Like A Boss: The negotiations never took place
Ha ha ha! I’m the boss of you!
I recently completed my first year of working at home as a contractor. Although not as good as my dream of doing nothing, the year was still pretty good and … I had no complaints.
What’s good about working from home? No phones. No walk-in customers leaping in your office. No floor sales. No public toilet across the hall. No attending awkward pizza-only lunches on every employee’s birthday. You don’t spend your day using company-owned equipment. (A previous boss liked to joke he was logging my keystrokes. That was a real damper on my twitter activity.) You get your very own chair. No boogers from other employees on your stuff. There’s an ottoman where two cats sleep and the view out the window is squirrels playing.
When my one-year contract expired, of course I wanted more. It was a no-brainer.
These are the actual and verbatim excerpts of the official transcripts of the negotiation process. I’m sharing them because I don’t mind being humiliated in public.
From: Shouts
Subject: ContractI am ready to keep things simple and renew the same deal, no changes needed on my end, with all the same terms (another 12 months) excepting a modest increase of only $x.xx to the hourly rate for COLA. That’s $xx.xx/hour up from $xx.xx. Other than that I can’t think of anything else.
It’s official. You all know my salary now. I literally make $X amount. Note my colorful use of marketing terms like “modest” and “only.” Ha ha ha! Player at work! Also, thinking I was being clever, I provided dollar amounts and not percentages. This was a deliberate attempt to confuse and astound. -Ed
Make the jump to read additional communiques from the “negotiation” process and the surprising twist at the end.
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Proud sponsor of the American Scream
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: What of Mediocre Fred?
For newbies, Mediocre Fred is a decent, honest, hard-working guy. He doesn’t cheat on his taxes, obeys the law and is kind to small furry creatures. As such, he’s not exactly rewarded like a paragon of the American way.
Here in America we base our entire system of government on one simple principle: No freeloaders. You have to work for a living. As a nation we abhor the notion of those who work the system to get the promised land of freebies without pulling their own weight. Well, at least on the bottom end of the scale.
Mediocre Fred has worked every week of his life since he was 16. When still in school he worked part-time. After graduating with his high school diploma, he went full-time and has never looked back.
Over the decades Mediocre Fred has always worked. He’s had no pension, 401k plan, health insurance, vacation or paid days off. He just works. And when his fellow workers tried to unionize and the company closed and bulldozed the store and built a new non-union store across the street, Mediocre Fred always seemed to land on his feet. He’d just get a new job and keep his nose to that grindstone.
That’s what you’re supposed to do, right?
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Basket Weaving for Dummies
I apologize in advance if you came here actually expecting information regarding basket weaving. My misleading headline has lead you astray. I sincerely apologize for wasting your time. At least there aren’t 42 self-loading videos on this page. I guess it could have been worse. –Ed
For a fun mental exercise I will often take modern situations and problems and try to extend them, in my own inimitable fashion, to a hypothetical construct in my mind loosely based on my concept and interpretation of an indigenous people’s village.
Does this make good sense? Is it accurate? Does it result in increased understanding of how things work? Is it, in even the slightest way, particularly useful? Perhaps not, but I enjoy it and besides, it’s my brain. That’s the one place on this planet where I get to make the rules. No wonder it’s so crazy in there.
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One day there was a visitor to the village who observed two people sitting on the ground and weaving some baskets. It was clear they were not equally skilled at the task.
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What would your reality show be called? (via So anyway…)
Reality TV
I came across a blog today that asked the simple question: “What would your reality show be called?”
My first thought was, “Hey! Excellent idea for a blog post.” But my second thought was, “Yeah, what would it be called?”
And that’s when I decided to think hard and figure it out.
It turned out to be a wee bit tougher question than I originally thought. Continue reading →
Stressure
December 23rd. Woot. Doing the lame “what I was posting a year ago” thing is a cheap way to milk out the start of a new post. Last year on the 23rd I blogged about some women who stole a child’s WalMart gift card and wrote about some really cool photography by a woman who has been featured in National Geographic magazine…
If Sarah Palin can do it, why can’t I? I’m going to invent my own words, too. I’ll start with this one:
stressure – A place where stress and pressure meet
LOLZ! RAWR! Mother Grizzly is in the house, yo.
So yeah, I was having another heart to heart with my new boss. We were talking about my fun-filled work days of balls to walls and hair on fire. Days that are so busy and hectic I don’t usually have time to take my breaks or even sit in a chair.
He was asking me about why I was letting the stress get to me.
“What would you do if you were an emergency room surgeon?,” he asked. “How would you handle the stress then, eh? They have a lot of stress!”
Wow. He really thought he had me there. So, so very clever.
I thought it over for a couple of nanoseconds and volleyed back with my rebuttal.
“Well, the first mother fucking thought that pops into my head is, oh, I don’t know. What? An emergency room surgeon? I’d probably be making what? Five million fucking dollars a year?!?!?”
I’m working on a new mathematical formula to explain this phenomenon. Think about it. Let us consider someone with a minimum wage job and no stress. Say it’s pumping gas at the local station. Now someone comes along and says, “Wanna get out of this dump? I’ll pay you $1 an hour more but I’ll literally blow your fucking head off with pressure and stress. Sound good?”
The point here is simple: I don’t want a level of stress equal to an “emergency room surgeon” while making damn near minimum wage. Seems simple, eh? Yet in my boss’s mind that level of stress in exchange for peanuts sounds perfectly reasonable.
The formula for this seems simple. If the situation you have to go through at work isn’t worth the level of pay, then you won’t give much a shit, will you?
Shouts from the Abyss 
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