Sticky Beak
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The Skinny
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...life in small Northern towns, working for assholes, boys who refuse to become men, synthetic personalities, anorexic models and their link to emotional scarring, bad marijuana trips, crazies on BC Transit, beer, piece of shit cars, living out of a suitcase paycheck to paycheck, unrequited love, Seinfeld, minimum-wage jobs, broken New Year�s resolutions, and over-limit Visa accounts.
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Confessions of a Ringmaster All around me, I'm surrounded by animals... the restless (read: demanding) chickens organizing a petition to establish blog update guidelines (you know who you are!), the monkeys I baby-sit, the hyenas that hound me to pay my (overdue) bills... they're everywhere, and I'm the Ringmaster. No wonder I have an allergy to fur... it's one of those innate Darwinisms designed for survival. Survival of the fittest. Yeah, right. If that were true, there would be people dropping like flies all around me. Public Servants. Lord, give me strength. If ever you wondered whether there was a life form below algae on the scale of evolution and thought processes... there's your answer; public servants. I can say this because I have become one of them. At this point, I maintain independent thought and the cognitive ability to discern between right and wrong, utilize common sense and basic decision making skills... however I have no doubt that in time I too will meld into this pot of mindlessness. As with the Borg Collective, "resistance is futile". But for the time being, I feel like a mole for the outside, Private world... a Double Agent, if you will. How foolish they are to let me though the gates, to give me responsibility within the Collective, and to even furnish me with an office with a door that locks from the inside. Silly servants. A prime example of the void of common sense and inability to exhibit independent thought is the 'team' meeting I held a few weeks back for 3 of the monkeys I supervise. For the past couple years, there had been dissention in the ranks among the primates here; one - we'll call her Primate A - felt excluded, neglected, bullied and eventually left on stress leave as a result (NB. Stress leave is to the public servant what oxygen is to the rest of us; an obvious right and a given within existence as we know it). Upon her return from stress leave, Primate A did not feel that any issues relating to her leave had been resolved. Thus the team meeting. The meeting was designed to a) deconstruct the existing set-up of the work place and put it back together in a way that best met the needs of the department, while capitalizing on the core competencies of each individual, and b) allow for an open & honest discussion about the current caustic environment of the workplace and how we could best resolve the issues and resentment woven though the department like cancer. The meeting was very clearly established FOR the monkeys as a means for them to address the issues plaguing their work and making them unhappy. We did not, however, address these pervasive concerns. Nor did we resolve any long-standing conflicts. Instead, the meeting focused primarily on three things: 1. Doughnuts: Why did I not bring any to the meeting? How could I possibly dream of holding a meeting to address these very serious issues without the offering of sugar-coated rings of deep-fried dough? We focused on this for several minutes, and returned to this topic intermittently throughout the meeting. Like I said... no common sense. no independent thought. It's like traveling though time to 1,000,000,000 BC when our species was still at the evolutionary stage of tadpoles. Except that I'm almost positive the tadpoles never asked their supervisor if they could wear scrubs while feeding their dog doughnuts at work. Mother. Of. God. |