Tuesday, April 17, 2012

Know your enemy

I work for a giant corporate behemoth.  This beast will eat your hopes and dreams and come back for the pride.  One of the greatest challenges I'm faced with is knowing all the rules.  They change from day to day and I'm not 100 percent sure they're all real.  Some of them are so ridiculous they must be fake.

I sit on a committee at work.  The committee gave me some great insight into how a corporation makes rules and rationalizes behavior.  I'm a member of the safety committee.  We walk around and audit the plant once a month.  I talk with my fellow workers when I'm auditing and ask if they have any safety concerns.  I normally get back pretty good feedback but once in a while I get a dumbass response like "that person is wearing shoes with her toes exposed".  I can't argue with the person and I have to bring it up during the meeting or I won't be doing my job.  In the meeting I mention how someone thought someone else was wearing uncovered shoes.  I wanted to get passed that as soon as possible but somehow the committee members d welled on it for a half an hour.  I could have mentioned the roof was caving in but somehow this person's toes were way more important to the group.  I don't trust any safety committee members.

Every couple of weeks we get news that some brand of auditor is going to be walking through our area.  We need to prepare for the auditors and make sure we aren't doing any behavior which would get back to corporate saying we're not following the rules.  They have auditors for everything.  They probably have auditors that audit the other auditors.  Auditors have a lot of rule violations they're looking for.  I never get any incite as to what they're looking for and I wouldn't care anyway.  I don't trust any auditor.

Once in a great while we'll get visitors from another division of our company.  They are corporate visitors.  We normally clean up a couple weeks before and they parade them around so they can watch us work for a few minutes.  I feel like a caged animal.  I kind of like the corporate visitors especially when they feed us bread through our cage.

The final set of rule makers are the invisible.  We have so many rules coming from so many different places that it's hard to keep track of them all.  People have actually made up rules to get even with someone pissing them off.  Take for example Jim.  Jim makes Tom mad so Tom might go to management and complain that he's eating crackers at his workcell.  Tom will say that eating in your workcell is against corporate policy.  Instead of checking they'll just have a chat with him and put an end to it before an auditor catches him.  Tom is a douche and should be beat up for doing that.  Now Jim might retaliate with another rule.  The possibilities are endless.

Between the managers, auditors, corporate, and the invisible it's hard to keep track of all the changes and rules that are a result of the corporate machine.  I've realized that anyone I don't work with will undoubtedly turn me in for something that I'm doing wrong.  This is my jungle and I know what's it's like to be the prey.