Saturday, March 02, 2002

Nice Job Kevin and Evil Corporations

I like it Kevin--and I really like this "open letter" vehicle that is floating around these days. They speak in such a human voice--not someone trying to be legal because they are afraid the recipient might get mad and sue them. Anyway, it has my vote as a send. Do you want me to put a link on the left nav bar to it posted someplace, so that once more posts come in it doesn't get "buried"? Let me know. I'm glad you're here. Did everyone miss me? I've been playing with the girls, and I'm exhausted. I got this idea in my pre-sleep state one night and blog sisters was the result. We climbed to number 3 on daypop in our first 24 hours and finally fell off the charts today. So I can ease up a little bit and come back to my roots some. I was adding 1-2 sister bloggers an hour for most of yesterday, which means I participated in fewer than usual extracurricular activities.

With that, I'm going to rest.

I pose a question--what was the shittiest company you ever worked for and why? (I warn you not to use actual company names unless you're unafraid of litigation.) My disfunction junction was a now defunct Atlanta-based mom-and-pop boutique consulting firm where I served as director of corporate communications. We worked so hard for so little, it should have been illegal. game-playing, alcoholism, cheating, divorce, plots to get people fired, all of this happening in a group of people that numbered 80 in it's prime. Direct report meetings generally started with one or two women crying. Even before the meetings started. Door slaming, chair kicking, and lots of screaming between the CEO wife and Chairman husband. I told myself when I walked into the madness that if it ever started to seem "normal," I needed to leave. It started to seem normal, and I didn't leave. THAT was a crucial mistake. In the end, the place nearly killed me--quite literally--and brought one 6' 2" 60-year-old man to his knees during one of the company's patented workshops.

This was my lesson that although corporations can't breathe, can't love, aren't human, they *can* be inherently evil**. The sum of their parts, working in tandem, can create enough velocity to spin into some mad force of destruction. I have seen it, felt it, and seen people destroyed by it. No one person, plot, scheme, or hateful idea on its own has the power of evil. But when two or more join, the result can be a horrifying synergy of mass proportions.

Clearly, I went on longer than I should have here. But, when you come back home again, you might as well bring a story with you.

**evil - an overused word these days, but I think it applies much more aptly to corporations than to countries and their people.


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