The Great Grand Boss

A tale of collective bargaining and desperation.

Once upon a time, I worked for a company that basically quit the software business. It was a massive multinational whose name you would immediately recognize. I went from being a programmer/analyst with the cool products working with the executives to being a customer service rep with the crappy products working in a cube farm. Hated it. But I kept my salary.

Anyway, part of this experience meant getting a whole other set of managers who were evidently not the smart and upwardly mobile sort. Since I had worked in a union shop before, I know what it’s like to know when my great grand boss is a slob lifer with a pot belly, a sneer and a Mercedes in the parking lot. I just remembered his very unique name and found that today he lives in Little Rock, AK. I’ll call him Fart Karson.

The idea starts to float around that the call center for the crappy products (none of which, I might add, have survived to this day) might be relocated to a place with a lower cost of living. The company would pay for our relocation. It immediately became clear to me that we weren’t going to get the sort of raises appropriate for the competitive labor market that is Los Angeles County. So as everyone is getting nervous about this development, I decide that I’m going to represent the employees and air their growing number of concerns.

Comrade Bowen
So I go around the call center, it takes about a week or so, and I do a weighted voting kind of thing. I probably spoke to about 20 of us and got feedback on our top 13 concerns. I remember that the top two concerns were about the fact that we didn’t have a clear career path and the criteria for promotion was murky. We did have a three tier escalation path, with the regular guys, the experts and the boss. We did have the good fortune that our immediate boss was technically proficient and a nice guy. I remember him fondly. Our grand boss was wise, but she didn’t get into the technical weeds - which was fair because the technical weeds on these crappy products were as tangled as kite string, tinsel and dog hair on a beater bar. She made sure that our interactions with the great grand boss were as infrequent and as brief as possible. Another bit of SPF for the desert of our professional lives. That didn’t change the fact that we were lorded over by Fart Karson who waddled around and grunted like The Penguin. No of course he didn’t work in the same building as the rest of us. He was an important man.

In my manifesto, I made sure that the language was crisp and to the point. I also anonymized all of the literals. The literals were actual quotes from actual people in their own words. I had them say these things that would not indicate specific ways they could be identified, but I had them all initial the document. I and maybe one other person collated, stapled and distributed it around and delivered the signed original to the boss and grand boss.

I felt very proud about the document. Everyone said that it was a fair and accurate assessment of what was going on. I can’t say what assembling it said about me. As you could imagine, there was some hesitancy at first, but I made assurances that I wasn’t an agent of the bosses and that everybody would get to see what was going on before I submitted it. As someone new to the call center, I managed to pull it off. The other employees could see that I understood the risks. After all, my division had just been liquidated, that’s how I wound up in this purgatory in the first place and yes I had once been a union employee. I know what it’s like to work with lifers who are locked into oppositional frameworks.

The Results
Fart Karson addressed the plebes and a few things were locked in. We would suddenly and actually have annual reviews that followed the corporate standard and the path through escalation was clarified. It was clear that our 32 year old and 43 year old boss and grand boss would not be leaving any time soon, so forget about management. And suddenly the competition for getting into call escalation was the new hotness. So the call rotation went in such a way that our resolution of ‘hot seat’ issues would be noted, and over time the best would have an opportunity to get promoted to the higher tier. These were now official positions whereas before, the hot seat was just for anyone who wanted it.

On the whole things didn’t get better, but people accepted that the new way was essentially what we asked for when we were stressed and afraid of losing our jobs. I left and went to an actual software company as soon as I bloody well could. Things got better for me. Still, I was once doing some object-orient client-server work in the days when System38 and AS/400 were basically market leaders and PCs with Pentium and 5 1/2 inch floppies were all the rage. Now I was set loose during those wild west days of the Unix Wars, when it looked like everyone would select IBM’s OS/2 as the way forward.

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From Oppression to Chaos
When I look back on it, I imagine it to be a cautionary tale about coming forward with honesty. Be careful what you ask for. When you are forthcoming about what you really want, and you want your job to have X, Y and Z, and you negotiate your way into that, you now lose your excuse to bitch. You now owe your employer more focus and dedication. It makes a shit job comfortable. It’s the shit you demanded. I was never comfortable, before or after. I was surviving. They made me learn LU 6.2 as if IBM’s networking protocols were going to take over the universe. I knew better.

I left the predictable tedium of debugging print streams for the vagaries of the market. It was the late 80s, at the end of the Reagan Era. Aerospace and defense spending were just about to dry up and they were the only people buying the kind of software my new company was selling. Los Angeles County was running on empty so I ended up in NYC.

My new boss was a volleyball player. My new grand boss was a sharp dude out of central casting for The Departed. A clean-cut hard-shoe Boston JFK stunt double. He ended up as a Director at a private equity firm. My great grand boss was one of those eccentric wealthy indoor kids from Yale & Princeton who jogged every morning at 6am and occupied a large rambling mansion in the old money downtown. A perfect combination of Peasant, Genius, Ruler hierarchy. It launched me well enough. It was the first job I got through connections and I got along well with the geniuses, one of whom pointed me to the next big thing. That second genius, I have to tell was a remarkably cool dude who ended up racing Porsches for a living. I had all the wrong instincts about Corporate America. It took me a very long time to learn.

I’ll end on that sentiment.

I took it as a generational imperative to be one of the new swarm of young, gifted and black soldiers in Nordstrom attire. I was yuppie to the core, except to the extent that I had been and retained that New World Afrikkan aesthetic. That could be best exemplified in my fingerless leather gloves, Girbaud baggies pounding Kamikazes in a Village basement party to the beat of Rumpshaker (No Diggity). There would have been a character like me in New Jack City but they didn’t do a Martha’s Vineyard scene. Then again, neither did Boomerang or Mo Better Blues. The end result was that I was never capable of merging my social appeal to my business appeal. I was never easy to get. So I ended up working like a secret agent.

Instead of being a whip in the office where all the connections and powers were centralized, I became an operative in the field where all the risk and danger and road-meeting rubber was burned. Eventually I crossed the country as an independent contractor - a digital mercenary in the wilds of {Dayton OH, Olympia WA, Berlin CT, Dunedin FL, Norcross GA, Katy TX}. It was just me and the wetwork. I had only one or two good handlers.

The story for today is that as a Peasant, our relationship to work is dependent on our own capacity to see beyond the daily and into the imagination of the Great Grand Boss. If we cannot be centered in that imagination, none of our whinging and whining will matter. As a Peasant you need to be a lead dog and your Great Grand Boss has to trust your instincts. Its easy enough to manage your boss, and on occasion when they are pinching your ass, you need to work around them with your grand boss. But if you are not a twinkle in your great grand boss’ eye, you may as well disappear. Survive long enough to plot your escape.

There’s a lot of very common yak about the evils of capitalism. To know and understand capitalism is to reckon with its opportunistic nature. Too many folks think the conspiracies are capitalist, but the capitalist, like the Stoic, knows that the market cannot be cornered. The capitalist is a player, a player with a very good understanding of the limits {buy, sell, hold, hedge, option} of his own liquidity. The capitalist, like the Stoic, always has an eye out for an exit from a market whose consensus goes beyond reasonable cause and effect - when even the shoeshine boy has a stock tip.

Therefore beware of consensus. When the demands of the stressed-out masses are accepted, you suddenly have nowhere to go.