when you are in Rome....

It’s a Wednesday night… nearly midnight… and its close to beddy bye time for me… and you know what I noticed… as I’ve gotten older… and climbed past the mighty 30 barrier on the age scale… the earlier I am going to bed… the more valuable my sleep is… and more I count down towards days when I can actually sleep as I wish – i.e. the weekends….

I was pretty much ready to write a really cynical joke about how now that I am officially heading down the other side of the hill, I have really low expectations of my conscious time and time sleeping seems ever more pleasant in comparison to the daily reality…. Yes… that would kind of sound morbidly witty for a second or two but really not true…. I was much more miserable in the years past than I am now… and this latest habit of
early bed times – i.e. midnight – is just a function of deteriorating body stamina and
function and not of the condition of my mental state…

was going to write something more meaningful… but now it doesn’t make a difference… wanted to go on a rant about a certain professional matter but then remembered all the horror stories of people getting their blogs found on the internet and getting fired… now on second thought…. Maybe that’s not such a terrible down side… Screw it… and lets do it…

ill use secret decoders tactics to make sure that even if undesirable eyes do befall upon these precious words… that there can be no implication of yours truly in anything whatsoever…

anyway… we have a certain senior manager where I work who is a lovely man… generally polite… pleasant in conversation and in possession of a healthy sense of humour… of reasonable physical appearance – not too shabby and not too shallow… is of reliable and diligent nature in his professional responsibilities… and really has only one slight fault as a professional and a human being – he is a finger pointer…

nothing this man enjoys more than talking about what somebody else didn’t do or even better yet what someone actually did that he shouldn’t have done… this gentleman is very good at reciting in public places who forgot to deliver what to him… who had what stupid idea and who was really doing something he had very little clue about… the gentleman’s pleasant nature, natural approach and flawless timing made these sorts of observations seem almost natural… so natural that at a certain point you feel an ancient cow instinct kick inside your brains, and next thing you know you are badmouthing the guy next to you for no reason but for pleasant conversation…

anyway, the above quality – the finger pointing – has its fine and not so fine points… for example… its quite noble when this gentleman occasionally calls out a more senior member of the staff for being an idiot… very refreshing… when he talks about clients or counterparties or whoever else – its not bad and it re-affirms your own hidden suspicions that everyone around you is an imbecile of first class intent on holding you, and your paycheck, as far down as possible…

things don’t go so well, though, when this gentleman starts whistfully recounting the failures of his employees (for sake of disclosure, I am one of them)… somehow, though this guy is suppose to be overseeing you and making sure you don’t make the exact screw ups he is so philosophically discussing, somehow he makes you seem like a complete ignorant incompetent, while he - an observant and astute manager… how he is an observant and astute manager I don’t know, for fuck ups seem to happen and you feel your career getting worse instead of getting better… but no… somehow it all makes sense, and even when your neighbor is being ricocheted off of three walls of a closed office, with the door wide open and the neighbor nowhere near, you sit there and nod your head knowing full well that the next time this guy is at a managing directors retreat, all he is going to talk about is what a failure his staff, namely people like me, are…

this quality in a manager does a few things… first of all it institures accountability, which is good… since you know that if you muck something up, on purpose or not, your name will be plastered across every office in midtown manhattan…. Second of all it creates clear lines of responsibility… nobody wants to take on something unknown that lord forbid might blow up in his face… so everybody sits there and does their particular lot in life… trying to keep their head as low as possible… which creates a very orderly place in one sense, and a place without innovation or initiative in another… you pick which one you prefer… finally, this managerial finger pointing creates a KGB atmosphere around the office… you never know who is ratting what on whom… because when the guy calls you in his office and asks you why this particular data happened to have been entered in the completely opposite manner to what it was supposed to… you can either bow your head and take the bullet to the head… knowing full well that this guy is going to go to the head of the group and say how things are going pretty well except for these slight errors by that guy in the corner (i.e. you) who keeps on ruining everything for everybody… or as another option… you can announce that yes, perhaps you did enter this specific piece of data in a literal sense… but metaphysically, you got this information from so and so and that person mislead you, maybe on purpose, maybe not… who knows… and that while you’ll certainly be happy to take your share of the blame… all you did was mis-enter the information this other incompetent, the true incompetent here to be perfectly clear, provided you with….

And so it goes… you have your job… you do it… if you do it OK or very well or excellent really doesn’t make a difference… for you are never going to be over-complimented or over-recognized… you keep your head down… and if push comes to shove… they say when you are in Rome, do as the Romans do…. so you become an expert at lifting thy right hand and pointing in the direction of the weakest link you can think of… it’s a healthy work environment, I know….

But here the story gets better my friends…. Though my colleagues and I never actually discussed this… this gentlemans reputation for being a shitty ass boss somehow established itself of its own… i.e. you don’t need to say it… you just know when push comes to shove this guy don’t have your back… he’ll sell you out to whoever he needs to sell you out to… and that’s that… its not going to be personal… he’ll happily shake your hand and share a beer with you afterwards… its business baby….
Well… of this no more… I am happy to say that I wasn’t the only one totally fed up with this non-sense... in the past couple of days this guy lost two out of his three main employees…. (I am not the third and will not divulge more for confidentiality reasons)… the guys bailed of course at the worst time possible… and essentially this guy is left with only the most junior member of the staff… which of course sucks for him and must raise a very curious question to the senior management of the firm – why doesn’t this guy have any loyalty from his employees…. Cuz he don’t care about no one but himself… that’s why you dummy! So when you are in Rome, do as the Romans do, and if it pays to do something for yourself, do it and worry about other people’s asses never…