"
From "The pandemic was hard on office suck-ups. Now they’re back and ready to schmooze" (WaPo).
I almost didn't read this article because the illustration, which you'll have to click through to see, is so absurdly and earnestly racist. And you can see from the bit I chose to excerpt that there is a racial analysis to this question of sucking up at the office. It's easy to just guess that it's a white-male strategy to make a show of catering to the boss rather than actually working. It's what you see on the TV show "The Office," and it's what the professor of business psychology at Columbia tells us is "likely." That's the kind of cheap prejudice we're fed these days. The article identifies a real problem: The kind of people who thrive working in the office might be the ones who put on a show and don't really work. But I don't like seeing this gender-and-race material thrown in as if the basic problem isn't spicy enough and women and minorities are useful excitement.
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83 comments:
It's easy to just guess that it's a white-male strategy to make a show of catering to the boss rather than actually working.
It's not that he's a white male.
It's that he's a dirty ginger.
I used to work at a place where most of the managers smoked, and it was not lost on the rest of us that smokers, who all shared the same break area with the managers, often got first crack at openings for promotions.
"Suck-ups"?
Get back to me when you write that Jeff Bezos expose... from home, if you prefer.
This has always been the way with human beings. Competence is never the deciding factor; at best it's a minimum requirement. Being able to charm the decision-makers above you is what counts for getting ahead. Don't like it, go work for yourself. Of course, if you do, you'll still have to schmooze and charm the clients and customers.
i'm retired, so i'm ignorantly asking this Serious Question
If you work from home.. How do you do your elevator pitch?
"But I don't like seeing this gender-and-race material thrown in as if the basic problem isn't spicy enough and women and minorities are useful excitement"
Ah, you don't like it. Tough. But if not useful excitement, what else are discussions of "women and minorities" in the MSM for? Their tragic experience of universal inequity is always and everywhere the "basic problem."
Apple polishers learn young that they can win by polishing teacher's applies. They become salespeople, preachers, and politicians. Some of these folks are good and some are evil, but they help make the world go around. Race and gender are not relevant.
Everyone needs to find their niche, and facts tend to come out over time.
Back in the 1990s the video game company iD Software created landmark technology and massively influential products (Doom, Quake, etc.). The first face of the company was one John Romero, who gained fame far and wide as the "genius." The true technology genius was one John Carmack, who sat in the dark writing code 24/7. Over time Romero left and flamed out with his own business. Carmack endured, his technology became a standard, and he became a pure geek who rose to fame. Carmack later became CTO of Oculus (Facebook, Oculus Rift).
There are horses for courses.
there is a racial analysis to this question of sucking up at the office.
Given that the "analysis" consisted of mere guesswork ("most likely" this over that, etc.), it seems like there was no actual "racial analysis" applied to this question.
And *of course* the Black guy is the boss. They plainly screwed this cartoon up though by not having a photo of his Indian wife on his bookshelf. I mean, WTH does a cat figurine do to resolve the White Supremacy scourge, y'know....
It's a question for the woke. Are the identity injustices, racism etc., more or less an aftermath of, or downstream from, bigger injustices, or are they somehow the drivers making the world unjust (and unhappy for the, er, losers)?
There's lots of history of white people (men) killing and exploiting each other. The Protestant vs. Catholic wars, to some extent both world wars. It seems easy in this context for white people to inflict injustice on people of color as well. It seems upside down to say race gender or whatever are always the main thing.
Tim: Your comment reminds me of the character in “The Player” on his way to an AA meeting because “that’s where all the deals are being done.”
BIPOCs and women have to work twice as hard from home (but they always have, so four times harder in reality), since people can't see they're of color and/or female. Ergo, they're more likely to come back to the office than white men.
So going to work is now racist. This is so tiresome.
No 'professor of business psychology' know anything about work.
knows anything
the Idea that white men are the "suck-ups" and "office pols" is so hilarious. The opposite is true, the white (and asian) men are focused on getting the real work done. Its women who are "More likely" to be suckups, play office politics, make a big show of being busy, and goof off on remote work because they have family obligations.
In most techncial fields, women get bored with actual work fairly quickly and before you know it they're in management, or have moved on to being a liason or teaching or writing. OR they're working part-time and raising a family. There's nothing wrong with that, but to say the opposite is untrue and absurd.
I think Jordan Peterson might agree.
"useful excitement" I like that term.
You can't rise to the level of your incompetence if you work from home. Defeat the Peter Principle.
One of the biggest problems in big organizations (not just business) is favoritism and suck-ups. I have seen people who never did anything useful keep going because buddies with the boss. Professors who are popular and ride the coat-tails of their grad students do very well without doing any actual research themselves. Such people actively resist performance-based reward systems as "not fair". If it gets out of control, you get Russia, where half their military equipment doesn't work.
Some bosses don’t believe people are really productive unless they see them at their desks — which infuriates remote employees who want their work to be what counts
Yeah, well, that's when you take matters into your own hands and find a new boss. You don't go whinging to the Post and hope they write an article about it that suddenly changes the world to one of your liking.
I read the first sentence of the clipped section and already knew it was going to end, as usual, with “women and minorities hardest hit.”
Plus it’s WAPO. So… one trick pony
People (like this author) are ALWAYS concerned with “how it might….” And the might part is always “impact women, mothers, the poor, the young, the old, minorities, gays and the alphabet folks”.
They said it about work from home, right. Now they’re saying it about going back to work. Always the same. Women and minorities hardest hit.
Deep thoughts from the Ivory Tower, where the sources all study their subjects with deep intensity and know absolutely nothing about it. They then bloviate to a mal-educated liberal media activist for the enjoyment and bias confirmation of their select audience.
I think there is fleetingly little productive work that can actually be done from the employee's home- software development, accounting, and what else besides porn? I stand by what I wrote 2 years ago on the subject- if it is productive and can be done from your loft apartment in San Francisco, it can be done just as easily by someone in India, and by someone smarter and more productive, too. If it isn't actually productive, then it doesn't need to be done at all, at least not on salary.
I was a medicinal chemist before I retired- a good deal of my job could have been done from home, but not the entire job, and certainly not even half of it- I still needed a chemistry laboratory with millions of dollars of equipment at hand.
It's easy to just guess that it's a white-male strategy to make a show of catering to the boss rather than actually working. It's what you see on the TV show "The Office,"...
Not a good reference. There are Michael Scotts in the real world, but the never last very long.
Yes- women, children, and PoC's hardest hit. Always. Every time.
Where is the handi-capable left-handed lesbian in the illustration?
Leftism is evil.
And yet another reminder, if not for white men (and these days, increasingly Hispanic men), we'd all be living in caves in the dark.
What Yancy @9:45 said. How does a manager "size you up", or "get a feel for a fit"? Sight unseen the playing field may well be level. There is value to effective schmoozing in sales. My last two bosses have been really good people at the core and very friendly. I'm blessed and I know it.
Things have become so fucking absurd.
Every attribute, characteristic and behavior associated with any form of success is labeled and denigrated as "Whiteness". How do you fix a culture that toxic?
I've been a cubicle dweller, on site consultant and a developer working from home. The arrive early and leave late people are usually the most productive people because they realize that the normal 9 to 5 workday is filled with meetings with the idiots who think an hour to discuss "ideas" is productive work. And all hour long meetings will run over by 5 minutes times the number of people in the meeting.
Working from home doesn't change this too much. A cheap web cam make face to face discussions possible. The quality of the discussion depends on the quality of the video chat program (Google Meet is my favorite). Elevator pitches are easy over person to person text chat, "Here look at this one pager I wrote up".
As a consulant, you bill for what you work and you are on site from Monday morning to Thursday afternoon. You stay until 7 or later because you gotta bill at least 40 hours anyway. Every meeting is billable time and if you haven't finished your work because of 8 hours of meetings, you just work 8 more hours and bill for 8 extra hours that week. Restaurants,airports and planes have internet access, so you sit at a bar and keep working.
I did some consulting for a Silicon Valley company with a liberal work-from-home policy and it was the most productive office I’ve ever seen. You need long, uninterrupted blocks of time alone to get your work done, but you also need time with colleagues to collaborate. Some of that collaboration needs to be unstructured and face-to-face for reasons that are difficult to pinpoint but very real. All of which is to say that the either/or framing of this question is, like most American debates these days, profoundly dopey.
"It's easy to just guess that it's a white-male strategy to make a show of catering to the boss rather than actually working."
Yeah, it's actually the blacks and women doing all the work. They just hire us old, white males to keep the government off their backs.
Another overlooked victim class is comprised of those who look presentable on Zoom—fairly symmetrical faces, ok hair, tidy bookshelf in the background—but have let themselves go during the pandemic.
Facial discrimination works at home but doesn’t work in the office if one has a schlubby body or is vertically or hygienically challenged.
Pick ANY random job in the USA and you have a 60% chance of finding a white person doing it, especially since we get to count most Latinos as white for census purposes. Ipso facto America is racist! See. Easy!
"...and what else besides porn?"
Customer service and technical support. And there are costs to having that work shipped overseas, as many companies found to their detriment prior to bringing it back to the US (or at least the northern countries of the western hemisphere).
I still needed a chemistry laboratory with millions of dollars of equipment at hand.
Or a sketchy RV parked out back...
I do IT Help Desk support for a living. My boss is well over 2 hours away from my office. At my office location, many employees get paid literally for schmoozing with each other most of the day (or they are surfing the web on non-work related searches) and I have no idea how they get their work done. I also get interrupted by people who want to schmooze. That is why I am one of the first in the office and one of the last to leave every day so I can get my tasks completed. When the pandemic hit, I worked from home for 18 months. I was even more productive at home than in the office AND I got done with my work at my scheduled time. I have the metrics of open and closed tickets to back this up and I was not being interrupted by someone who wants to socialize. I was forced to go back to the office full time last year by my boss. Meanwhile, my boss decided he could still do his work full time from home. To say that I am pissed is an understatement when a supervisor makes a demand for me to go back to the office full time when he doesn’t. At least he isn’t in the same office location as me is a blessing since he wouldn’t be watching my every move.
Was the pandemic hard on sucks-ups? It seems from the one quoted that they recognized fairly early in the pandemic that they would have to adapt. Sucking up works best when other people can’t see you sucking up.
I've got a friend who is a salesman. A few days ago he couldn't make it to a get together because he was "taking a customer out drinking." Nice work, if you can get it.
It is my opinion that when you are at the beginning of your career, it is especially bad to work from home. I'm basing this on my 25-year-old son's experience, as well as what I experienced at the beginning of my career much (much) earlier. He started his career in the summer of 2019, worked from the office for 6 months, and then everyone was sent home. He has lost many serendipitous learning and being-mentored opportunities and is significantly behind a friend of his who started at the same company the previous year, who therefore had a year and a half instead of 6 months to learn from the people around him even when they were not trying to teach him something. My kid is smart and dedicated, but his friend will probably go farther - and all who knew them in school would have expected the reverse.
Arguing from anecdote, I know, but can you review the fact that when you're walking to the restroom, you might see someone's screen and realize that they're doing something you don't know how to do?
If your salesman has too low of a handicap, you may be playing him to play golf, but if he closes deals, so what?
Xmas said...
Elevator pitches are easy over person to person text chat, "Here look at this one pager I wrote up"
i'm NOT seeing that.
I thought the whole idea of an Elevator pitch was: a captive audience, for a VERY short time?
If i'm a VP, and someone i don't know (or, barely know) sends me a text chat; i'm ignoring it. If there's an attachment, i'm NOT opening it.
Sorry, but the best you're going to be able to convince ME is,
SOMETIMES, for SOME THINGS, WTF might work as well as being in the office
(not many times).... (not many things)
For Every shirker at the office, there'll be a shirker at home
For Every Go getter at home, there'll be a Go getter at the office
Color me not convinced
My job was to sit in an office with another person and think up stuff to present for production. If I got an idea getting a burrito, petting my dog or in the middle of the night - I would wait to share it at the office with my partner, who most often said 'that's been done'. I can't imagine working from home for what I did, which required a lot of bullshitting about the task, and other stuff, in an office setting. But that was then.
Most office jobs, especially in larger companies, can be done in considerably less than the allocated eight hours. There is often no personal financial benefit for working hard the entire time. So you can use the extra 2-4 hours/day goofing off on the internet/around the water cooler, "schmoozing" for personal advancement, or (especially when working from home) doing something personally beneficial with your time (i.e. child care, home schooling, housework, working out) while being available in case of work emergency.
It's OK to be white.
Can we say that?
'I've got a friend who is a salesman. A few days ago he couldn't make it to a get together because he was "taking a customer out drinking." Nice work, if you can get it.'
I have friends with jobs like that.
If they're in sales and don't make their numbers, they're gone.
The entertaining is just a part of the sales cycle...
exhelodrvr1 said...
Most office jobs, especially in larger companies, can be done in considerably less than the allocated eight hours. There is often no personal financial benefit for working hard the entire time.
My experience also. I have rarely worked overtime and when I did it was generally a legitimate emergency. ("Why are the file indexes being corrupted every time we do a write?!" or "Uh, guys, half the tables in the database just vanished!"). I've always maintained that if you're constantly working late into the night it's because you don't manage your time well, your boss is an asshole, or you don't like your home life.
And I've more than once caught the "show up early/leave late" types pulling out of the parking lot 10 minutes after everyone else has gone home.
"It's OK to be white.
Can we say that?"
To ask the question is to answer it.
Of course we can't. No one may.
The WFH policy is not at all fair to Blacks or gays because all of them are employed making television commercials or appearing on HGTV shows, both of which require those oppressed minorities to be physically in the studio.
"the Idea that white men are the "suck-ups" and "office pols" is so hilarious. The opposite is true, the white (and asian) men are focused on getting the real work done. Its women who are "More likely" to be suckups, play office politics, make a big show of being busy, and goof off on remote work because they have family obligations."
This, overwhelmingly. And that's in private industry! In government the imbalance is off the charts.
Who'da guessed that Richie Cunningham would make a bad employee?
Shallow leftism aside - Bullshit Jobs guy, David Graeber, sums it up pretty well. There's a lot of other videos of him plugging the book. He has since died. Most Bullshit Jobs require conspicuousness.
Pearls Before Swine had a good one - pre pandemic.
Ann Althouse is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I've ever known in my life.
WaPo is just flogging the latest fad in the hopes of undermining everything that has worked for centuries to make America great. For every suck-up pretending to work at the office there are five pretending to work at home sucking up in Zoom meetings and email, and being distracted by other family members, and all the home goodies easily at hand (TV, refrigerator, etc.).
There are advantages and disadvantages to any work arrangement, and setups that work well for some and badly for others. Remember when the "open office" was all the rage not too long ago, with WeWork leading the charge? It always seemed to me the reason was to save on office costs and to be able to see what people are doing. The downside of course is constant distraction.
The mandates, the cargo cult, were hard on everyone, especially granny at planned parent/hood, and children ordered to wear petri dishes, viral collectors, dust cloths, and to sequester in elevated risk environments.
That said, schmoozing or socializing? Is hard, but worth it, or so we were not so long ago advised.
I like the story about Christina Smith near the end, especially this bit:
"Smith, 37, initially tried to befriend the boss herself: making small talk, offering to get him coffee, inviting him to get coffee together."
I don't know, Christina, but low-key asking your boss out on dates might not be the best way to go about sucking up to him. Someone might misread your intentions.
Link to archived version (so you don't have to WaPo).
https://archive.ph/PRp1i
Much of this is, in my mind, stereotypical female behavior. By HS, I hated English and History classes because the As were going to the girls who sucked up to the mostly female teachers, and would just parrot back what the teachers wanted on tests. They all seemed to end up as teachers themselves. College was much better because I could mostly chart my own course in terms of teachers and classes.
I look back, and realize that I was very lucky in my first real professional job - as a programmer for the 1980 Decennial Census. Within the first six months I had attracted the attention of the senior scientist in the division, when we wrote competing 3D Tic Tac Toe game programs. Mine was a slightly better, and his was a lot faster. He was the one who figured out how to use me - on very complex 1.5 man projects by myself. Our division was unique - run more like a startup than a government bureaucracy, with the unproductive pushed safely out of the way. For the next 15 years, the mode was set - I would do the impossible if left alone. Best was the year or so I had a huge office to myself in the secure area containing the computer systems. Then, I moved to patent law. After 4 years in a small collegial male environment, I went to work with a large electronics firm with over 100 patent attorneys. Kept getting in trouble. There was the time when a couple of slacking female support staff filed a sexual misconduct claim against me, because I wouldn’t make eye contact, because they were talking with male attorneys to keep from having to carry their weight (and my Secretary was picking up the slack). The VP didn’t like me one bit, and tried to get me fired several times. But my production was in the top 2-3 out of over 100, in terms of patent filings, better than twice that of anyone else under him. And the top engineers loved me. HQ management looked at production, and took my side. I worked best, when I could close my door, work uninterrupted for hours, and work more hours than anyone else. Throughout the rest of my career, I did best that way, and less well when I had to deal with everyone else, and, in particular, with office politics. I did great in a small boutique patent firm, but less well in a moderately large general practice law firm.
My experience was that female dominated work organizations were typically less efficient, because everyone spent their time gossiping and socializing. Getting along was typically more important than actually generating work product. I think this is a result of the our traditional sex role differentiation between hunting and gathering. But as is obvious, I never worked well with my coworkers, doing best when I could be put in a dark corner, alone with my computer, to turn out code or patent applications.
I was a chemical engineer who became a manager and later a director of engineering services.
One of the issues that I see, at least for engineering types, and probably for a few others such as accountants, etc, is how do you mentor college graduates? A fresh engineering graduate doesn't really know squat yet, and has a lot to learn in the next five to 10 years before they are really productive. They need a lot of mentoring, and I don't see how that can happen in a WFH situation. And for those who work in a refinery or chemical plant, how do you learn the ins and outs of the plant? Now, granted, for the coders, this may not be an issue. But I can tell you what scares me about new engineers is that they don't know what they don't know. In a chemical plant, that can be a dangerous situation.
Let me point out that its simply impossible for most people to put in 8 hours of high-quality brain work every day - that's especially true of technical and finance work. Most managers i knew would brag about working 12 hours days, but most of that was just spent in meetings or yacking with someone about something non-essential. The actual time spent reviewing and providing guidance on technical matters was much, much, less.
That's also why 8 hours of class on some difficult technical mwtter is rarely 8 hours. when you factor in lunch/breaks etc. its probably 4-5, because they learnt that people simply cannot process 8 hours straight of the stuff.
“ But I don't like seeing this gender-and-race material thrown in as if the basic problem isn't spicy enough and women and minorities are useful excitement.”
The basic problem is that if those women and minorities you hired to make your office “look like America” don’t show up for work, your office is going to look as horrible as it did in the 60s, and you will be fired/sued/cancelled as a result.
My favorite suck up was a fellow postal clerk who had developed a jumping technique to demonstrate his energy and enthusiasm. He was an inferior letter sorter but he sure looked energetic. His last name was Cooper and he was called Cooper Scooper by his fellow employees. Sure enough, he was promoted to management and was carefully mentored in his new position. He had his wife, according to her, buy him the same kind of knit ties his supervisor wore. Quite dapper. Fast forward a number of years, long after I had left the PO, I was told The Scooper had been arrested for embezzlement. After a lengthy investigation and sting operation by Postal Inspectors he was caught stealing from the stamp vending machine which was his job to maintain. And then some years later I ran into him delivering vegetables in Berkeley, CA. He was divorced but his daughter was with him on his run and he looked content.
I worked for many years in a hybrid office, with half our department working from home and half from the office.
What I found is that the office people were most likely to be those who thrive working with other people face-to-face, while the home people (now, wait for it....) worked better alone and in isolation.
You might be surprised to learn that office-suck-ups were pretty equally distributed between the two groups; and that it is pretty easy to look like you're busy even when you are working from home.
a lot of you here; have made it very clear, how EASY it is for y'all to work from home..
And, actually; how Much BETTER it is, since you don't have to waste your time talking to LOSERS.
But, I'm Not surprised. After all, y'all work 97 hours a day (with NO BREAKS), and are frankly,
The BEST in your fields. I know all that is true, because you KEEP mentioning it.. So it Must Be
You have NEVER, had ANY problem where you needed assistance from a mere mortal; and NEVER failed to complete a project on time, on budget.. without a single bug.
I am sure that superhumans like yourselves could work from a park bench (in a thunderstorm)
But, what about those of us that are slackers? Most of us need breaks. Most of us need collaboration.
In a more perfect world, they'd just get y'all to do all the work (which would be easy, you'd just increase your daily work day from 97hrs to 105
BUT! MOST of you are retired.
Those poor kids two years out of college, have NEVER been in the office.
They're still trying to figure out how to log in
Blogger rsbsail said...
One of the issues that I see, at least for engineering types, and probably for a few others such as accountants, etc, is how do you mentor college graduates? A fresh engineering graduate doesn't really know squat yet, and has a lot to learn in the next five to 10 years before they are really productive. They need a lot of mentoring, and I don't see how that can happen in a WFH situation. And for those who work in a refinery or chemical plant, how do you learn the ins and outs of the plant? Now, granted, for the coders, this may not be an issue. But I can tell you what scares me about new engineers is that they don't know what they don't know. In a chemical plant, that can be a dangerous situation.
I am also a chemical engineer and I have a company that does refinery and chemical plant workforce development. Almost 40 years into my career, I can validate your concern. When I started, I worked with engineers who had been working as process engineers or project engineers for decades. Few plants or refineries have those kind of people anymore, which limits even in-person mentoring. Refineries and chemical plants are demonized in the popular mind, and it's getting more difficult to attract and retain young people.
A high school friend's daughter has worked for 20 years as assistant to the President of a New England state university.
She reported to him that 40% of the 2021 incoming class has no idea how to study, and will be flunking out by the semester's end.
Coincidentally, I graduated with a Chem.E. degree from that school. And a B.A. in history.
I loved going to college. In those days, I might have even been called a "study queer".
****************
And BTW, that same high school friend went to Yale, where John Kerry was one of his classmates.
He said Kerry was always considered a phony and an asshole---but one with a photographic memory. I guess that explains a lot.
NorthOfTheOneOhOne said...
It's easy to just guess that it's a white-male strategy to make a show of catering to the boss rather than actually working. It's what you see on the TV show "The Office,"...
***********************
That sounds like someone who's never worked in a Sales Office, where the boss and managers are "line", living or dying based on whether they "make their numbers", and not "staff", who support the "line" employees.
Useless, ineffective ass kissers are the LAST thing Sales "line managers" want to have around.
That illustration is unfortunate. The illustrator is Kristian Hammerstad in Norway. His webpage shows a lot of interesting illustrations he's done, including one of Trump that's actually pretty good.
'The illustrator is Kristian Hammerstad in Norway. His webpage shows a lot of interesting illustrations he's done, including one of Trump that's actually pretty good.'
He was a great UN Secretary General as well...
People who are focused on advancing their careers decide to accomplish that by just pretending to work?
I generally assume suck-ups are likely criminals.
You wait for the ask.
LOL now everyone is suddenly concerned about mentoring? Out of all the attorneys I have worked with, only one ever uttered the word "mentor" - one. All the rest must have figured it out on their own. Hell, I only worked with one attorney that really put effort into training me as a paralegal (same one that had mentors himself). These so-called 'mentors' seem to be like unicorns - often talked about but never seen. I call BS.
A few talked above about sales. Sales people paid by commission are interesting. They comprise some of the highest paid and some of the lowest paid people in the USA. There is no actual "salary band" that describe commissioned sales jobs.
I had an uncle who sold railroad cars for a living. He used to talk of the time he sold 100 freight cars to a single railroad for moving sugar beets. Period. During sugar beet harvesting season these cars would be shuttling back and forth between where they were loaded and where they were emptied. The rest of the year they'd sit on a siding waiting for the next harvesting season. Selling single use cars was the best- because it created a demand for mor cars overall... His company moved HQ, so he moved with them. Decided he didn't like it in the new place, cashed out, retired, and moved to back where he liked it. Within a year he was working for them again. They opened up an auxiliary office manned by him and his secretary, where he could meet with RR execs, or travel into Manhattan to meet with them. And the key to selling, aside from knowing the product, was schmoozing, lots and lots of schmoozing combined with generous amount or alcohol. Schmoozing is a skill. And you either have it or you don't; you can't learn it. And at the time, at the level he was working, schmoozing involved alcohol consumption. Not wine, not beer, not frozen drinks with an umbrella, but whiskey straight or on the rocks. Or something similar. I'm not cut out for that level of sales.
I sold appliances for many years at a big box, not commissioned. I like selling things, it's fun, and is actually, if done right, that is, the way I did it, a win-win game. The customer gets something he (or she) needs or wants, and the company gets a sale! I was good at it. Had highest total sales in the division for the week several times. As a part timer... Was always in top 10 for sales per hour.
What Tim in Vermont said- "I used to work at a place where most of the managers smoked, and it was not lost on the rest of us that smokers, who all shared the same break area with the managers, often got first crack at openings for promotions. is very true. And can be expanded. Smokers promote smokers, and alcoholics promote alcoholics. If you're a non-smoker and a family man (or woman) who goes home right after work to be with family instead of out for a few cold ones with the co-workers- you're at a severe disadvantage come promotion time. My particular job has a lot of alcoholics in it. Promotion opportunities are few and far between- someone has to die or retire before there's an opening. The last few times there's been an opening in my area, the promotion has gone to either an alcoholic or heavy drinker. 3 of the last 4 job opening at my facility for my position have occurred because someone ruined their chances for promotion by either coming in to work visibly drunk, or getting drunk WHILE AT WORK! One retirement.
Suck-ups or just lonely people looking for a human connection?
Unless they really, really liked being alone, the isolatoes may have suffered most.
Along with women and minorities, of course.
I now understand. I am a racist. I caught it from my dad and mom. Dad told me, on time is 10 minutes before punch in. Half hour early is a good time to relax, look at the paper, listen to the bosses talk.(but keep my mouth shut) Volunteer for extra hours and projects. Clean when you can't think of anything else productive. finishing a project on time is for losers, better to be early, Dont end the day until you are told the day is over.
Worse part, I passed the same racist thinking onto my children. They do the same thing. They in turn have already passed it onto the grandkids.
ALP said...
LOL now everyone is suddenly concerned about mentoring? Out of all the attorneys I have worked
is it okay, if i "LOL" at You for being So Foolish as to think Everyone here is an attorney?
If you READ the comments, you'd know a little better
“… the basic problem isn't spicy enough and women and minorities are useful excitement.” For about 99% of the “problem” cases, that is a true statement.
Bruce Hayden @ 2:36: Very interesting. It sounds as if you found your way, did a lot of good, and had some fun. Despite office politics!
I worked in bullshit corporate jobs for 20 years, then accidentally became an IT consultant. It improved my life immensely because now I had responsibility for two things - customer satisfaction and billable hours - and no bullshit. I realized how productive I could be when the meetings and culture crap and bickering were eliminated. My friends couldn't wait to get out of the corporate world; I'm still working, happily productive, and I'm older than Professor Althouse.
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