Employee of the Momth

Flickr photo by kath-leen.

Dear Reader,

As you know, it has been quite commonplace for quite some time for employers to single out and designate one employee as “Employee of the Month”.

I’m not sure where this trend began, but i imagine there was apple pie served for dessert afterwards.

The idea, insofar as there is an idea, is that singling out a monthly ‘winner’ will raise the self-esteem of that employee and make them feel recognised for all their hard work, and, collaterally, the award will give the other employees something to aspire to.

In other words, it’s a confidence trick designed to raise profits for the company.

Well, sadly, this week i was awarded Employee of the Momth.

Yes, “sadly”, and, yes, “Momth”. All that fancy curly ‘certificate’ writing is apparently quite hard to read on-screen, and it’s too late to change it after it’s printed on fancy curly certificate paper.

But a typo’s not why i’m sad.

I’m not that shallow!

No. See, the thing about singling out an employee and celebrating them as champion is that the employer – The Man – is, essentially, singling out an employee.

And being singled out is nature’s way of having something bad happen to you.

For example.

The Parable of the Pedigree Chick

When i was little, we dabbled in chooks. We had a small run set up in a collection of gal-iron oddments tied together with chookwire down near the back fence, with half a dozen or so small, unremarkable hens in there, egging away for us in return for kitchen scraps.

One day, we went to an agricultural show, and there we stumbled upon this poultry breeder who was selling high quality chicks, complete with certificates to attest to their high quality. Inspired, we bought one of these chicks, and took it home.

You could see that it was a fancy chick, even though it was only small. It was brown, a deep, chocolate brown, which made it stand out even more from its new runfellows in our backyard compound.

Even its tiny little peeps sounded more refined.

We all looked at it proudly, gave it a name, and went inside for the evening.

In the morning, i rushed out to give the chooks some vegie peels. I didn’t usually do that in the morning. Truth was i couldn’t wait until after school to gaze in admiration at our new prize wunderchick.

It was dead, of course. The other chickens had pecked it to death. It was lying all mangled in the middle of the run, its entrails straggling out behind it from where sharp, pinching beaks had pecked them out of its arse.

Pecking order

I’ve thought a lot about that little chick in the last few days, after becoming Employee of the Momth.

See, when i initially did the clever thing that i was ultimately recognised for, other widgeteers would come up to me and say how great the thing was, and how much it helped them do their widgeteering.

That felt really good, to know that i’d helped my colleagues. That i’d made their miserable lives of slaving for The Man a little better.

In truth, the clever thing i did was a very small thing, and it was, really, part of my job to do it. It did require some initiative on my part to come up with it, and some cleverness to deliver it, but part of my job is to show initiative and come up with clever ideas, which i then deliver.

So come up with and deliver it i did, and then everyone was slightly happier, and i got smiles and compliments from co-workers i passed in the steaming alleyways and cluttered ratruns that connect the different parts of the factory.

And then, at the monthly staff meeting, one of the suits made a big deal about this really clever thing that one particular widgeteer had done, a clever thing that that widgeteer had gone out of their comfort zone and job description to accomplish, and a clever thing that was genuinely the result of some pretty darn clever thinking that we could all aspire to emulating, and then, quite bizarrely, the suit turned around and awarded the Employee of the Momth certificate to me, for nothing more than my having done my job.

Snide, much?

Ever since then, the other widgeteers have looked at me sidelong. The smiles and compliments have disappeared. They now go out of their way to ask me to do things that i normally do without having to be asked, and then they compliment me – snidely – on doing them.

SNIDE WIDGETEER: Say, Gully, could you just run a tolerance compatibility check on this widget for me?

GULLY: Sure, no problem. You don’t have to ask me to do this, you know, i would normally just do…

SNIDE WIDGETEER: Gee, that’s a really good job you’ve done there, Gully.

GULLY: Um, well…

SNIDE WIDGETEER: I guess you’ll be Employee of the Month next month, too, if you keep up that level of doing your job exactly the way you’re supposed to.

GULLY: Um…

SNIDE WIDGETEER: Well, i guess i’d better get back to my bench and get on with doing my job, just exactly the way i’m supposed to. [glares sidelong at GULLY and then leaves]

So now i’m having my entrails, dear Reader, pecked out through my arse by my co-workers.

And i have the Employee of the Momth programme to thank for it.

Hurrah.

Employee of the Moment

When i run my own widget factory, i’m not going to single out and recognise individual workers for their achievements in a public humiliation ritual like that. Instead, i’ll wander the factory floor and routinely congratulate ppl on the job that they’re doing, where such congratulations are appropriate. I’ll have a real relationship with my workers, not one that i print out using MS Publisher.

Or that’s my plan anyway.

Not that i’d ever own my own factory, of course. I have no plans to be The Man, dear Reader! But if i was, you know, forced at gunpoint to run a factory. Like, if there was a war or something, and all the widget factory runners were dead. Then. That’s how i’d run it.

And Thursdays would be funny t-shirt day.

Yours,
Gullybogan