Thursday, May 17, 2007

The Office

My job is like the Office - only not funny.

Today, we had a "consultant" in who is studying the place for "how it can improve, for both the employees and the employer." The punchline, in Office Space at least, is that at the end of the day somebody gets to collect a check - from the unemployment office.

The strange thing about this consultant is that the foregone conclusion from the beginning of the interview was, seemingly, that the person who is the problem is el jefe - the senior/managing partner of my law firm.

It was both kind of sad and weird and anxiety-provoking to sit there for 30 minutes and explain that the problem is the boss. The one improvement that could be made would be to fire the guy who signs all our checks. The consultant promised the conversations were confidential. But there's only 10 of us who work here, so when he goes back to el jefe and says the unanimous opinion was that the boss needs to quit his day job...well, the anonymity kind of goes out the window.

Also, it's kind of sad, because if el jefe wanted to know el problemo, everyone here could have told him. He didn't have to pay some consultant $1,000 to find out what everyone already knows. But maybe it'll help him admit he's got a problem.

1 comment:

-Dave said...

The humor in the Office, Dilbert, and any other workplace-related humor is that it is in fact real and believable.

I'm fortunate to have a good boss now - I was not so fortunate before. But I also have realized that perhaps I was mistaken. Sure, I saw some things they did when they tried to micro-manage things from the top - and I applied my confidence in their abilities there to their abilities at-large.

But it is arrogance on my part to think without any evidence that I know what it takes to run a company. I have seen enough times where things I thought foolish worked brilliantly, and my own majestic plans crumbled.

The difference between foolish management and brilliant me is often that my painfully bad ideas can remain glorious dreams of success in my head, while their glorious dreams are exposed to the harsh light of reality, and will succeed or fail for all to see.