Darth Me

The main problem with being in charge is that, on occasion, people will ask you questions. No, I guess that's not completely right. The main problem with being in charge isn't that you get asked the questions, it's just that implicit in the acceptance of the in-charge position, you have abdicated your right to shrug your shoulders and turn your unperturbed attentions back to YouTube videos of cats being afraid of things. People actually want you to know the answer. Often to questions on subjects to which you are entirely unfamiliar. What kind of a system is that to run a household/workgroup/business/major political party?

Orientation training is fine, but the inherent weakness in all orientation training is that it is stupid. I'm sure it's all devised with the utmost attention to techniques of memory retention and maximum input efficiency, but at a certain point, it has to become obvious to everyone that every instance of "orientation" fails because learning is experiential. Orient me all you like, but as a new hire/newly promoted/leading vote-getter, I've never been here before or done any of the things people are now going to ask me to do. In a nutshell, I'm the least likely person to benefit from your orientation as I, as evidenced by the fact that I require orientation, lack any of the practical knowledge to make it worth your time or mine.

As a new-to-it person in charge of the smallest of sub-groups at my place of non-blogging employ, I thought I'd take this opportunity to protest the expectation. Granting me any kind of decision-making authority in the first place is already quite a black mark against the entire company I work for, institutionally speaking. The idea of another human being asking me about the details of their health insurance open enrollment or whether or not they have permission--permission!--to leave early to go pick up their kid or whatever... All I can think of in the face of all that is: hey, you get your kid on your own time. I start letting you run around, my boss is gonna be all over my ass, you goddamned communist freeloader hippie.

And just like that: I'm the Man. Not in the good way, the 1990s black urban pop culture way. In the bad way, the 1970s black urban pop culture way. If I were in a movie, I'd be played by Robert Vaughn. Not the Man from UNCLE Robert Vaughn, after that, a little older, a little heavier, tons more racist. Not concerned with the trivial challenges of the working man. No, I'm busy plotting how to introduce lethal narcotics to the ghetto and maybe after that, working on my machine to kill Superman.

Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. On the relative scale using "absolute" as a guiding metric, middle management power corrupts exactly as much as the native ego is conditioned to allow. In my case, one more promotion and I'm going to go full-blown Pol Pot.