Over the months that I have been writing I have talked before about my problems with management. Over the past couple of days I have had talks with friends who have had to deal with managers. This has only managed to successfully prove that companies are evil entities, managers are idiots and out of touch with reality and that people who devote themselves to companies have problems.

I think the problem has to be that when you work for a company eventually you come to the realization that everything that has been worked for so far is turning into a great pile of meaningless dung so rapidly that it’s like watching one of those time-lapse films showing a dead mongoose decomposing over several weeks. It is the realization that what you thought was the Great and Terrible Oz isn’t even really just the doddering old man, but something far more hideous, soulless and evil behind the curtain.

I think it all depends on what a person wants to do with their lives. Are you willing to work and slave for years and years and years, following orders, towing the company line, kissing the right asses, year after year, selling yourself here and a principle or two there and a part of your soul there all for the hope that you kissed the right asses at the right time and when the axe comes down, maybe it doesn’t cut you too badly? Sure, you are willing at that point to sacrifice your friends and colleagues, because by then the giant vampire that is the company has sucked so much life and so much soul out of you, you can’t even feel it anymore. You tell yourself night after night, as you work long hour after long hour, that it all means something and that there will be some great reward once the sunlight comes up again, and that the parts of your soul that are being cut away are really just extra bits you don’t need anymore. Then, after 30 years or so, you get to the end and you find your reward is a box full of nothing. That you basically made some richer people even richer and now you have a 401K and company stock and maybe a gold watch and now there’s nothing. What have you done to make anything in any part of the world any better for you having been here?

Oh, sure, there’s your family, but your kids barely know you and your spouse doesn’t know how to talk to you because for 30 years you were sacrificing huge parts of your life to the machine, in the hopes that in the end, there would be something worthwhile there. So, only then, do you realize that all those years have flown by and that somewhere about the time you went into high school someone hit the fast-forward button on your life but you were too busy moving paper from this side to that side and trying so hard to look like a good-worker-bee in the hopes that maybe you wouldn’t find your head on the chopping block to even notice how it was all flying by.

Oh sure, you could use your downtime to become involved, try to make a difference, but instead, the company is not just asking, but now DEMANDING that you sacrifice more and more and more and more of that precious free time to feed its constant hunger. That hunger that sucks you dry slowly, leaving you exhausted and battered and standing outside the doors with your pension and a gold watch and nothing to look back on and nothing to look forward to because it took everything from you.

If you’re lucky.

If you’re not, then you find that when the axe comes down, all that ass kissing just gave you chapped lips and you see the monster for what it really is. You see that all those hours meant nothing. All those hours you sacrificed, all those long nights, all of those endless days and lost weekend, all amounted to a number that some manager somewhere or some consultant somewhere decided they didn’t like. No gold watch then. Nothing.

No, what should happen, is that the company should not demand people work extra hours.

What I love are the ridiculous attempts to boost moral. One company I worked for found out a way to try and reward people for working countless extra hours. A sticker and a plastic toy! Does a sticker and a toy make up for the hours of your life that were sacrificed? Those are hours that you can never ever get back? If companies want to compensate, then they should give those hours back. How about days off? How about letting someone go home early? How about at least letting someone come in late the next day if they had to work until 3 am?

What most companies that rely only on are metrics and numbers and continually write people up for making mistakes create is not a feeling of teamwork. What they create is an atmosphere of fear. Fear that you won’t meet a metric. Fear that a chart won’t get turned in on time. Fear of making a mistake or having to tell your boss you might make a mistake because every moment and every detail of your life is plotted, charted, graphed and analyzed by the monster that lives behind the curtain.

People can’t work in an atmosphere of fear. It wears on them. It breaks them.

In the end, all of the hours worked don’t matter. It’s is a job. It pays the bills. When you stand and look at the unpleasant atmosphere, ridiculous demands and every moment is utter hell you soon discover the compensation just isn’t enough. It isn’t enough to match up against the parts of you that you sacrificed to make it. It isn’t enough to give you back the hours you wasted. It isn’t enough to make up for robbing the person of the hours they could have been using to try and make something of their lives, and maybe leave a little bit of an impression on this world.

Sacrificing your time, your family, your health, your sanity isn’t worth the plastic toy, the sticker or even the compensation. Finding solutions that allow people to put in a relatively regular working day is the route to go. Instead of cutting to the bone and expecting people to sacrifice even more, find a way to make the increased amount of people more efficient and cost-effective. You don’t put out a fire by taking people away from the hose or the line of buckets. You put out the fire by bringing more people in.

You give people back the time they sacrifice.

You don’t demand that they sacrifice it.

You create a working environment free of lies. Free of smoke and mirrors. You treat people like adults and you compensate them and reward them fairly and then you find people willing to go the extra mile when it is needed.

Let’s wake up and act like adults. Find a way to actually make a difference. Find a way to actually make things work and listen to people who have ideas on how to make things work and let’s make sure it all really does work before putting things into action.

Let’s try to make at least one aspect of working worth doing.

Right now, there’s nothing.

Bryan W. Alaspa’s novel Dust is now available in print and eBook format at his website www.bryanalaspa.com and www.amazon.com.