Despite my career being almost a decade long – almost 1/3 of my lifespan – I rarely think about my work life in retirement. However today, my mind was drifting while I watched the sunset and I remembered something hilarious. This is the tale of one of the (many) times I was berated at work for being MORE efficient. It will be a rant – you’ve been warned ๐ .
Corporate America fascinates me because it is such a performance. We’re seeing very obvious signs of that now with some companies like Apple trying to force their employees back into the office despite 3 years of evidence that it’s not needed to be productive.
In fact, I would say being in the office, (for me at least) leads to WAY less productivity. Constant interruptions, running between different meeting rooms, and trying to block out my colleagues yelling while playing Xbox right next to me, (yes that happened – ad agencies are weird) was not conducive to deep work.
I was shocked with how much time in my day freed up when I started working from home in 2016 – the lack of all the above as well as commute and preparation time in the morning shocked me. Also as a serious introvert, dealing with people over video call in my pjs instead of in person in less comfortable clothes, was a serious bonus.
Anyway, I digress. There are a lot of parts of work life that seem to be done for appearances instead of actual productivity, and I want to tell you an example from my work life.
The year was 2014 and I was at my last job in New York. It was an ad agency and one of the few places I made friends that I still talk to to this day (and that haven’t stabbed me in the back…unfortunately that’s happened a few times, but that’s a tale for another time…)
ANYWAY, I was working with a client that became very challenging to work with for a lot of reasons, but one of them involved constant changes. I tried to be firm and push back, but I didn’t have my FIRE bulletproof armor yet. I wasn’t the DGAF badass you see before you today.
- How Pursuing FIRE Has Changed How I Act At Work
- How Pursuing FIRE Has Changed How I Act At Work (Part 2)
So when my superiors didn’t back me up and agreed to let the scope creep because this client brought them so much money – I acquiesced. However, I tried to find ways to make this new lack of scope and acceptance of a million changes better for our team. To do that, I moved from my open office seat down two rows to an empty seat next to the designer I was working with on the project.
Instead of sending endless messages and emails back and forth throughout the day, we could work through changes as they came in, in 1/10th of the time. This allowed us to not let this new ballooning scope actually encompass the rest of our work lives. After doing this for a few weeks, we increased our productivity with this client so drastically that we received praise from them for our turnaround times and our ability to deal with their continuous mountain of changes.
But then – I was told by my superiors to move back to my seat ๐ . This was hilarious to me for the reasons above, but also because WE DIDN’T HAVE ASSIGNED SEATS. They were randomly assigned. If the dice (or whatever they used) had rolled differently, I could have by chance been seated right next to my designer anyway.
I did let a little bit of Badass Purple out at that moment out of frustration, and asked why in the world they wanted me to move when we’d found a solution to the problem they were allowing to fester that didn’t hurt anyone. They said because “it didn’t look right.”
And once again, I was confused ๐ . Our seats were random and people from different departments that did and didn’t work together were mixed together. So I don’t know what the actual issue was or if this was just a way to exert control, but that’s what happened. I moved back to my seat and shortly after, gathered the fire burning in my belly and told them I wanted off the account – and (I kept this part to myself) was going to quit if they didn’t make that happen. You can read more about how that went in the posts below, which recap those years of my working life here if you’re interested:
- $5K to Retirement In 9 Years: Year 3 “Discovering FIRE…And Ignoring It”
- $5K to Retirement In 9 Years: Year 4 “Catching A Unicorn”
Conclusion
So that’s it. Rant over. Corporate America in a capitalist society is filled with so much bullshit that it now makes me laugh in hindsight. Productivity isn’t the most coveted commodity, which is a lesson I learned many times in life and in a book I enjoyed recently called Bullshit Jobs – appearances are…and that’s stupid ๐ .
What’s the most inefficient thing you’ve seen at your job?
I can see you have left your perfectionist tendencies back in corporate US (LINKs in text where you meant to circle back and add a link I think). Good for you! ๐
Most inefficient thing? The office.
I was once told by a colleague to slow down because I was making everyone else on the team look bad. ๐
Being hired as an expert to do a job for a company, doing it, and then seeing someone higher up undo everything because he thought he knew better (he didn’t, and a shitstorm ensued). Luckily (for me) it was a contract – I got paid (a lot) and then got to leave them to it at the end of three months! ๐
An aha moment for me was realizing that a lot of people in higher level positions in companies are not there because of competence, but for other reasons (kissing ass, being yes people, being prepared to “shovel shit” for the CEO, etc.)
Haha yep – mistakes are inevitable ๐ . And that is WILD. I can’t believe they said that with a straight face – wow lol. Contracts are indeed awesome for that reason ๐ . And yeah I can confirm that it seems like a lot of people are ‘in charge’ for reasons that have nothing to do with competence unfortunately.
Yeah, this rings true. Efficiency? Initiative? Evidence of independent thought? VERBOTEN. You ever see that 1944 CIA manual on how to sabotage productivity in an organisation? This kind of banal, pointless request falls right into it. I sometimes use that manual as a weekly bingo card at my current place. You have to laugh about it.
Haha I haven’t, but I’m going to check it out. Using it for bingo is genius!
Dang Purple, I feel this SO MUCH. I really need to start blogging again because I have some truly absurd stories too…
In my first job, everyone socialized SO MUCH that work wasn’t completed until the last minute. Except mine, as I didn’t socialize that often (there were only 3-4 people I truly liked/knew well in that office, out of about 60 on the entire floor). I never got any recognition for my efficiency. Similar to your situation, we also had arbitrarily assigned seats in that job and my weird controlling manager would randomly switch them up every so often. He was preparing to move everyone around when I left, thank goodness.
In my second job, I met more people I liked and embraced the socializing. Everyone else did it, so why not?! That job was dysfunctional in its own way, admittedly, but I was a lot happier there than in my first job and I did make some lasting friendships.
My third job was by far the fairest with performance reviews. Plus, I started working remotely full time while there (due to covid). Unfortunately, the new chairman of the board started forcing everyone to go back to the office, even though we were MORE efficient working from home from 2020 through 2022. I loved my coworkers and actually kind of liked the work there, but I left due to being forced to return to the office.
Now that I type that all out, dang, work is absurd. I think you had the right idea to retire… I can’t wait to retire! ๐
Yes – definitely write again! I’d love to read those stories ๐ .
Yes yes yes! Wholeheartedly second the book Bullshit Jobs. From it I understood how fundamentally human it is to desire that oneโs life mean somethingโฆ for our existence to have benefitted the world in some tiny tiny way. And at the same time how challenging the existing paradigm makes things, with BS make-work and arbitrary seating rules. Also reminds me of Marge Piercyโs poem, โTo Be of Useโ.
Yes 100% ๐ . Also I loved that poem when you sent it to me – so true.
Yes! Work really can be absurd. From being told that my colleague and I (both female, and hired to do… event programming) weren’t allowed to staff the social event that we designed and created because “there should be a male in the office” if the event was after-hours, to “well, not everything has to be efficient” when offering to help trim down a ridiculous process, you just have to laugh. Like someone else pointed out, the first time I saw that 1944 CIA manual about disrupting work, literally all decisions in the office at that time were by committee.
WOW ๐ . Those are some wild quotes. It does sound like that office is taking the CIA manual to heart.
I don’t think this would even be considered inefficient, but rather just plain wasteful:
For the last month of our year in Afghanistan, we spent every free moment cleaning the bottom of our vehicles before they were sent stateside. Our boss said that the bottom of the vehicles were going to be inspected, and if they weren’t perfectly clean we wouldn’t get to go home.
We were still running missions at that time, so we sacrificed a lot of sleep and spent hours every night and day under those things with a hose and toothbrush.
They don’t really have a sewer system over there, so it wasn’t just mud that we were cleaning off. yayyyyy.
When we finally had them spotless, we were then ordered to drive to the air base which was hours away. The only way to get there was along a dirt road, which crossed several small creeks/sewage run off.
By the time we got to the airport, the vehicles were dirty again. But no one inspected them. Turned out our boss had only heard a rumor about the inspection, and never actually confirmed it.
So that was fun.
I left the military to work in the public sector, and things got slightly less stupid. But not much. It’s funny, we used to lament how inefficient our systems were because no one had any monetary motivation to improve things. We all figured the corporate world must be much better.
It’s almost a relief to read your posts about the other side. I guess everywhere is messed up! Really glad I retired.๐
Wow – that’s ridiculous. And yeah sadly the corporate world is wildly inefficient. Woohoo retirement!
As someone who works in the public schools, everyday is inefficient. Recently got berated for not putting progress notes in a student file- even though I have 100 students and doing that 4x per year would take forever. Total waste of time. I asked why we couldnโt wait til the end of the year to do a print out of all progress comments and was told itโs a โjust in caseโ measure for audits. Sigh.
I’m sorry to hear that – and “just in case” is a wild justification for that large amount of work.
yup. We have a new head dude who wants to force us all in.
so far we are exempt because… well we do CS calls. Who would even want to be forced to overhear our often annoying and repetive calls?
This dude actually said he didn’t care what we did if we came in person. We could just socialize.
Hopefully none of this happens before I can retire. Because that exit interview is definitely going to involve a lesson in having to treat coworkers with respect and do our jobs. it does not mean we have to want to hang out with them personally.
Doubt it will help. I can’t decide if some of these people would be shocked to know we don’t all want to talk to them socially, or if they already know this so they are applying force to make it happen.
Reminds me of a few people I know who are constantly posting about families being the only thing that matters. Ok, if that’s how someone genuinely feels, but for a few of these people, I think it has to do with a bit of difficulty finding people will voluntarily tolerate their behavior – such as friends lol
That’s wild – admitting that you have to come into work, but don’t have to work ๐ . I hope you can retire before it happens too! I do get the vibe at least at the offices I’ve worked in that a lot of people would be surprised I would prefer not to socialize with them. That’s an interesting point about family vs friends – and who would tolerate bad behavior ๐ .
How DARE you be efficient?! You’ll make people with higher salaries think they’ll have to step it up to justify their salaries! >:<
I think you used the word 'performative' in your post โ exactly this! So much of the workplace is playacting that, if we eliminated all the posturing, we could work 20-25 hours a week instead of 45-50.
Lol I know right?! And yeah it’s ridiculously performative. So ridiculous.