When "D" Students Get Jobs

People amaze me. But not always for the right reasons.

I work for a large, multi-national corporation whose name, logo and corporate signature are instantly recognizeable. The people I work with are highly paid (if not over-paid), highly trained professionals who are at the top of their field. Many are nationally known for their work and accomplishments. I, on the other hand, actually work for a living.

And yet these well educated, well read and well bred professionals are some of the dumbest, most incosiderate people I have ever met. Not stupid. Not ignorant. Not naive. Just dumb. Because there's a difference.

By dumb, I mean no common sense. No sense of reality. No consideration of others or awareness of what's happening around them or the impact on others. Brilliant is the person who can tell you when, where, why, how and how much it rains. Dumb is the person who knows all that but still doesn't know enough to come in out of it.

There's the high level manager who delays the 9AM meeting four days a week because at 8:58 he has to leave the building to walk to the deli a block away to get a breakfast sandwich, then spends an hour dissecting it in front of a room full of people.

There's the person in Administration who refuses to order light bulbs for desk lamps until you can prove to her you have exhausted all other ways of solving the lighting problem without them.

And then there's the person who sent eight overnight packages to his son at UCLA on the company DHL account, then put in a voucher for reimbursement of $2 for coffee he bought a job candidate at the coffee cart on the corner.

Certainly we all have our workplace horror stories to tell, but what we sometimes overlook is that the knucklehead who still hasn't learned how to operate his telephone voicemail after 15 years could very well wind up becoming the senior executive responsible for everything from environmental safety to global oil prices. For instance. whoever the genius is at BP that decided not to inspect the pipeline for the last 14 years, was once a peon driving some other office worker crazy. At some point someone should have recognized the danger in this guy.

BP, according to wire reports, had not performed the required physical inspections over the years. Instead, they relied on ultrasound analysis which told them things were OK. They were wrong. In some spots, more than a foot of sludge had built up in the pipeline. In others, the corrosion was so bad, the pipeline was actually leaking barrels of oil. A BP expert is quoted as saying "My assumption is that we didn't do it in the right spots".

Well DUH.

The nation has now lost 8% of its oil supply due to this lunacy. Higher prices are sure to follow. There will be much governmental hand wringing and very little in the way of penalties. Why should anyone be surprised? Corporate America continues to reward stupidity and malfeasance. The guy in the small car on the freeway takes it in the shorts and nothing ever changes.

Don't get me wrong. I'm a capitalist just like everyone else. I just can't figure out why I have to push and struggle and fight eleven hours a day, 49 weeks a year to keep my job and make a living, and other complete fools muck up the environment, wreak havoc on the economy and threaten the financial future of millions of people, then are rewarded with bonuses, stock options and transportation on private corporate jets.

I'd like to see those jets take them to some nice federal prisons and leave them there. Not likely though. They're too busy having barbecue down on the ranch in Crawford.

E-Smarmony

Am I the only one who thinks those e-Harmony ads are annoying as Hell?

All those smiling suburban mall people make my skin crawl. And that guy who runs it with that automatronic grin looks as smarmy as can be. Every time it comes on, I reach for the remote and change to something else. Anything else.

Let's be clear. I have nothing against online dating or match-making. I know plenty of people who have done it with great success. I think it is a great idea when done correctly and safely. But these ads just make me ill. And what the hell are the 32 or 47 or 658 dimensions of compatibility they match you against? Are you a psycho? Do you drown small animals? Pay your bills? Have indiscriminate sex? Subscribe to 53 different porn sites? Go to church more than twice a year?

As a perpetually single person, I admire people who are able to find true love even after passing beyond their fabulous years and into the beer gut years. Even though I am essentially jaded and unfeeling, I believe one can find true love at any age, and hopefully when you're not already married to someone else. And while e-Harmony is not the only company capitalizing on people's hopes for happiness, their come-ons bother me the most. I can't put my finger on it. Maybe it's the promise of absolute happiness that they seem to want to convey. Maybe it's that grinning pitchman and his nebulous dimensions of compatibility.

Come to think of it, that's a dating term I bet you never even heard of. Maybe you should try it in a bar sometime. Just walk up to that someone you'd like to know better and say "Hey... want to see my dimensions of compatibility?" Or how about "Wow, those are some knock-out dimensions of compatibility you've got."

Let me know how it goes.

It Begins

I've been mulling over how to begin this project. What would be an appropriate topic about which to vent. God knows there are plenty to choose from. But a look back at the last two weeks gave me some inspiration.

What in the world goes through the minds of corporate mega-executives? Or is anything going through those minds at all? I'm speaking about New York's Con Ed. The company had a melt down in Queens that quickly became a public relations nightmare. Unfortunately that was followed immediately by a week-long heat wave that came close to crippling the city's power grid.

Now, I won't harp on why a city like New York should have such a fragile power system to begin with. That's a topic for another time. What I can't fathom is why Con Ed is so incredibly bad at dealing with the public and the media. The arrogance and the disregard for the public's interest, concern and anger is astounding. They stonewall media inquiries, answer direct questions with double-talk, schedule briefings for times that are so late in the day it is virtually impossible to get the information out there, and do everything in their power to keep the media from distributing the information in a timely fashion at all.

Con Ed, like the New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority, has not figured out that a little touch of honest, candor and accessibility will go a long way to diffuse public rancor and media criticism.

Con Ed also hasn't figured out that sending the CEO out in a chauffer driven car with his own personal photographer to a work scene to pose with crews achieves nothing good. He needed to go out in the community without the photographer. He needed to go in casual clothes, riding in a Con Ed work van, make multiple stops, talk to workers, customers and business peoples. He needed to personally hand out claim forms and face the music. Hiding in the Union Square headdquarters achieves nothing.

Unfortunately, this will likely not be the last time New York will see this type of problem. Even more unfortunately, the next time this happens, Con Ed will handle it exactly the same way. They need serious public relations advice and they need to listen to it.

But they won't.