One of the favorite words that managers love to use is the term “we.” Of course, what they always mean is you. However, they want to seem like one of the guys and like they intend to roll up their sleeves and pitch in and help out. In fact, what they then do is scurry back into their little holes and plan more meetings.

And example of this happened at an office I just happen to be familiar with it because I may or may not happen to work there. I can’t say much about the incident because there are people involved besides someone who may or may not be me. Let me just say that managers and this possibly fictional office made a very significant decision that greatly affected the work of people in the department (man, covering your butt is difficult). This change was not for the better and, in fact it made working in this particular department I heard about much more difficult.

Now, was not entirely unexpected. Most of the employees knew this day was coming. What doesn’t make any sense is that management chose this week to do it. See, the department is very short-handed already so making any other changes just multiplies the work of everyone else.

Another employee happens to be on vacation this entire week. So, my question is, what could not wait until next week. If you just did the change next week the person who was affected would be just as affected and the rest of the employees would have been just as shocked next week without having to do back-breaking back-bends to try to keep things afloat this week.

My favorite part was when a manager said, “we’re all just going to have to pitch in and help out this week.”

See, she said “we.” What she meant was, “yeah, we made a decision, didn’t really think and don’t really care how this affects you guys on the phones and now you will all have to work twice as hard to make me look better to managers higher-up than me.”

Do managers ever think? Do they ever ask their employees about anything? Do they plan for anything? All of those meetings they have and what do they do there? My theory is they just plan for more meetings. Then they run out of time and have to make snap decisions and that’s when they pull out the “we” when they actually mean “you.”

Now it would be entirely different if a manager actually said “we” and then rolled up their respective sleeves and pitched in. What drives me insane is that they make the insane decisions and then expect you to somehow match their previous expectations. It’s like they put a giant boulder on your back, then strap on weights and then pile on a Volkswagen and expect you to continue to run a marathon every day. When you can’t do it they mark it down on your yearly review.

I worked for a retail store known as Venture for a while. I was part of a crew that was helping remodel the store. I was the guy who could tear down, move and then rebuild one of those display stands that they put the merchandise on. We worked at night and the idea was that we would move the merchandise around at night and get the stuff out of the way of the construction workers so that the workers could do the remodeling during the day. However, Mr. and Mrs. Consumer would supposedly not notice a difference. Or something. Again, it was something a manager thought up so it does not make much sense to start with.

We had this manager who did nothing but stand around and give orders. If he worked in an office he would be taking a lot of meetings. I never saw him lift anything. I never saw him push anything. He stood around and yelled and got every excited. He got especially excited when the big-wig who was in charge of the store and worked in the corporate office was supposed to be coming to visit in the morning.

“Hurry up,” he would say, standing at the end of the aisle looking very anxious, “So and so is coming!”

I forget the guy’s name but he bandied about like it was some kind of secret password. My whole take on the matter? What the hell do I care what this idiot thinks of the work I do? Does he have any idea how hard it is to do this job? Can he take apart and rebuild one of these kiosks? Does he know how hard it is to put the product back up and make it look nice before the store opened in the morning? If he wasn’t there, with his sleeves rolled up, pushing a damn shelving unit across the floor right beside me then he had no right to judge how well I was doing my job. Therefore, his opinion does not matter.

There are some companies that make an effort to do this. I remember when St. Louis Bread Company was only in St. Louis. I heard that the upper management of that company was required to spend at least one day a month working at one of the stores. They worked behind the lines. They made sandwiches. They took orders. They got down there with their workers and they worked a hard day’s work. I think that would at least help them in some way get a better idea of what their employees were going through. That would at least give some minor help when it came to making a decision that would affect the way those people did their jobs.

Of course, more than likely, what happened was some brown-nosing, ambitious, ass-kissing store manager probably spent the week before the visit instructing his employees how to act and cleaning the place. He probably ran drills to make sure everything ran perfectly. He probably did everything he could to make it seem like his store was perfect, without blemish and that everything the managers decided was perfect and like being handed down the Ten Commandments from God himself.

There are always brown-nosers. You see them at those boring meetings. These are the people who sit right up front and take a lot of notes. Me, I’m sitting the back drawing or writing more haikus.

Until they actually do the work they are forcing the rest of us to live with I see no reason to care about managers. I find them beneath me. I think they are beneath all of us who actually do the work while they run to meetings, are sitting in meetings are planning meetings or writing wrap ups of meetings they just had before going off to another meeting.

Bryan W. Alaspa’s latest novel Dust is now available at his website at www.bryanalaspa.com and also at www.amazon.com.