I worked at an Amazon Fulfillment Center for over two years. I was part of a massive hiring group, and somehow slipped through the cracks when it came time to sort people into their respective work areas - My job title was just “Hazardous Materials Outbound” and that’s it.
My first day they had too many people starting, so I was given a crash course on the RF scanner processes for inventory and thrown into the mix with assigned aisles.
Fast forward to the following week… I was befriended by some coworkers in HazMat, that clued me in on a secret: at that point in time, they only measured overall performance metrics for an entire shift, and not hourly like they do now. So if one were to speed-count an entire aisle in two hours, that left the entire day to do whatever we wanted to. Since the breaks and lunches were done in groups, we all had 3–4 breaks and 2 lunches every single day.
It lasted for the better part of two years before they switched the metrics to hourly and caught on. Worth it to not be able to ever work at Amazon again. }}
What’s sad about it? He’s minimizing input and maximizing financial gain. Private Equity does this all the time and we’re told it’s quite patriotic and worthy of emulation.
I am guessing that what the Captain means is that it is sad to avoid “work” when it is possible instead to have FUN and intense satsifaction from accomplishment by finding work you do not want to evade but instead relish. It might take some adventuresome looking and risking (also fun).
He was, after all, an innovative early digital systems guy, the “captain” of a Marina, and also takes a certain quasi-piratical pleasure in the regular stuff of life.
A close spiritual relative of his may bet the Auntie Mame insisting “Live Live Live, Life is a Banquet and most poor sons of bytches are starving to death…”
When I dropped out of college my dad was very disappointed but he gave me the best advice for life, “Whatever you do, do the best you can.” I was lucky in that my first job was with IBM but every job I had after that was of my own choosing.
And, no, we never were “upper class.” Maybe upper middle class after arriving in Venezuela with practically no money, just a desire to work and succeed. When the family arrived in 1939 they didn’t have enough beds for all of them so half slept while the other half worked. Our most cherished photograph is a picture of my dad next to the delivery van he drove. He was a talented salesman and he even got to know the president, not bad for a delivery boy.
Andrew Carnegie sure was not born upper class. How many fortunes have poor immigrants made in the US? They sure didn’t start as Upper Class, they started as “Can Do Class!” When I asked for help at the desk of the MIT dorm I was told,
“Use your MIT ingenuity.”
“You are not going to solve the problem?”
“No, use your MIT ingenuity.”
“My MIT ingenuity?”
“Yes.”
Since I was not going to get help I figured out how to solve the problem which was quite trivial, the glass of the PO Box had fallen out which I fixed with a couple of paper clips. But the lesson was one of the best I got out of college. That was the America I loved.
A Chinese proverb applies, “No fortune lasts three generations.”
I’m a potter, 50 years experience, started at age 23.
Ups and downs for sure, if a satisfying, and healthy occupation, keep at it.
Eventually, I learned to really enjoy teaching, or should I say, being around enthusiastic students, who I liked and they liked me.
It’s pretty sad. It shows a lack of character. You can try to justify it by saying rich people do it more often. That may be true, but it is still a lack of character. If I owned a business I wouldn’t hire the guy. Would you?
An admirable philosophy. Sadly it seems to be replaced with “Do as little as you can get away with”.
Finding work you relish is something that one has to work hard and plan for. It often requires taking chances, relocating, and re-education. It almost always requires delayed gratification and sacrifices.
Only once there is no inspirational leader. There needs to be something more to life than just making money. My first job was with IBM when it still had the Thomas Watson inspiration. I saw the same decline at HP after the founders left. Jack Welch might be the prototypical soulless capitalist. Roberto C. Goizueta at Coca-Cola and Chainsaw Dunlap are other notorious ones. Maybe the problem lies in the MBA training of soulless executives.
Way back in the day, I bought into the ‘be loyal, do EXTRA for the JC, be on time, be ‘good’, blah blah blah’. That’s the way I was RAISED in my ‘farm’ background!
I bought into the ‘get a good education, get a good job … and THEY will ‘take care of you’… bs’
I got the good ed, the good job… and found that THEY would TAKE ADVANTAGE of my ‘goodness’.
‘They’ were NOT going to proactively meet MY needs. I realized that I would have to ‘play their game’ in a way that got me to MY GOALS: FIRE.
I became much more mercenary in my thinking.
The JCs (corporations are ‘person’ ya know) do NOT have those ‘loyalties’ that are espoused by the ‘old timers’ as a way to ‘please the boss’.
These ‘Prole honesty attributes’ MIGHT have pleased the ‘boss’ a few millenia ago, maybe a hundred years ago… but in today’s world, ‘pleasing the boss’ is merely a way for the ‘JC’ to take advantage of the Proles.
I applaud the person in the OP that used LEGAL tactics to play the JC/corporate ‘game’ and win.
Apparently, the widespread knowledge provided by the internet is helping the Proles to learn how to ‘play the JC/corporate’ game?
If you recall, in 2020, the Apes found a way to use LEGAL to play against the SmartMoney and win. The Apes used the tactics of the smartmoney against the smartmoney. And smartmoney complained.
I see this OP story as the same kinda thing.
Not to worry. Now that the JC/corporate knows this loophole exists, it’ll be closed.
Way, way back, I worked at a sheet metal shop, there as one such creep there I’d have to try to work with from time to time, but like simply moving a folded ladder I’d pick up one end, the dingbat would just stand at the other end, not bothering to even pick it up, much less help move it… If a foreman was nearby, he’d do the minimum, the creep should have been fired many times over, just drawing down everyone could get away with… Must have had a miserable life, I bailed so don’t know what became of him, memorable, sure, but not in a good way… Don’t recall his name, likely long gone from this world… A good thing…
Yup. My mom always said “do more than is expected of you”. What happened? The more I did, the more that was expected/demanded, and the work load spiraled. The first DM I worked for at RS, was the only boss I had in over 30 years that appreciated and rewarded good work, instead of tagging the good worker as “everyone’s b!tc4”
The Amazon guy met the productivity requirements of his job (i.e., he found that if they worked fast, they could reach their quota in 2 hours and spend the other 6 hours of their shift “goofing off”. Management was getting the work product they were paying for. The big problem was that you had smart, highly productive workers who took "advantage’ of a gap in the system for their benefit.
Actually that was the kind of bone-headed management thinking that caused me to quit my engineering job at age 38 once I’d accumulated enough capital to live off the “4% rule”. Once I figured out the “lay of the land”, I’ve never had a position where I couldn’t meet the job requirements with a lot less than 40 hours per week of work. People have varying levels of ability, but I’ve never had a job where if I did twice as much work, I got paid twice as much. So, of course, I just did an excellent job at meeting my performance goals in as efficient a manner as possible, and spent the rest of my minimum 40 hrs of sitting in the office on other stuff. Eventually I got to the point of peak efficiency where I was using my engineering skills to produce a middle-class income by spending a few hours at year-end doing a little tax planning and rebalancing my investment portfolio, making my appearance in a workplace unnecessary.
If I owned the company, I’d hire and promote this guy cause he has shown he works SMART rather than hard.
But, please. Go ahead and tell the younger folks you encounter that they should lube up and willingly BOHIC.
Me? I’m gonna continue to tell them to put their own needs on at least the same level as the JCs needs.
Work a position 2 years, then self-fire, and move to the next position.
Why two years? In the first 6 months you are learning the position skills. 12 months getting really good at it.
Last 6 months looking for the next job.
Giving yourself a promotion in both job skills and in pay.
