Work vs Jobs vs Mission

A lot of young people in tech jobs have recently discovered how little loyalty their previous employers held for their employees. As usual, a lot of millennials think they are the first group to experience this horror. Kiddies, you aren’t. I doubt there has ever been a generation who was happily surprised to discover their masters were willing to make sacrifices to keep the minions fed. Modern government jobs are probably the closest thing to that kind of situation, but that is only because in a socialist system everyone in the system shares in the funding of the system. In a public education system pension, for example, if the retired teachers don’t get paid the retired bureaucrats don’t get paid. In business, except the CEO and a few other C’s who will always get their golden parachutes, there is no such thing as “us” or “them”; it’s just “me” and everyone else. When you work for a corporation, it is a gross mistake to imagine “we’re all in this together.” Corporations, by design, are everyman and woman for themselves.

I do have sympathy for all of the young people recently dumped from their “dream jobs.” Been there, done that, and worse. The “worse” was being middle-management and being told to layoff my employees. The firs time in my life I was drunk was when I was in my early 30s, in the late 1970s, and I had just finished the slow painful dissolution of my test engineering department at Valmont Industries. For three months, the company mismanagement kept telling us “this will be the last layoff” and, a week later, we were handed another list of employees to get rid of. For me, this was the first of a fairly long list of engineering jobs but for several of my friends and coworkers it was the end of the brief rise in their career paths. A couple of weeks later, my boss laid me off and, later that day, he was handed his notice.

I had no “mission” at Valmont. It was just a reasonably well-paying job near a reasonable tolerable Nebraska small city where my wife had picked our next house. The economy in Nebraska and all of the country’s agricultural areas was in rapid decline and our small city, Fremont, was especially hard-hit when Valmont laid off 1,600 employees, Campbell Soup closed their canning facility, two packing plants shutdown and moved to non-union states, and the city practically closed down for the duration of the recession (well into the 90s). There was no Reagan “economic miracle” or any other kind of miracle to save us. We managed to “sell” our house for a substantial loss, including giving the “buyers” $5,000 under-the-table for their down-payment. I took another awful tech job in Omaha, which lasted until my new employer asked me to layoff my best employees because the were “overqualified.” I quit, instead, and wrote this song the night I decided to leave that job, “I’m Gonna Quit.”

Over the next 40 years, I went through 11 employers and discovered whatever “mission” my life was going to have in the process. Like soldiers in battle, there is no such thing as patriotism or fealty to king and country, there is only loyalty among peers and “the unit” within the organization. Having any kind of emotional attachment to any larger entity is foolish and in most organizations (using that term loosely) you have to watch your back even around your peers. Functioning teams are a rarity. Most departments are organized around defending management from responsibility and unnecessary (anytime the buck can be passed) effort.

I think mostly by accident, I have been blessed to be part of a half-dozen teams, probably amounting to a total of 15 years out of my 50-year career. The other 35 years were spent earning a living in a “job.” In many ways, I learned more useful lessons in the jobs than in the functioning work situations: sometimes seeing how not to do a job is more valuable than examples of excellence. I believe the key to that whole “mission” thing is to have one for yourself, totally separate and even isolated from your job. I have always advocated “The best time to start looking for a new job is when you start a new job.” Your “career” and your “mission” are to constantly be updating, improving, and fine-tuning your skills and taking care of yourself. Your employer almost certainly holds no loyalty to you other than the expectation that assigned work will be completed as expected. You should also expect fair and reasonable treatment, but you should not be surprised if that ends suddenly, unsentimentally, and without notice. Corporations, contrary to foolish assertions by our Extreme Court, are not people although they may be psychopathic and sociopathic.

Who Is Sustainable?

As I’m writing this I am doing one of the least sustainable activities human beings have ever invented: a vacation cruise to the Caribbean in late January. I’m on a floating city with about 3,000 other old farts, burning tons of oil resources every few hours, consuming more food than many cities ten or one hundred times the population of this boat, creating nothing of use for anyone else on the planet, and we’re all pretending that we “deserve” this luxury because we managed to be lucky enough to be some of the world’s most wealthy people. We just left two islands, Aruba and Cascaras that are barely more sustainable than this boat. One of those two islands produces nothing but tourist attractions and the other is equally dependent on tourism plus water resources for a brand of booze that is incredibly water-intensive on a desert island that tears through energy and water as if the world were endless.

I live in a small Minnesota town, Red Wing that is barely more sustainable than those islands and this boat. Like all of the previously mentioned places, Red Wing’s residents are mostly oblivious to their dependence and like most of rural America they are even arrogantly clueless about how dependent they are on the rest of the country and world for their lifestyle. “We grow our own food, unlike the people in the cities,” they often argue. Growing corn and soybeans is not “growing your own food.” Corn and soybeans are food for animals and a particularly inefficient energy boondoggle. Just like the rest of the country, if the shit hit the fan and our system of interdependent reliance collapsed, most of rural America would fail in quick and spectacular fashion.

Oddly, the most sustainable community I have visited in recent years has been Detroit. Through corruption, incompetence, indifference, and lethargy, Detroit’s infrastructure and community completely collapsed in the wake of NAFTA, the Bush Recession, and the socio-economic upheavals of the last 25 years that is causing the auto industry to either reform or die (the outcomes, the winners and losers are yet to be determined). After neighborhoods collapsed and were abandoned, ransacked, and, eventually, knocked down and hauled away, urban farms sprouted up everywhere and became far more efficient, independent food sources than anything rural America has seen since the 1800’s. There are neighborhoods in Detroit that not only are capable of feeding themselves, but they produce enough food to export to the rich folks for a premium and profit.

Nobody ever said, “If you can make it in Red Wing you can make it anywhere.” One of the problems rural Americans haven’t had to face (yet) is the fact that talent, skills, and intelligence have been evacuating the countryside since the beginning of the Industrial Age. The smart kids leave and the dumb ones stay and reproduce, creating a growing dumbed-down rural population that becomes more dependent every generation. Every economic study I know of demonstrates that urban America economically props up rural America for diminishing returns and vanishing reasons. There will be an obvious outcome, eventually.

One of the lessons I learned from my manufacturing career was that engineers apply the Paretto Effect, sometimes unintentionally, to occupations. We first automate the jobs that are typically filled by assholes, eliminating the assholes and the places were their “participation” jams up production. For example, you might have thought that production line technicians would have been the last place for automation to appear, but it was among the first. Equipment and fixtures to perform final test procedures on assemblies and finished products were some of the first jobs to be automated because the people who gravitated to those jobs over-estimated both their skill levels and their necessity. Likewise, farming is experiencing the beginning of that effect as GPS, satellite weather monitoring, drone and robotic ground conditions observation, and robotic planting and harvesting equipment take over farming and farm jobs. In the very foreseeable future, the only commercial farm jobs will be high-tech equipment repair and “farming” will be managed from even greater distances; most likely from urban offices. At that point, rural dependence on urban support will be unsustainable and we’ll see even more rural communities dry up and blow away than in 1929.

The best possible scenario I can imagine will be that some rural areas will become like those Caribbean islands; tourist destinations that either learn to be incredibly tolerant and friendly or die. I got the feeling that Aruba was like one giant service business depending on positive Yelp reviews for its existence. It is scary-easy to imagine my current hometown, Red Wing, becoming one cruise ship-like entity living or dying by a few thousand tourist reviews.

"I Was Right! Damn."

The country is hotter than it has been in recorded history. Temperatures are high and rising, rainfall is dribbling to record lows in much of the nation, crops are failing, and Al Gore is hidden in media-obscurity somewhere saying, "I was right! Suck on it, you wingnut biaches."

I guess there is some justification to be had, knowing that the wingnut mainstream media got it wrong, as usual, but since wingnuts are still in charge of information everywhere, only the literate know about it. The majority of the Marching Morons are just as delusional, incoherent, and fucked up as they have always been. Nothing changes but the names on the mastheads.

In a country where "God is punishing them" is considered a rational argument, God seems to be punishing the Red States aggressively. If he/she is out there, it must be frustrating to see how the religious zombies mistake their own punishment for something done to others that happens to spill over on to the "righteous." The high price of poor design; Intelligent Designer, my ass. You forgot the brain, fool. Next time, create a bill of materials before you start playing in the mud. If God had been Japanese, he'd have had better quality control. Since he is, obviously, European he missed the entire manufacturing revolution and is more of a marketing guy than a manufacturing guy. That explains my crappy knees and hips and the entire Repuglican Party and the weird Romney genetics.

Humans have missed the boat so many times, you'd think we'd be better swimmers. The 2000 presidential election is going to be viewed, for a few years, as one of the most catastrophic events in human history. We allowed five senile assholes to overturn an election and stick us, and the rest of the planet, with a pair of characters who couldn't outsmart an inflatable Bozo the Clown doll and we wasted eight precious, unrecoverable years packing the pockets of the most corrupt people in human history while one hell of a lot more than Rome began to catch fire.

My advice, if you haven't reproduced yet, don't do it. If you have, start apologizing now. Unfortunately, being right means that we're all in for a nasty future.