I've said here before I'd really prefer not to be in a position to make decisions regarding other people. It's a stance that has informed my politics to a certain degree in that I'm not really anxious to weigh in on gay marriage or the criminalization of pot or whatever else. My basic position on this and loads of other stuff is: please don't check with me. I've already got kids and a mortgage and laundry and like four episodes of Chopped on my DVR that I can't for the life of me figure out how I'm ever going to have time to watch. If I don't get my scheduling sorted out, I'm never going to learn how to make a 20-minute gourmet quiche out of Spam, curly endive, sea urchins and Raisinets.
But the lure of money and not wanting to be told what to do has led me into a position where I'm in charge of a very small group of people's lives. Well, their work lives ostensibly, but I'm an overachiever. A reluctant overachiever. That means I'll go above and beyond but only after thoroughly and exhaustively negotiating the limits of what below and in-bounds mean exactly.
As had to inevitably happen, I found myself in the really awesome position of divesting someone of their job recently. A decent, basically honest person with acceptable work habits and a pleasantly effective hygiene regimen who just happened not to be able to do the job for which they were hired. Because we live in America 2013, this means the process by which this happened, instead of a simple affair of evaluation and consequence, triggered a nine-month monitoring regime of scrutiny, scrutiny, scrutiny and, above all, documentation. And wouldn't you believe it, the target of all this corporate legal prophylaxis found the whole process debilitating and demoralizing, planting and feeding a canker around which noxious resentment collects, rises and wafts, all eventually in my direction.
It's a strange thing to be the Villain in any subplot of your own life. Of course from my own perspective I was doing things consistent with the best interest of the company, the group and, by extension, my own job. And, to be honest, in the long-term interest of the underqualified person struggling and failing. But I know that in the interim and especially at the end, there was someone spending time outside of my presence denouncing me as "that motherfucker out to get me." That's a speculative paraphrase, but if I'm any reader of body language,* it's not far off.
I'm certainly not the first person to be thrust into a position like this. People, Americans in particular, are too ready to disappear up their own asses, forgetting we have all of human history to draw from as examples in how to survive just about anything. Luckily they've all been preserved in the little nuggets we call culture like folk tales, religious ritual, painting and, most importantly for me, literature. I believe it was Shakespeare who said, in Henry IV, Part 2: **
Canst thou, O partial sleep, give thy reposeYeah, I don't really know what that means either. To sharpen it up a bit, I draw from another indisputable voice of poesy and deep shamanic sooth, Spider-Man's dead uncle: with great power comes great responsibility. This has largely been codified into law, at least in the state of California, in the way I'm not allowed to tell any of my female employees how their wardrobe choice on the day may or may not be framing their hindquarters. Restraint as defined by exposure to punitive liability still counts as restraint. But I've taken it to heart. Because look at what happened to Spider-Man's uncle: dead. Then resurrected as Martin Sheen and then dead again. That heartless, tone-deaf fucking Spider-Man apparently can't learn this lesson, but I can. Sometimes being in charge of stuff means you have to feel like shit and be viewed as the bad guy. They only had to kill Martin Sheen once for that to sink in for me.
To the wet sea-boy in an hour so rude,
And in the calmest and most stillest night,
With all appliances and means to boot,
Deny it to a king? Then happy low, lie down!
Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.
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*I once sat through an entire uncomfortable show convinced the whole of Cirque du Soleil were coming on to me, so take that as you will.
**One king's life split into three parts, the exact same marketing model Peter Jackson used for The Hobbit. It's all about the opening weekend rollout, isn't it, Bill? Cynic.
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2 comments:
I was with you until the Shakespeare....
Yeah, but if you stopped there, you missed the Spider-Man. You should know by now that high culture is not going to get the last word in these parts. For instance I'm giggling now at the use of the word "parts."
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