Corporate Hacks

We would like to hijack what was supposed to be a lovely post about a visit from an old colleague (old as in "past", not as in "age") to rant for a while about large corporate America.

Meet Michelle



Lisa met Michelle when she came to work for her in the old days when Lisa was a corporate hack. We worked for a very large US corporation to remain un-named - other than to say it was, and is, the largest telephone company in America.

Michelle was pretty much working as an admin when she came to work for Lisa (not by choice, she was assigned) and Lisa spent days worrying about how to use her in this very technical group of people with very technical job requirements. Turns out no worrying was required. The size of the workload didn't allow the luxury of only assigning Michelle projects that we thought she could handle - we had to assign her projects we were sure she couldn't handle. Boy was Lisa ever wrong - and happily so.

Michelle turned out to be (as were the rest of her team - Lisa was blessed) incredibly hard-working, quick-learning and committed. It wasn't long before she started leading entire projects on her own (smartie pants!) She also happened to be the nicest person Lisa had and has ever met. We mean "nice" in every definition of the word - like "helping little old ladies across the street" nice, "spending her weekends pulling all-nighters for her charity work" nice, "finding time to hand paint wine glasses for a housewarming" nice.

Why the commercial for Michelle? You need it as background for the rant.

Michelle and her husband Lenny are on vacation here over on Paradise Island. We went to pick them up last night for an evening out. During the evening it came out that nothing at work had changed. She was still over-worked and underpaid - in fact the night before she flew out for her vacation she stayed up until 6:00 in the morning (yes I mean all night) working. Do you think anyone even noticed? Nope. Do you think if anyone did notice it would matter? Nope.

One thing that Mark and Lisa realized after leaving life as a "Corporate Hack" is how completely unnecessary you really are. You work so hard believing that you are making such a contribution and that you are irreplaceable - you're not, you aren't.

Here is Michelle dedicating herself 1000% to a difficult, and stressful job and no one notices (sorry Michelle) - even worse, they take advantage of her niceness. She is the one they go to with their "troubles" when they want something.

Corporate America is like a towering, drooling beast that will consume you within a year or two. The only way to protect yourself is to lie down and give up - be as unnoticeable as possible.

Those who roll-over are rewarded simply for "putting in their time" which starts a vicious cycle when these folks (mostly white men) get promoted and are in charge of persuading as many people as they can to roll-over as well ("don't rock the boat or someone will notice I actually don't do any work")... and the cycle continues. Not a good situation for anyone with unshakeable passion or drive.

Anyway - we had a lovely visit with Michelle and her husband Lenny (Emily wanted to go home with them). Lenny treated us to a great Snapper dinner at Arawak Cay.