Author: Rilaly

Influences: John Irving, Stephen King, Chuck Palahniuk, Raymond Carver, Larry David, David Bowie, Mike Patton, and Ayn Rand. Style: Short sentences, easily readable, and little in the way of description. Genre: Information, humor, and psychological interpretation.

When You’re Strange

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“Be nice,” is the advice we should give anyone accused of being crazy. “Be nice and smile a lot,” we would add. Someone, somewhere might say, “She’s crazy,” but they usually don’t mean it. By jumping past all of the progressions we have for casually noting that someone might be a little off, we’re trying to be provocative when we joke and say someone is crazy, and provocative is funny. They might start out at weird, followed by strange, a little nutty, a little off, and just plain different, but most people won’t make the leap to crazy in a serious manner. So, when our peers start putting their opinions together about us, “Be nice and smile a lot.” 

This doesn’t sound like an adequate defense to such a malleable charge, but if someone accuses us of being crazy there’s probably not much we can do to change their mind. This defense acknowledges that by suggesting we convince those who surround us that we’re kind, and we genuinely care about them. By doing so, we might gather some loyal defenders who will form a team that mount a unified defense against any and all accusers, until our accusers begin to think they’re in the minority.    

Most of us have never had anyone seriously question our sanity. They might say things like, “You’re crazy,” or “You’re insane,” but they often say that with a wink and a nod. To those who have seriously been accused of being so far outside the mainframe that it has diminished their quality of life, we offer this advice because we’ve witnessed others rush to the defense of a person they consider nice, regardless what anyone else says. These defenders are prone to dismiss most eccentricities of the nice and kind as endearing qualities. As these eccentricities begin to build up, people will talk. They will share stories and compare notes, but again, if the subject of this scrutiny is considered nice, sweet, or genuinely cares about those around them, their defenders will fight for the accused.

One of the primary components of selling this nice façade is a warm, pleasant smile. A genuine smile not only speaks of peace of mind, it disarms observers searching for cracks in our foundation, and it might serve us well in our attempts to conceal our eccentricities. Anyone who has seriously been accused of being crazy might be surprised to learn just how disarming a simple, warm smile can be. “You think she’s crazy?” observers might say in the face of another’s accusations, “because I think she’s nice.”

“And you’re basing that on what? Her smile?” the accusers counter. “Because Ted Bundy had a pretty, radiant smile. Do you think he was normal?” It doesn’t matter, for the idea that a crazy person seems nice, based on nothing more than a warm, glowing smile is the primary point and the end of the discussion for them.

Another key plank to insert in your fight is to show concern for others. If you find out, through the grapevine, that your worst accuser’s grandmother is sick, take a moment out of your day to ask her about her about it. “Hey, how’s your grandmother doing today?” This will touch her in a way from which she might never recover. If you do it right, and your concern is genuine, your greatest accuser might end up your greatest defender.   

We have bullet points that we seek when trying to spot crazy people. It’s a self-defense mechanism we use to protect ourselves in the dark, wild, and sometimes savage environs of the average workplace. Are these bullet points fair? It doesn’t matter. We have created them to help us avoid saying, or doing, the wrong thing to the wrong person who might go crazy on us, and one of the most prominent bullet points we look for is nastiness.

Being nasty is the subject’s best defense mechanism. Most of us don’t choose to be nasty, but we’ve been attacked so many times over the years that we’re defensive when we meet new people. Attack before being attacked is the go-to some have to protect their vulnerabilities. They’ve become so accustomed to being attacked over the years that being nasty is the first arrow they reach for in their quiver. The goal of this preemptive attack is to convince others to avoid them. That could lead to them missing out on some quality workplace relationships, and even some friendships, but most crazy people have not found a better alternative to avoid being attacked. The problem with this strategy is that they might find otherwise sympathetic souls joining in on the discussions of our unpredictability, until they reach an agreed upon characterization that we do not expect.

“You’re telling me to be nice, and smile, and say nice things to these awful people?” crazy people ask us. “Do you have any idea what these awful people have said to me? Has anyone ever accused you of being crazy before? If not, you have no idea what we go through.” 

We’re not saying this solution is foolproof, but we saw it. We were there, and we saw the accused do the worst possible thing she could’ve done. Our solution is so simple that most crazy people don’t consider it a viable solution. “Be nice and smile a lot,” we say. If Abbie Reinhold tried it, I have to think it would’ve disarmed most of her accusers.

“When you’re a stranger
Faces look ugly
When you’re alone.”

Jim Morrison and Robbie Krieger

I used to work for an online company. This company rewarded its employees with a month long sabbatical for tenured service. While I was on this sabbatical, my department hired a number of new people. One of them was a crazy person named Abbie Reinhold. One of the first things Abbie did, to introduce herself to the group, was defeat any impressions we might have about her. This preemptive attack involved a confrontation approach to anyone who might challenge the impressions she may have made. Her defense gained her a reputation, however unfair, of being a cat lady.

To this point, no one knew if Abbie Reinhold owned a cat. She simply fit the stereotype, arrow for arrow, bullet point for bullet point. We joked that Abbie could’ve been the prototype for the cat lady on the television show The Simpsons. The stereotype is an affixed staple in our culture, because there are examples of it. It’s not true that all women who own cats are crazy, of course, for we’ve all met perfectly sane women who have an inordinate number of cats as companions. We’ve also encountered women who scream at these cats, as if they’re human, and they find that they get along a lot better with cats than they do humans for all of the psychological underpinnings that are indigenous to a cat lady.

When I arrived back at work, after my sabbatical, I found that those in charge of making seating arrangements placed an Abbie Reinhold across from me, in a cubicle I faced. Did I know that Abbie Reinhold was a little crazy? How could one not sense that something was off about her, based on her preemptive attacks?

My attempts at building a psychological profile on someone, based on first impressions, had been so wrong, so often, at that point in my life that I decided to give Abbie Reinhold a chance. Mary, one of the precedents for how wrong I can be, sat right next to Abbie Reinhold. I was so wrong about Mary that I decided Abbie Reinhold might be another Mary. Mary was a woman of solitude, and a little “off”, but it turned out that Mary was a happy person who was so nice. She had an ever-present smile on her face, and she was always asking about my dad. Mary, it turned out, was such a sweet woman in all other matters that she became anecdotal evidence for how wrong the psychological profiles we build can be.

As that first day wore on, I noticed that Abbie talked to herself a lot, and while I do deem those who talk to themselves a lot a little crazy, I cut all new employees a little slack. Some of the cases we worked on for this company, could be quite difficult, overwhelming, and stressful, and I had firsthand knowledge of how difficult and overwhelming the job could be for a new person. For this reason, I paid little attention to Abbie Reinhold on that first day.

On the second day, Abbie Reinhold began talking to herself when I sat down at 8:00 A.M. up and to the point when she left at 5:30. Man, I thought, this poor woman is really struggling. Abbie’s frustrations were on display for all to see, but as I said I empathized. We all have coping mechanisms for dealing with the stress and pressure of the job, and we all know that coping mechanisms can vary, and they are often unique to the person. If this woman’s coping mechanism included talking to herself, who was I to judge? She did talk to herself a lot though.

The third day was something altogether different. The coping mechanism of talking her way through a case progressed to silent screaming. Abbie developed the habit of silently screaming at her computer. Everything about her face and mouth suggested she was screaming, except for the sound. Her head was bopping, and she bared her teeth. I glanced around to determine the source of her frustration. I couldn’t find anything. She was new though, and I continued to offer her some slack, but the progression didn’t ebb and flow in the manner it had in the past days. Abbie’s frustrations had progressed. Matters, such as these, don’t usually phase me. I’m a calm and levelheaded guy, but I had one foot pointed to the door in case her frustration reached an ultimate resolution.

I worked in various computer companies for nearly a decade at that point, and I saw so many anomalies of human behavior that her idiosyncratic behaviors were noteworthy. Nothing more and nothing less. Did those of us around her laugh when she laughed for no apparent reason, we did. Did we share raised eyebrows when some noises escaped her otherwise silent screams, we did. Those who might call us out for those judgmental reactions have to understand that it’s human nature to laugh at something we don’t understand. When we witness what we consider a confusing anomaly, our impulsive reaction is to either laugh or cry, and I wasn’t so afraid of her that I would cry. I came close the next day, when I saw her eat a cookie, as everything about that act appeared to crystallize the notions I had that she might be crazy.

I would never go so far as to say that I’m a macho man who fears nothing, but I can say without fear of rebuttal, that I’ve never experienced anything resembling fear watching another person eat a cookie. I don’t think I feared her, in the truest sense of the word, but watching her eat that cookie gave me goosebumps.

Some have theorized that goosebumps are a physiological phenomenon that we inherited from our animal ancestors. They’re useless to us now, because most of us don’t have a coat of hair, but the reason we have them, some guess, is that our ancestors either used the elevations in the skin and hair to protect themselves against the cold or to make themselves appear larger when confronted by a potential predator. I didn’t consider Abbie Reinhold’s ravenous consumption of the cookie an act of predation, but the biological phenomenon occurring on my arm suggested that my brain was telling my body that we might want to consider appearing larger just in case.

I assumed she was diabetic, as I have known many diabetics who were calmed by a cookie. I don’t know if that was the case with her, but she ate that cookie in the manner I suspect one would after starving themselves for days.

I watched every bite she took. I don’t know what I was waiting to see, but I was watching. Watching is probably the wrong word to describe what I was doing, for I was not looking at her. By the time Abbie Reinhold began eating the cookie, she established a set of rules that I was not to talk to her, refer to her in anyway, or look at her. I trained myself to pay attention to her, without looking. I was looking at my computer, but I wasn’t typing or doing anything work-related. I was staring at her without looking. When she finished that cookie without any progressions, I did not sigh, but I was relieved.

In the days that followed, I would see her progress from talking to herself, to silently screaming at her computer, to laughing. Most people, who have never been hired to work on a computer ten hours a day, four days a week, have no idea the level of solitude we experience. The employee knows they were hired to work cases in the company’s queues. They know that they are not there to socialize, and they learn to keep non-work-related, social interactions to a minimum. They learn to avoid the temptation of “So, how’s your day going?” because that can lead to a minutes long conversation that might be documented somewhere. I write this to inform the reader who has never worked in an office, with miles of cubicles, that a ten-hour day, sitting behind a computer, can lead to the mind drifting.  

Those of us who worked in the service industry dreamed of the day when we didn’t have to interact with people, because some people are bitter and angry about whatever life did to them, and they vent their frustrations on whomever happens to be standing in front of them at the time. Once we achieved that complete overhaul from too much human contact to none, we realized how much we needed it. To satisfy this need, we can accidentally drift back to the rude thing the supermarket checker said to us the other day, and we conjure up a perfect comeback while staring at our computer. We remember the hilarious thing our friend said to us at the bar over the weekend, and we think up the perfect addition to their joke. This can lead to spontaneous and embarrassing emotional outbursts such as laughter. When it happens, we stop as quick as we can, drop the expression and scan our surroundings to make sure no one saw any of it. This woman didn’t seem to care about any of that. Her conversations with no one turned into silent, uproarious laughter, her grimaces turned into silent, vehement screams, and she didn’t catch herself in the midst of these reactions, and she didn’t look around to make sure no one saw them. 

In the professional climate of office workers reading the words on their computers, the white noise of the sounds of typing, can lull employees into a safe harbor of the mind. Anything and everything is distracting. Drop a pencil on the carpet, and six people might turn to watch you pick it up. In this climate of solitude and servitude, whispers are distracting and annoying. The relatively benign sounds of soft laughter can lead the bored to roll over to see what you’re laughing at on your computer. In the early days of Abbie Reinhold’s tenure on our team, some employees would roll over to her desk to see why she was laughing. After a number of these incidents, fewer and fewer rolled over to Abbie’s desk to see what caused her emotional displays. We would laugh, but it was a laugh of empathy, for we knew how often we drifted into our own daydreams. We managed to restrain ourselves from displays of emotion, but we knew how close to that line we were. Over the course of our brief tenure together, Abbie shattered the shackles of embarrassment by reenacting scenes from her life without shame. When a non-team member would stop by our desk to ask us a question, and they would see her turning left and right with laughter or anger, they would ask us about it, and we would say, “Just ignore it.” On one such occasion, she placed a hand between her breasts and apologized to her computer screen for laughing so hard. She wasn’t speaking to me, the unfortunate witness to her activities. She wasn’t speaking to anyone.

When Abbie Reinhold talks to herself, she gesticulates in a casual manner that one uses to expound upon meaning. These gesticulations progress to a flailing of the arms, in a manner reserved for partygoers having one hell of a good time. She swirls in her computer chair, in a Julie Andrews, The Hills are Alive manner, when she appears immersed in a wonderful moment in her life, and she says mumbles responses to the fictional characters who surround her.

I wondered one day if she is talking to people in the future or the past, or is she one of those rare individuals who –like a Kurt Vonnegut character– is unstuck in time, and is living in the past, the present and the future at the same time?

I wondered what Abbie Reinhold would think of me if I started talking to myself, followed by silent screams, uproarious laughter and wild gesticulations. Would she laugh from a distance at my bizarre actions, to reveal how oblivious she is to her own? Would Abbie laugh at me with full knowledge of her actions, but by ridiculing me, she hoped to gain some distance from the things that crazy people do? Would she view my bizarre display as an opportunity in which she could define herself to others, thus lifting herself above those who engage in such activities for the purpose of either changing the minds of those around her, or vindicating her beliefs in her own sanity? The unlikely alternative, I suspect, is that she would see what I was doing and identify with in a manner that might establish some sort of solidarity between us. Even if I mimicked her without any discernible form of mockery, I doubt that she would defend me against anyone who ridiculed me for talking to myself. I doubt she would say anything along the lines of, “Hey, I talk to myself, how dare you crack on my people.” I doubt that she was that objective.

On one of the days that followed, Abbie Reinhold stood. She was not looking at a fellow employee named Natalie, but she wasn’t looking away either. She was just standing. She did stand near enough to Natalie that Natalie thought Abby had a work-related question that she couldn’t figure out a way to articulate. Natalie was a senior agent on the team, assigned to answering agent questions.

“What’s up?” Natalie asked her.

“Just stretching,” the crazy lady said.

“What’s wrong with that?” I asked when Natalie informed me of that brief conversation.

“She was standing still,” Natalie informed me. “I don’t think she moved a muscle.”

“Did you ask her what muscles she was stretching?”

Abbie Reinhold also eats her earwax. She pulls it out, examines it, and she eats it on occasion. Some of the times, Abbie Reinhold looks at it and discards it. I often wonder what her selection process involves. What’s the difference between a good pull, and a bad one?

I wondered if I cracked a joke about people who eat their own earwax, what Abbie’s reaction would be. Would she laugh from a distance at such foolish people, or would she defend her fellow earwax eaters? “Hey, I eat my ear wax, how dare you crack on my people.”

“When you’re strange
Faces come out of the rain
When you’re strange
No one remembers your name.”

Jim Morrison & Robbie Krieger

Some readers might find this piece mean-spirited, as we should never discuss (much less laugh at) those who have vulnerabilities. To those charges, I submit to the court of public opinion, exhibit A: Abbie Reinhold.

As much as we might want to defend Abbie Reinhold, she was not a sympathetic figure, and witnesses to Abbie Reinhold’s demeanor would testify to the fact that Abbie Reinhold could often be witnessed laughing as hard, if not harder, at the idiosyncrasies of those around her as anyone else. (This raucous laughter might have been born of the relief of being on the other side of that laughter.) We understood that she was defensive by nature when we met, but she began leveling attacks against us before we knew her last name. We have no knowledge of the frustrations that drove her to attack us, and we empathize with anyone who has been attacked for their characteristics, for we have all experienced such attacks throughout our lives.  

When it comes to using past grievances to fuel nastiness, anything can provide an impetus. Perhaps she made unfair associations that led her to unfair conclusions about us, but we were ambivalent to her presence, until she attacked us with her shield. Abbie Reinhold brought her past grievances to the table not us. We did not seek to chastise, or ostracize, Abbie Reinhold. We viewed her as nothing more than another employee in a large company, until she made her presence known.

For those in the court of public opinion who are not willing to take some anonymous author’s word for it, we submit exhibit B: Sheila Jones. Sheila Jones was what we might consider the prototype for a nice, sweet, woman who has lived long enough, and experienced just enough, to know the best and worst of humanity. Sheila is the type of person who chooses to view humanity from the magnanimous position of believing that her waste matter stinks too. 99 times out of 100, Sheila was uncomfortable talking about other people, and conversations about another’s vulnerabilities made her so uncomfortable that she tried to end them as patiently and politely as she could. She knew this is what we all do, but they made her uncomfortable. Not only was Sheila an audience to the stories we told about Abbie Reinhold, she broke the mold we had for her by contributing to them.

I make no claim to being as nice and understanding as Sheila was, is, and always will be. She is one of those rare individuals who are nice, understanding, and empathetic to the plight of the 99.9 percent of the population. When the subject of Abbie Reinhold arose, not only did Sheila join the pack of hyenas, ripping at the carcass, she laughed as hard as any of us did, even if it was behind a hand.

The question I have, now that I have achieved enough distance from this story to have some objectivity on it, is would anyone like Sheila want to trade such stories about Abbie Reinhold if Abbie was a genuinely nice person who wore a hearty smile on her face, regardless what she’d experienced? Would anyone as nice as Sheila laugh as hard as she did, if Abbie Reinhold was a sweet person who just happened to have been afflicted with some noteworthy eccentricities? The males might have, for males are predisposed to enjoying stories that pertain to the weaknesses and frailties of another, a trait that we can trace to their king of the hill mentalities. Mean girls might have too, for many of the same reasons. We’ve all heard of people raised with Midwest values and Southern hospitality. Sheila had all that, plus a personal level of sympathy for others that those of us who knew her considered unmatched. Thus, those of us who know Sheila know that if Abbie was anything from ambivalent-to-nice to Sheila Jones, she would have shut down any discussions about the woman’s eccentricities with a simple word about decorum and being nice. If Abbie was a nice person who just happened to do odd things, the nice women in our group would’ve followed Sheila’s lead in shaming us against engaging in such discussions. “She’s a nice person,” is something she and all the nice women in our group would have said, and they would’ve dismissed every characterization of Abbie Reinhold on that basis. The fact that these women not only laughed uproariously at the stories of Abbie Reinhold’s idiosyncrasies, but shared their own experiences with her, and drove the discussion in many cases, should suggest to any people seeking to proactively diffuse any attempts at characterizing them in an unfair and exaggerated manner, that the best way to ingratiate themselves to those who might end up defending them, is to simply be nice and smile a lot. 

The Leadership Mystique

Rilaly3 Comments

“A ruling class has got to have a strict morality, a quasi-religious belief in itself, a mystique.” –George Orwell

George Orwell was referring to world leaders when he used the term ruling class, but ruling class can also be applied to the supervisors of our cubicle, our softball team, and our daughter’s music class. We’ve all seen the good, the bad, and the ugly when it comes to our beloved leaders. We’ve witnessed leaders who just appear born to lead, those who seem to be perpetually learning, and those even your daughter’s preschool classmates can suss out. At some point in our lives, we think we can we spot a good leader in our business meetings, in preschool parent-teacher conferences, and in shopping mall. We think we can just spot those characteristics necessary to lead good us.

Can a Human Resources representative (HR rep) for a Fortune 500 corporation spot those characteristics better than us, to select their company’s leaders of tomorrow? HR reps tell us that they can spot their candidate five seconds after they enter the room? I used to think that was a good thing, as I thought it spoke to the years of experience the HR rep had in interview rooms. I thought there were intangibles that she could spot that I couldn’t. The question I have now, based on my experiences with the poor to awful supervisors they’ve chosen for teams I’m on. I should note that they’ve made some quality decisions over the years, but their batting average would not land them in the hall of fame. If this HR rep can spot a quality leader five seconds after they enter a room, how often is she convinced by characteristics that are symbolic as opposed to substantive? Is there a quality that HR reps look for, or is it all based on intangible and indefinable determinations?

For those not born with magical, born leader qualities, self-help guides list off a number of quantifiable qualities of leadership that anyone and everyone can memorize for an interview, but a qualified HR rep should be able to see through all that to the core of a person to determine if they are a leader.

If the HR rep is attempting to look beyond a self-help list of qualities to the true man, what is it they are looking for? Are they looking for the charismatic qualities of a leader, and can these qualities be faked throughout an hour-long interview? This degree of charisma could arguably be called a person’s leadership mystique.

Can a quality candidate fake indefinable qualities the self-help guides teach us? What are self-help guides, but a way to assist those lacking in natural leadership qualities into projecting a leadership mystique? Some of us memorize a few Churchill quotes and go into that interview with the idea that we, too, can be leaders of men and women. Then the HR rep sees right through us, and they hire the other guy. What happened?

Did that person project that image better than we did? Is it easier for an attractive person to project that image? Is it easier to convince another of leadership qualities if that person is in great shape, freshly groomed, well dressed, male or female, of a certain ethnicity, and born into a certain economic class? Or does the HR rep go into the series of interviews with a mindset that specifically goes against archetype definitions of a leader to prove that they can better spot a leader? Is it a series of lies, façades, and mindsets, or can an HR rep truly spot a qualified leader in one hour-long interview?

I’ve worked in corporate America long enough to know that even the most solid, experienced HR rep, with their breadth of experience in interviewing people, cannot see through a façade that candidates have created for them before that interview started. Some candidates are simply better at constructing a façade than others, and most people, HR reps included, cannot see through it. I’ve witnessed too many eventual managers —put through the grueling, three tiered interview process— come out as incompetent, dishonest people, to continue to believe that HR reps know more about the leadership mystique than I do. I’ve witnessed it so often that I can’t help but believe what one of my managers told a friend of mine: “If you want to get anywhere in this company, lie your ass off!” This leader turned out to be the worst employee I’ve ever worked with, and I’ve worked in the fast food industry. How did she get through the grueling three-tiered interview process? First, she was great at answering questions quickly and confidently. Those answers involved lies, half-truths, exaggerations, and deflections to successfully construct an image, and mystique, about herself that made great impressions.

I’ve had too many poor managers, and I’ve worked with too many poor non-management types, and upper level employees, to continue to believe that there is something more than the search for an unquantifiable mystique at play. The first question an HR agent must ask themselves in the post-interview grading process is can a candidate think fast on their feet? Yes, if they are good liars. There is a reason that a leader must be a good liar, and it has everything to do with perpetuating the myth of their own mystique, and the mystique of the company at large.

A good, somewhat dishonest manager will never tell you, for example, that they haven’t heard about the latest update on the company website. A more honest manager might tell you that they’ve never heard of the update and ask you to relay it to them. The dishonest manager may have a stock answer at such a point, and it’s often something along the lines of, “Why don’t you tell me what you think it is.” The manager may also look the information up later. They both arrive at that same point of knowledge, but the manager who maintains the mystique better has learned how to fib their way through a scenario like this one to uphold the mystique by never letting you see them in a temporary moment of vulnerability.

We perpetuate this myth by what we say about the manager after we return to our desk. If the manager was forthright and said she didn’t know about the update, we return to our desk with this salacious bit of information about the leader. We all seek to poke holes in their myths at every opportunity. We feel better about ourselves in lieu of the fact that we now know that our emperor has no clothes. It’s the American way to dress down our leaders, but there is also a part of us that feels a little uncomfortable with the fact that our leaders have notable holes in their garments. This is why the perpetuation of the myth is so important. This is why it’s important that the honest manager tell you that she’s heard about the latest update when she hasn’t.

It’s important, because if the good, dishonest manager successfully preserves the mystique, the employee will go back to their desk and tell their co-workers, “She said she knew about it, but I know she didn’t.” That co-worker might then question the employee’s assessment of the leader, until the employee begins to question their own assessment. “Why did I feel the need to question their leader’s leadership qualities?” they might ask themselves. “What does this say about me that I felt the need to do that?”

The obfuscation that the dishonest manager employed feeds the myth, so that it can survive another day. The employee finds that they are actually more comfortable in a world where questioning leaders exists without substantial proof of the leader’s vulnerabilities, and everyone walks away satisfied.

Does anyone know how to define leadership qualities are on a case by case basis? No, but you know it when you see it. It’s a certain mystique that they have constructed and maintained over time, be it honest or dishonest.

Another manner in which the mystique is perpetuated is in the grading process. The leader is in charge of the grading of the performance of their employees, and their method of grading will provide the employee the most tangible proof of their myth. If the manager grades that employee poorly, the employee feels less substantial and a greater need to prove themselves to their leader in the next quarter, even if the poor grade doesn’t portend eventual dismissal from the company. On the other hand, a better grade means a better chance at promotions and raises, but it’s more than that to us. We want their approval, and if they give us a poor grade, we find ourselves doing whatever it takes to please them and the way they want things done. A poor grade only enhances their leadership mystique to us.

Some of the grading process is based on tangible qualities, such as production numbers, but in many instances —in my corporate America experience— the process is often more arbitrary than many of us know.

Employees, in my most recent employment experience, were graded on a scale of one to five. Fours were given to the best, most outstanding employees, and twos were given to those employees most in need of assistance. I know what you’re thinking, you think the grading scale went from one to five. Well, I’ve only heard of one case in which an individual received a one in a particular category of their employer’s assessment. The supervisors were discouraged from giving ones, even in cases where the employee probably earned it. I’ve also heard of more than one instance in which an employee received a five in an individual category, but those instances were so rare that they should be considered anecdotal. The supervisors were also discouraged from giving out fives, because, I can only assume, that they feared the employee might not strive as hard in the upcoming quarter. We, almost all of us, received scores between two and four, and we all believed, as former NFL coach said, “You are what your scoreboard says you are.” We all believed we were the accumulated score of three-point-five, and we were all on the “strive to be a five” quest that may have been our carrot on the stick to be better employees. As the next case will prove, however, these arbitrarily low scores may have also fed into the leadership mystique of those who scored our work.  

Whether he was making a conscious effort to poke a hole in this area of the myth of leadership or not, one particular supervisor in our company, we’ll call him Pete Abernathy, decided to give every one of his employees fives across the board. Pete stated that he genuinely believed that every one of his employees were “five” employees. He had a team of eleven employees, and we could all argue that the idea that Pete Abernathy couldn’t possibly have eleven five star employees, but he genuinely believed it. Pete Abernathy was chastised for this action by our company. The company forced him to go back and change the scores to lower scores.

“Why would you think that is unfair?” I asked the friend who told me about this event, and how he thought that this manager should be forced to adjust his scores.  

“Because it’s unfair to the rest of us,” the friend said. My friend was a true believer in the system, but he had no idea how correct he was, or on how many levels he was correct. 

The “all five” scores, for every employee on Pete Abernathy’s team, was unfair in an arbitrary nature, because the eleven employees who were on his team were arbitrarily chosen to be on his team. They were the lucky ones, because that they were arbitrarily assigned to a supervisor who would arbitrarily score them so high, and the rest of us were unlucky that we weren’t arbitrarily assigned to his team. We were arbitrarily assigned to a team with a supervisor who arbitrarily assigned us lower scores. Except they didn’t arbitrarily assign our scores. They followed their manager’s order.

Pete Abernathy created a huge problem in the company, because he exposed the myth to we “three” employees that our threes were arbitrarily considered by our arbitrary supervisors, or that they had a cap on their scoring that would merit scrutiny if they went to an extreme. The message that we threes learned is that our company’s scoring process is not a precise measurement of our ability.

A science teacher once told me that it’s scientifically proven, or mathematically if we want to delve into the probability of rations, that the correct answer to most multiple choice questions is often ‘C’. Thus, our managers may have taught our supervisors that it can be difficult to find a perfect quantitative and qualitative score for eleven employees every quarter, so when it doubt go ‘C’, or in our company’s case, three, when scoring an employee’s performance. Three might not get us much of a raise, we realized, but at least we’re not a two. We walked away satisfied, not happy, but satisfied that we would, at least, have a job for another quarter.

Pete Abernathy unintentionally exposed the myths and mystiques to at least one employee, me, because I asked the question, ‘Why strive to be a five when it’s pretty obvious to me that I was arbitrarily assigned to a supervisor who only gives out threes?’ If I have a supervisor who follows the company’s unspoken rules, to the letter, and they feel the need to abide by the rules inherent in the leadership mystique by arbitrarily giving out threes, what’s the point of busting my tail for the company.

“Keep your own records,” a friend of mine said when he was put in a position to deliver me my supervisor’s scores for the quarter.

“So, you’re saying that these scores I received are set arbitrarily low?” I asked.

“What evidence do you have to prove your supervisor wrong?” he asked. I didn’t have any, and I told him so.

“Keep your own records,” he repeated. “Keep your accomplishments in a spreadsheet that you can present them at the time of grading, and then present them if you decide to dispute their scoring.”

It’s all arbitrary.

The overriding point of the naysayers occurs in response to this flood of information, and it is nestled somewhere in the idea that we all need something, or someone, to believe in. As the information piles in to suggest that our federal government is either corrupt, incompetent, or something that we should remain skeptical about, we learn that our state government may be as corrupt, and that our local government is full of incompetency. Learning these details from an informed skeptic might illuminate us, but we maintain a certain level of detachment from it, because we hate politics, and we think most political discussions don’t hit home. When we question the method of operations of the company we’re employed in, however, or the supervisors or managers that we’re employed under, it hits close to home, and we begin to question our personal beliefs in a way that makes us feel a little uncomfortable. 

I spoke to a number of coworkers about this issue, as I was obsessed with it. Their natural inclination was that I received a poor score for the quarter and my conspiracy theory was built on bitterness. When I freely told them what my accumulated score for the quarter was, and how it proved my point by being equal to theirs, their “C’mon!” smile faltered a little. When I told them the Pete Abernathy story, they didn’t enjoy listening to my story anymore. They gave me obvious signs that they didn’t enjoy talking about this topic.

If we can believe in nothing else, even ourselves, we want to believe that our company knows us, and that they put forth due diligence into properly evaluating us, and judging where we stand among our peers. We understand that it’s difficult, based on the size of our company to always be exact, but we want them to be as exact as humanly possible.

“Okay, I got it!” one of my co-workers said when I wouldn’t stop pounding my points home.

Whatever their actual response is, they unknowingly inform the skeptic that they do not want their personal foundation shaken up in such a manner, and they prefer to draw a line in questioning the idea that that which we used to define ourselves against mediocre employees cannot be based on a “Fudge” in the system in which we all operated. The alternative is too random. They need to believe in the system, even after it’s pointed out to them that the apathetic guy that sits next to them just received the same arbitrary scores that they did. They need to believe in something, so they choose to reject all that we’ve said, and they prefer to believe in all the illusions, delusions, and the mystique of leadership that they are fed on a day-to-day basis.

The cynical portion of my brain can’t help but think that the grading process was also created to provide distance between the follower and the leader to strengthen the mystique of the manager, leader, and score decider. A “five guy” may think he’s two steps away from the leader, and he may think less of the manager in that light, but a “three guy” knows he has a lot to work to do if he ever wants to consider himself on par with his leader.

“I’m only a three?” I asked, after receiving my evaluation in a one on one. I worked harder for that company than I’ve ever worked for a company in my life. “Actually,” my supervisor said, “You are a 3.8, but the grading process requires that we round down.” I was confused. “So, a 3.99999 is still a three?” The supervisor had a half-smile, “A three point eight is great. You should be proud. It puts you in the upper tier. It means you have fewer areas of concern than a 3.00 employee might.”

That supervisor tried to enhance her leadership mystique by basically saying, even though I gave you arbitrarily low scores, I’m on your side. I am very pro you, and I will go to bat for you, even if I know my arbitrary declarations basically put us on a superior vs. inferior plane.

The Orwell quote, “The ruling class has got to have a strict morality, a quasi-religious belief in itself,” placed the focus on the leaders, but in my experience the role the followers play is just as vital to maintaining the mystique. Leadership requires that we followers believe that “our” leader has qualities that we don’t. If we believe that our leader exhibits the qualities we assign her, we may see it as in our best interests to kiss her coccyx in a figurative manner. It’s my contention that kissing coccyx is a function performed by two relatively innocuous individuals for a mutually agreed upon result that benefits both parties involved. The person that a follower chooses to assign such characteristics achieves that level in a vicarious manner, and while they may enjoy ridicule or skepticism directed at leaders, or the systems those leaders abide by, most followers do not enjoy it directing at “their” leader for it undercuts one of their primary functions. If we dare to expose them it also undercuts us in a strange way, because if we are effective in our pursuits we may be left with nothing to believe in. 

We all love that guy who questions everything when it comes to the federal government, and the president in particular. That’s just kind of the American way, and a tradition that –at the very least– dates back to our colonial forefathers mocking and denigrating King George. Mocking state and local leaders is “Okay” too, because “Because they signed up for the gig. They should’ve known they were signing up for performance scrutiny.” When we criticize our boss at our company, and the whole manner in which our company operates, and we do it in an effective manner with uncomfortable evidence that holds up under scrutiny, it makes us so uncomfortable that “Okay, I got it!” comes out with a level of force that reveals how much we don’t really want to hear this. 

The leadership mystique requires both the leader and the follower to understand their respective roles, but that dynamic is precariously balanced on respect, trust, legitimacy, and a number of other factors. Both parties know that scrutiny will be part of the game, as will the jokes, and the playful derision behind the boss’s back, but that’s mostly a fun part of the game. When we’re done with that game, both parties know that as disgruntled as the follower might be, the system is fair and merit-based. When some “busybody” comes along and seriously challenges the foundation of that system and our relationship with our company, we don’t want to hear it. If the boss feels forced to address it, she’ll do so with an, “It’s not true,” and we accept that answer so quickly that it’s obvious that that’s the answer we wanted to hear. Another part of our eager acceptance of her reply is that we live with this notion that our system has already been properly vetted by those in the know, and they drained of it any skepticism in their boardroom meetings. The final problem is that if we believe the busybodies of our system who exhaust us with their skepticism, is if they find an argument that could undermine the system we operate in, in our beloved company, we’ll have nothing left to believe in.   

The Leans

Rilaly2 Comments

Have you ever experienced a mean case of The Leans? I’m talking about entering into confined quarters and moving left to get passed someone and they move left, and then you move right only to have that person move right. If you’re too embarrassed to admit it, just know, no one is immune. It affects the the old, the young, the healthy and unhealthy, and everyone in between. The Leans are always embarrassing, and as the story below shows, they can be humiliating. My advice is to either continue going right, or just send still. Don’t over think it. If you do, you’ll go left. I write this cautionary tale to anyone thinking that the antidote is to simply go the opposite direction, because, mark my words, that’s what they’re thinking. Most of these terribly embarrassing situations can be avoided if we learn to just stand still. I’ve advised some victims, and I’ve even screamed it on occasion, but no one listens. 

I could’ve and should’ve alerted Andy Parizek to this cure, or the other brilliant antidote you’ll learn later, but there was so much going on with Andy’s exit, his momentum, and his plans for leaving a glorious trail behind him that I felt anything I did would only further his embarrassment and ruin his moment. 

“You in my lane (Get out my lane)
You in my way (Get out my way)
You crossed that line
It ain’t yo’ day.”

Tedashii

“This is it,” Andrew Parizek said crouching down beside my desk. I was listening to music in my earbuds, so I didn’t sense his approach. By the time he said that, Andrew was so close he startled me. He was a close talker normally, but on this afternoon, he narrowed his normally uncomfortable distance to the point that I could smell the cool ranch Doritos he had for lunch. “My final farewell to you, my friend,” he added. “I’m leaving the company. I’m on my way out the door.”

“Oh shoot,” I said to Andy Parizek, my co-worker and close associate. I don’t think Andy would even call our relationship a friendship. When we had a go-between, we were close, but when that third party changed jobs, I never thought I’d talk to him again.  Yet, Andrew kept coming over to talk about the stupid stuff that we stupid people talk about. “It was great working with you buddy,” I told him.

This “Final Farewell” occurred in stages over the course of two weeks. Two weeks prior, we discussed his departure at his going away party. One week later, he and I discussed his imminent departure in greater detail, and we also discussed his future at length. We shared brief discussions about the people we knew and the good times we shared. We also talked about how we would miss the little things we both did to brighten the other’s otherwise boring days. We didn’t hug at the end of those discussions, but we engaged in a hearty, heartfelt handshake that physically expressed how we felt about one another.

Everything I said in those farewells were said in the spirit of a conversation that recognized it as the last time we might speak, but his presence at my desk informed me that those notions were premature. “It won’t be the same around here without you,” I said, as I had in the other farewells, but I felt compelled to add original material to this one. I don’t remember what I added, but it involved some sentimental junk that I didn’t mean. I was being nice, and I was trying to make Andrew feel important in my life. I liked the guy, but we weren’t what anyone would call this close, not multiple-farewells-close.

“Are you excited about this move?” I asked him, and he told me he was, and then he told me why he was excited. “I’m so jealous,” I said. I wasn’t jealous, as Andrew was moving onto a career that I didn’t want to do, but it seemed like a fitting sentiment to add to this final version of our final farewell. “You’ll succeed,” I said, “because you’re a great guy and a hard worker.” I meant that. “Are you a little scared about the prospect of leaving the comfy confines our company? I know it’s what you want to do, and all that, but you’re venturing out into an unknown world where the prospect of failure is greater.” He said yes to all of the above. Then he launched.

He spelled out for me, in explicit detail, this new venture of his life. He did so with magnificence and aplomb. He was also magnanimous. He spoke about how he he found me delightful, and the type who would succeed, and that if I stuck to it, all my dreams would come true. It was as sappy and weird as you imagine. I hid my revulsion for his word choices. He tried to be multisyllabic, and he used as many –ly words as he had in his vocabulary to instill a sense of timeless quality to this final version of his “Final Farewell”. If it were a speech, it might have caused emotional responses. The audience might have been applauding at the end, some may have cried, and others may have even stood to applaud. The over the top farewell was one that often elicits such near-compulsory emotion. Andrew lit up in moments where ‘dreams can come true’ lines poured out of him. When the line “If it can happen for me, it can happen for anyone” brought him to crescendo, I might have reached for a handkerchief if I had emotions.

It was so over-the-top brilliant, coupled with subtle attempts at self-deprecating humor, that I wondered if Andrew plagiarized the material he prepared for this from one of the soldiers’ “going to war” letters that Ken Burns compiled for his The Civil War documentary. If it wasn’t, I felt safe in my assumption that Andrew practiced and rehearsed this speech that day, before a mirror. Whatever the case was, I felt compelled to inform him that I thought this version of the final farewell was an “Experience for anyone lucky enough to hear it,” “Your best, final farewell since final farewell number two,” and a “Tour de Force!” I didn’t say any of this, but I felt Andrew Parizek choreographed his speech in a manner that warranted such superlatives.

Andrew and I got along on so many levels that receiving an invitation to his going away party wasn’t a big surprise. When I arrived and Andrew offered me relatively little attention compared to his closer friends, it didn’t wound me. I thought he offered me as much attention as our association warranted.

This Casablanca-style parting was just way beyond protocol as far as I was concerned though. Once I got passed the idea that it didn’t matter that Andrew already said goodbye to me a couple times, I politely listened to his spiel as if for the first time. We exchanged email addresses so we could keep updated on each other’s lives. I knew that wouldn’t happen, but I thought it was a nice sentiment. He then concluded with another note about how nervous he was about his future, but he was just as excited by it.

By the time he began to step away, he was all but yelling good wishes to me. 

My mouth wasn’t open, but the display did set me back a pace, and then it happened …

Andrew Parizek entered into a wicked case of the leans with my desk neighbor, as she entered into the aisle he was exiting. He leaned left to get past her, she leaned left, and when he leaned to the right, she leaned right. Before they finally made it past one another, they performed four separate and distinct leans.

If Andrew was extracting himself from a casual conversation, and exiting the aisle in a routine manner, he might have been able to avoid the spectacle that ended up occurring. If he felt no need to execute a departure to be earmarked in the annals of time for those “who were there” to witness his ride into the sunset, I suspect he would’ve been the gentleman he always was and stepped aside to allow my female desk neighbor to pass. At worst, the two of them may have engaged in two leans, if it wasn’t Andrew’s hope that this “The Final Farewell” include women waving handkerchiefs and someone, somewhere saying, “You know what, there goes one hell of a good feller” this probably wouldn’t have happened. I assume that Andrew pictured the rest of us as side characters in his exit, left behind to chronicle the attributes of the main character of the “The Final Farewell” scene.

I don’t keep a ledger on such things, but I do believe that the Andrew Parizek v. desk neighbor case of the leans was the most intense I’ve ever witnessed. I’ve seen a number of severe cases in my day, and I’ve ever been a party to a few, but I don’t think I witnessed four separate and distinct leans prior to that day.

The one thing we know about the public humiliation that results from a case of leans is that no one gets out alive. Most people try to find some way to quell the embarrassment, but I’ve witnessed some get angry. “Get out of my way!” they shout, in an unsuccessful attempt to divert the humiliation to follow to the other party. I saw one person grab the other person by the shoulders and gently usher them right, so they could pass left. I’ve seen some giggle at their own foolishness, and I’ve seen some try to change the subject as quick as they can. None of it works. No one gets out alive.

The one exception to the rule I heard about involved a nondescript, middle-aged, restaurant hostess named Susan. I should note that I didn’t witness Susan’s case of the leans, but I heard about it. I heard about it so often enough that I know all of the details by heart. Susan fell prey to three separate and distinct leans with another co-worker. She was able maintain an unprecedented modicum of dignity in the midst of her episode, and she did it with three simple words: “Shall we dance?”

The witnesses to this event said she said it in the second of what would be a reported, and corroborated, three leans. The witnesses of this episode would later swear that she said those three words with a glint in her eye. The glint was faint, they would report, and it was a little insecure, but the observers suggested that they thought Susan knew exactly what she was doing.

What she was doing is subject to interpretation, of course, as this woman named Susan maintained a degree of humility that prevented her from addressing the full import of her purported casual salvo against future ridicule. Those who heard Susan issue this phrase swore that Susan knew exactly what she was doing when she set those of us who would fall prey to our own case of the leans in the future, free from the ridicule and embarrassment that follows our own episodes.

We can only assume that Susan suffered similar ridicule for much of her life, and that it bothered her so much that she sought to put an end to it. If that wasn’t the case, it might have had something to do with Susan’s hope that the line “Shall we dance” might provide a remedy for future sufferers. Her hope, we can only guess, was that the witnesses of this episode would spread the word to put an end to this scale of human suffering. Whatever the case was, this unassuming restaurant hostess provided those who were lucky enough to be there that day, and those who later heard about it, a shield against public scorn that we would use the rest of our lives. We might not have carried it off with the grace and dignity Susan displayed, but we would always think of her, and silently thank her, for freeing us from this ever-present spectacle in our lives.

Had Andrew Parizek learned of this antidote prior to his case of the leans, it might have spared him the humiliation. I doubted it at the time, and I still do, for I considered Susan’s humorous quip an antidote to two, and in her case three, separate and distinct leans, but I wasn’t sure that even her ingenious response could shield someone from the public fallout of four.

Four separate and distinct leans were so unprecedented, to my mind, that I doubt there is a sufficient antidote. Couple that with the fact with the Gone with the Wind-style, dramatic exit that Andrew hoped to execute preceding it, and I doubt that any clever quip would’ve permitted him to save face. His only recourse was to walk away and just hope that witnesses would forget it soon after it happened.

Andrew Parizek was an “always a bridesmaid, never a bride” fella. Everyone I knew liked him. He was a likable guy, but no one I knew connected with him on so many levels that they would regularly seek him to hang out, or consider him a best buddy. He was one of those guys who was always there but never the focus in the room. Andrew Parizek, to be brutally honest, wasn’t the type of guy we remember, and perhaps that’s all he wanted when he delivered so many final farewells to so many people that he accidentally said goodbye to the same people more than twice. I don’t know how much preparation he put into his final farewells, but I’m sure he did it so that he could let each of us know how important we were to him to hopefully have the sentiment returned. This is not to suggest that Andrew’s actions were self-serving, but everyone wants those who were around them to remember that we were here. It is possible that had Andrew escaped unencumbered by my desk neighbor, his final farewell might have had the lasting effect on me he hoped for, but the lasting memory I now have of him consists of him shucking and jiving with my desk neighbor, trying to get past her, for a dramatic ride off into the sunset.