Like a dream! The deficit is under control too!
Time for a tax cut!
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That’s ok I will go with your definition.
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I understand what you’re saying but you may have been surprised at the response from your supervisors had you given your honest opinion.
I had 6 supervisors that reported to me. None of them were afraid to give me their opinions. If I proposed something that they didn’t like they would tell me what they thought. Sometimes the discussions were brutal but at the end they either did things the way I proposed, or they convinced me where I was wrong and we went with that. The one thing that never happened, no one took what was said in those meetings personal. Never any repercussions for what you said. In fact we would often laugh about some of the things said a few hours/days later.
The one thing I miss about working is the camaraderie we had. I always had a great group of employees. I was blessed.
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OK, one short story. Office Depot warehouse. There were four of us who updated the delivery manifests each day. Two of the others wanted to work at half speed. The leader of the group said that all the work had to be done every day. So, anyone who did not finish their work by quitting time, leave it and someone else will do it for them. We ran staggered shifts because some of the delivery drivers did not get back until evening. Being single, with no family holding supper for me, I had volunteered to work the late shift. That meant that I was always going to be the last one there, which meant anything anyone else left undone, I would need to do, before I could go home. I immediately said to the team leader that was what would happen. She went to an upper level boss. The boss gave me a disciplinary write-up, and told me to shut up and do the work. One evening, the team leader called me up, from her home, around 8pm, asking how I was doing. She had assigned certain delivery routes for each person to process. I started reading off all the routes I had yet to process. She recognized the route numbers, and said “that’s all Marie’s and JoAnn’s work”. I said 'Yup. I was done with my own work an hour ago, but I’ll be here past midnight doing their work. I told you your policy would be abused". Did anything change? Nope.
Same thing at the pump seal company and RS. Coworkers who wanted to blow off their work, would go to my boss, and either play stupid or threaten to quit, and my boss would order me to do their work for them.
Steve
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Steve, no doubt you’ve had more than your share of crappy bosses. And if the job market is tight, then the option to leave is limited. However, every person has to decide how much crap they are willing to take at work.
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I worked like a dog, until the day I quit. The next place was pretty much same as the last. Actually, the last place I worked really wasn’t bad, and the coworkers pretty much pulled their weight. But, by then, I was so tired that, when my stack hit my goal, I was gone. Now, every morning, when I wake, I think “I will not spend today being yipped at”. Everything beyond that is gravy.
Steve
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Same. If I had a department manager who was afraid to give me their honest opinions, they weren’t the manager for me. And yes, sometimes they won and sometimes they didn’t.
The reality in business structured life is “You don’t always get to win, even if you’re right.”
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Exactly.
I had this quote from Thomas J. Watson Jr. hanging above my desk. I don’t know anything about Watson. He may have been a genius or a jerk, but I like what he said here.
Tom J. Watson Jr.’s philosophy on building a management team.
Copied out of Reader’s Digest, Personal Glimpses in the 1980’s
My most important contribution to IBM was my ability to pick strong and intelligent men and then hold them together by persuasion, by apologies, by financial incentives, by speeches, by chatting with their wives, by thoughtfulness when they were sick or involved in accidents, and using every tool at my command to make that team think that I was a decent guy. I knew I couldn’t match all of them intellectually, but I thought that, if I used fully every capability I had, I could stay even with them.
I never hesitated to promote someone I didn’t like. The comfortable assistant, the nice guy you like to go on fishing trips with, is a great pitfall. Instead I looked for those sharp, scratchy, harsh, almost unpleasant guys who see and tell you about things as they really are. If you can get enough of them around you and have patience enough to hear them out, there is no limit to where you can go.
Thomas J. Watson Jr., former chief executive of IBM, 1956-1971.
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@steve203 your bitterness at the way you were treated at work colors just about everything you have written for years. I have a question for you: since you were so unhappy at your job(s) why didn’t you seek better jobs? It’s not as if you were pinned down to a specific location by having a family of kids in a local school. You were, as my mother used to say, “Free, white and 21.” (Sorry, politically incorrect in this day and age but still true.) The world was your oyster. Why didn’t you leave?
Wendy
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I have been in Steve’s position for years as well. American management is not well done. The problem is a shrinking pie in relative terms and extreme greed at the top. The mismanagement is legion.
DEI breaks with that. Conflicts are managed extremely well in DEI firms. Pay is better. Management and workers are better off.
Supply-side economics shrinks the pie. The managers are crappy under those conditions. Including myself.
The breaking of DEI and a return to lower corporate taxes is a failure in American business.
In fact that American corporations and Wall Street would want lower corporate taxes should how inept and dense mentally they are in leadership.
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I did quit, repeatedly. Quit the pump seal company for RS. Quit RS for OD. Took a work transfer to the OD BSD, partly to get away from the yerks in the store. Took an internal lateral move at the BSD from the supply side to the furniture dealership department. Treatment at the furniture department was far better. Then OD closed the furniture department and laid everyone off. Was recruited by WPI. WPI had a RIF every year. I avoided the RIFs by working like a dog, because I was 50 by then. WPI went out of business. Recruited by Rose. Rose wasn’t bad, except for the CFO repeatedly trying to ram his 401k down my throat, after I told him I already had an IRA.
Now I’m retired, and no-one’s b!tch
Steve
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When your mother said it, it went differently, or maybe it was just implied. “Free, white, male, and 21” was what they really meant. I just watched and read “Lessons in Chemistry” and it really does represent how life was for women in those years. I know you are 20 years younger than the protagonist, but even in the 70s, much of that attitude towards women (especially women working in business) was still quite entrenched.
I highly recommend both the book and the mini-series on TV.
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Yup. As noted, in the late 70s, at the pump seal company, there were two female draftsmen. Every other woman was a secretary or clerk. Some of the honchos liked to boast about how their wives had not worked a day since they married. “Traditional American family values”, they call it.
Steve
Funny you should say, “Male,” @MarkR because I almost added it myself.
DH gave me “Lessons in Chemistry.” It’s on my shelf. Very good book.
I became a double major in Chemistry and Biology when I started college in 1970. I can tell you stories about being the only woman in the class. For example, one male classmate told me, by way of insult, “I would never date a girl who is smarter than me.” I shot back, “You must have a hard time finding dates.” Guys rarely bothered me after a run-in like that. 
I fell in love with a tall, handsome, shy guy in Quantitative Analysis (a very precise form of Chemistry). After several months of habituating him to myself, I said that I should be his girlfriend. I thought he was going to faint. But we did become a couple and also lab partners in Biochemistry and Physical Chemistry. He used to bring me delicious bakery napoleons while I was working off-class hours in Organic Chem lab. The little old Chinese prof who was holding his own lab class at the same time (Professor Ma) told me that he would ask me out if my boyfriend wasn’t so tall. LOL! I was pretty hot in those days, if I say so myself. I worked out daily and bicycled everywhere so I was all muscle. I often dressed in very short miniskirts or tight medieval-style gowns I sewed myself.
I held my own at work doing research then industrial water treatment in northern NJ then product management. I seldom had a problem because I was a very hard worker with a sarcastic, tough attitude toward anyone who tried to put me down.
As for my college boyfriend…we went in different directions after college for separate educations. I went to grad school for Chemistry. He went to med school, became a surgeon and ultimately ran the surgical intensive care department in his hospital as well as co-authoring a book on Surgical Critical Care. We are still good friends. He came to my wedding. My husband is a Ph.D. chemist and they got along well.
Wendy
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Objectively … yes. Was that photo taken in Acapulco???
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Yes, I think so. Mom took my younger sister and me to Mexico and we saw Mexico City, Taxco and Acapulco.
Mom used to say that if a person was male, tall, white and wore a suit well he would succeed no matter how stupid.
Wendy
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