On the opportunity of getting fired

5.0.01

from the big bad [censored][unnamed] company

Confessions of the corporate faerie

No this is not your usual "fuck the evil boss/corporation/capitalism" pamphlet. Just a personal storytelling for those interested and also "reviewing of the repetitive narrative" for myself. What I am about to share might be slightly triggering (and therefore meaningful) for those more alternatively-wired of my friends. For some, it may offer a bit of hope in their "epic life failures", perhaps.

Warning:
[✅] foul language (irony and sarcasm)
[✅] sex, perversion & bdsm
[✅] possible blasphemy for some esoteric/alternative beliefs

In the beginning there was an Attitude and that Attitude was Me. The pure existential resistance. I did not want to ... seriously. The corporate career (in IT, jeez!) was the visualization of Hell, the antithesis to my green leftist wannabeartist esoteric alternative self. Was it a working of The Life - playing its usual game of inviting me and walking me through what I dreaded and detested the most? Just to get a first hand experience?. For the sake of irony?

I admit, several of my previous (forced) attempts to change the genre and "do something else" failed spectacularly...
[❌] traveling job ✈️-> storyless, adventureless, connectionless experience, feeling stuck in exotic places, plus 4 years of mysterious bowel illness that ruined my first "real freedom & resource independence"
[❌] film crew attempt 🎬 -> the worst concentratedly traumatizing 6 months of my life, surrounded by mostly mean creative colleagues, for whom I "professionally" carried the guilt of their own insufficiencies
[❌] natural building & organic farming 🌱 -> inspiring but also a joy-less gay-less ego-trip that ended with mysterious bike fall, broken elbow and humiliating penniless return from abroad, on the doorstep of this corporate limbo

As if The Mean Entity Up There (😈) took pleasure in turning my dreams into nightmares.

I gave up, stopped playing along, doing all the positive-thinking cramp-smile motivation-literature self-convincing shit "It's how you make it" "You can do it" "Keep thinking positively"... and just (muff your ears) submitted. "All right, do what you want with me."

Counter-intuitively, this unwanted corporate almost-a-decade turned up to be the most exciting, adventurous, experientially nurturing period of my life. So far (I hope). Of course, I had to submit slightly more (who would think of this submission training in parallel to the later exploration of my kinky/bdsm side 😉) and hit the very bottom spirit-wise, until things started somewhat improving. The policy of "being kicked out of the door" or "having the door slammed in my face" before another door/window/rabbit-hole opens - has become a sort of cliche motif in my conversation with life.

Hating your job is the best way to take it lightly, to not get exhausted or frustrated that your dream turns into nightmare. If you "don't give a fuck" - you may be actually pleasantly surprised. And by "not giving a fuck" I do not mean working without honesty or engagement - one still can do his tasks responsibly and excel. As the annoyingly all-wise self-help books love to say: One way to like your job is just to like your job (or do it with a bit of love and involvement, regardless of what it is). #lovehate

The dance of the ironies

How does one negotiate this compromise with one's persuasion? I tired to tell myself that the (tele)communication gadgets and internet and information spreading/sharing are what this world actually needs, for the sake of idea exchange and networking, "to redeem itself from the remnants of the dark ages of ignorance". Who would imagine that in a couple of years, the whole "access to information - for all" "a channel to speak up and express oneself - for everybody" ... would backlash so epically in the form of postmodern populism, fake news and social media Book-exploding-in-the-Face mayhem. 😂 Well, it's a tool.

Due to the financial situation, I resigned on "helping the world" and my good intention narrowed to considering the companies that have a good political involvement, environmental policies and LGBT rights record. However, at the end I chose the one that was somewhat "nice towards me" in the most basic way: Not compromising my health by technically unnecessary night-shifts. Blue light. Circadian rhythms. SWSD. - there is quite a solid science behind it, though we still create offices and jobs in an outrageous defiance of physics and biology. Well, let's talk the health in a bit ... 😂

I learned that there are 4 basic combination of Homo Office species: (Heat||cold)&&(light||dark). Even worshiping the SUN platforms instead of the frosty Tux - does not ensure micro-climate harmony in the greenhouse. There's that phenomenal big-crowd insensitivity towards the problems of the minorities and individuals... The notorious above-average occurrence of asocial to sociopath traits in technical folks (yeah, sometimes the prejudices are based on statistics)... That spoiled-brat type of modernity "everywhere in car + caffeine + bubbles + ice + cold air" (I daresay: general intelligence correlated) that has evolved into "dependence" "must have" in less than half-a-century ... The legal definitions of "good working conditions" lagging behind science, I suspect drafted by the biased obese/overheating sort of politicians - and even those lenient "rules" bent by "well, we don't have time for that, we need to do business". Minimal input, maximum performance. In ten years I have progressively destroyed my immune system. While earning "good money" and "nice vacation" and "social benefits" - I was not able to fully enjoy those in my new routine: "Can't tell you on Monday if I am going to feel ill on Friday."

You remember the guy with the pigtail - the decoration that was (also) supposed to "remind him of his beyond-mainstream constitution" "keep a perspective above corporate conformism" "help not to settle in the comfy chair"? Well, surprisingly nobody forced me to get rid of it or to look "more compliant" or "adequate to my position". Side of weird obsession of my first British boss with collars (and an odd corporate sentiment against hoodies, cargo pants, shorts ... preferring the 19. century fasc-shion from one rainy island) I was at least able to bring the vivid colors into the dreary eastern-European masculinity in blue/grey/black. Over the decade I observed a humanizing dissolution of the most of the arbitrary rules. Well, you need employees, right?

If the guy in the pigtail did not want to get lost in the corporate world, perhaps that very "getting lost" and allowing "being transformed" by the experience - was the actual point of this life episode - as my fellow archetypal psychologist would say. I started at the green (quite) alternative (quite) esoteric left ... and slowly shifted towards the center. And guess what - it did not feel like "compromising" most of the time, but a vivid lived-through lesson, a mirror to some of my poorly based or biased initial attitudes. I had enough time, space and freedom to evaluate this experience of mine. And yeah, no one would have just convinced me of this current more-complex/messy perspective before living it. The live experience, the story of it - was necessary.

Earning is one thing - routing the money flow is another one. I worked for a corporation and lived very "alternative lifestyle". For some paradoxical, for some even self-contradicting. I started using bike as my means of transport (thanks Michal) 🚴‍♂️, eating mostly organically grown (and self-prepared) food with reduced consumption of meat 🥒🥕🍌 , donating to multiple NGOs 💸. I could afford to travel the world, I decided to travel the Europe on the ground and fly very seldom. 🚆 Enough? Not enough? In the same time most of my colleagues fully indulged in sitting culture, traffic jam culture, meat 3-times-a-day culture, cheap junk food culture, cola+hamburger culture, evenings-on-sofa culture, TV-numbing culture.

I am not the courageous activist type that yells slogans in the first line. I was a silent example of myself and it worked to some extent - I inspired couple of them and saw them trying and adopting new ways to be. Enough? Not enough? Actually, this light-handed not-pushing approach might have been one of the main "lessons" in this experience.

Somehow, disliking IT, disliking corporations, disliking commanding people - I was continually praised by the management (even if feeling like the biggest fraud out there 🤦) and promoted and even awarded... to my enchanted dismay. To this day I say that the key to my success was wanting to achieve nothing. Not pushing anywhere. Not climbing up the ladder. Not asking for promotions - getting them. Assessing my abilities and being more on the restrained side, I refused the manager role continuously from the first years till the end. I hear I was liked as a team-lead - because I was not bossy, but rather listening and ready to help. Sort of Omega management (that got what it wanted at the end 😎). "Leading from below", "leading as serving" - not commanding people around. *I proudly admit faerie influence here.

For those 10 years I mostly felt slightly detached, like "I am here just temporarily". You know how makeshift measures/times become the main thing? "Life is what happens while you try hard for something else." All and all, I saw the key to the magic in the lightness - i.e. the opposite of trying hard - just being and receiving.
[✅] As you know from The Wheel Of Consent: not taking, but allowing.
[✅] As you know from The Theory Of Flying: get distracted from the goal before you hit the ground - and maybe forget to hit it.
[✅] As you know from The Finger Trap: The more you do, the less it goes. The more you relax, the easier it happens.

Yeah, the irony says that this works mostly with the things one does not want to achieve. I wish it was that easy, natural, spontaneous, "going with the gravity" - in those parts of life where I genuinely want/wish/desire.

Let's talk the evil capitalists ...

Ironically again, good old hierarchy was actually something I was looking forward to - particularly after my previous job around "the artists" where things were sort of upside-down - and thoroughly sick, unfair, dysfunctional. In corporation, the person works & fits (more or less) into the team standards - and the person one level above him evaluates him quite fairly, providing rewards (or nothing, no "punishments") - felt like a welcome golden standard after the experience of an environment with no correlation between the effort and recognition. The basic correctness. Yes, the managers and employees are both humans - if someone does not click with you, he does not click with you - but there are quite some checks and balances to make the evaluations plus-minus fair. There's the reliability of the basic expectation: "You do somehow well, you are treated somewhat well." To counterbalance this and to complete the irony, I have become a part of community that shuns hierarchies in its constitution. Well, let's talk the in-between-er experience ... 😁

Those who know me as the "taoist by experience" "radical centrist" and whatnot will not be surprised that I found myself again in between two camps. Particularly the team-lead position (with our peculiar company flavor to it) is a place where one gets pretty much trust of the peer employees while also the management does to some extent. One has an access to the "kitchenette gossip club" of both sides and see what's cooking. A perfect position for the chronic observer, generalist, or even two-spirit. You see what's brewing on both sides - and you can attempt to "feed the wolf + save the goat" - while you don't have to fire/promote anyone really. They call it also the insider, the traitor, the grey zone operator. Let's call it an opportunity, the question stands: Who is the person you put into that position. What personal traits will it highlight?

That's valid for the whole corporation, while from the outer perspective often vilified, internally it is just a madhouse of scared humans, who try to save their asses in the overall mess, get an extra sugar cube now and then, get patted on the shoulder, feed their family (even if on behalf of the others) - all the usual human traits, amplified.

In those years, I did not encounter the caricatures of "the evil boss" or "the exploited serfs" - but rather ... humans. Some whimsical, some listless, some disengaged, some self-centered, some inept - but human managers. Completed by the human imperfect employees with their own agendas. I was amazed how many "lost existences" found a nourishing soil in the corporate environment. With some more sarcastic managers and employees alike, we used to call it lovingly/jokingly "protected workshop". I mentioned them already - asocials, sociopaths, but also arrogant queens, chronic objectors, people who used every opportunity to avoid doing something, eastern-European bureaucracy fetishists, mean people who took pleasure in denying someone something, completely dumb and inadequate people, people no one would/should/could ever employ ... and then a few nice agreeable folks. And believe it or not, if there was a drift from the very bottom upwards, usually somewhat more sane, bright, friendly, soft-skill-possessing, respected personalities were chosen.

Well, I was mostly stunned how (within its own basic requirements) the corporation acted as a absurdly socialist/liberal/postmodern mother who would just not throw out anyone. Even those who deserved it - and one does not need to be right-wing-inclined to say that. "We" hosted people that one needs to have a diploma in psychology to work with. People who had no intention to work at all and actually earned through the work of their colleagues. As triggering as it may sound, in those ten years, if I ever felt really exploited, it was by my equal peers (me doing their share of work, everyone including managers knowing it but no one willing to do anything about it) than by the management, company or the evil capitalists! If something felt unfair, it was a few Working their ass off for a dozen(s) of other people who spent majority of their working-day on coffee/cigarette/personal errands ... but we "have to have compassion and understanding, it's their nature, they are like that". The postmodern all-loving culture at its worst.

Maybe this could be accounted for as another example of the corporate world dysfuncions - the prevalence of internal parasitism was reaching the level of art. Colleagues and their careers being carried on the backs of their peers. (Pardon my generalizing, but from my experience those cunning individuals were mostly the same ones who often were the first to protest against "evil corporate exploiters", were the first to yell that they were "abysmally busy", or spend days with their favorite pastimes: "it's not my job, it's that other team's job" "but per rule 12569-17-B I cannot do it"). And all this was more-or-less seen and transparent to everyone - and therefore demoralizing. I wished for a bit more "big bad capitalism" (not only) sometimes.

We spent hours of forced trainings in soft skills, how to treat each-other (enter the list of all the possible personal constitutions) sensitively and respectfully, how to manage difficult interactions, how not to be a bossy boss, how to employ specific personal traits positively, hot to rewire the ancient rigid business cliches, how not to do all that corporate shit that most people hate about corporations ... on an admirable level that even the progressive human rights NGO would not be ashamed of. Shame that all this was "compulsory" and sort of turned into "click through activities" in between heaps of duties. Good intentions drowned by their own number. Ironically, the company culture - at least on the paper and in those compulsory trainings - was more whatever-friendly and progressive than the laws and general attitudes of the society in the eastern Europe!

Maybe my experience is slightly distorted by the situation, where corporation needs (and does not want to lose) employees instead of the usually imagined other-way-'round. But the generous amount of cotton-wool cushioning was undeniable - from the corporate social programs, contributions for whatever non-sense, lavish parties... and saying that we were one of the departments with comparatively poor social benefits.

The dinosauriation levels

Of course not everything was cool. Did I spend 90-95% of my time searching for how to do my work, instead of doing it? Not "the technical stuff", but filling in forms, complying with the internal regulations, chasing approvals, hunting for odd teams, contact mails and numbers, or even digging (!) some written correct procedures (if they ever existed): "who knows the person that knows the person that might know the person that might still know how/who/where ..." - and that is inside that very same corporation. As if the company broke down to something that looked like separate state entities, hostile institutions, or even self-serving mafia branches.

As a matter of folklore, the teams dissolved and regrouped under various names, sliced bizarrely like the elaborate cake and shifting between manager chains. "Being/doing the same thing while looking completely different." The quiet putrefaction of the corporate employees (in usual dismay or in its latter stage - oblivion) and of the whole departments disturbed just for the sake of "activity" "wake up exercise" "you are still here?". As my first manager said: "corporations work in their own mysterious way, that often makes no sense, but everything will be all right." Well, was it Wonderland, Oz or cursed kingdom?

The big badass capitalist company sometimes looked like a bureaucratic-socialist zombie dinosaur too big to die, but from another perspective paradoxically also like a feudal monarchy, with its usual pitfalls: The aristocracy enclosed in their own saloons, unaware of the reality of the outside world, deluded about where the "most splendid and flourishing kingdom in the universe" is actually standing, with servility and flattery plaguing the information flows, the top getting false information on the love of their subjects, the subjects receiving confusing and even misinterpreted commands. Nothing new under the sun.

The greatest tragedy of the company was indeed its encapsulated upper management caste. Lacking a capability of self-reflection, never taking responsibility for their own wrong decisions, but persisting for aeons as the "professional leadership". Quite detached from the very subject of what they manage(d), with artificially and non-sensically concocted numbers to evaluate any situation, they've cast their magnificent decisions... that no one below thought rational or sensible - and so they were "implemented" in make-look-like way, sort of Potyomkin village. Then the artificially positive feedback was provided and everyone was able to relax and applaud: "Another Great Success".

Of course, most of these "successes" blew into everyone's face, some of them lead to company-wide calamities - so they had to be patched byYet Another Great Success. Only Kafka or Orwell could imagine how a company, after a various transformations, fusions, divides, acquisitions and particularly "deals of the century" could happen to find itself in "Great Success" and simultaneously in "Serious Trouble". Of course, the solutions to the trouble, after the applause has ceased, was doing even more delirious tweaking. Imagine a more-or-less functional black box, but just for the sake of "doing some activity" every few month you pull out some screw, detach something, or randomly change the cables.

Sometimes when I read serious expertly analysis in our intellectual (pro-market pro-common-sense) newspapers I laugh. These sophisticated established renowned businesses do not function on good old capitalist "incentive, innovation, efficiency" formulas. Internally they operate based on invented Frankenstein equations (add, subtract, multiply, divide some random variables that you were able to get from somewhere) that output "Some Number". What is that number? What does it represent? What does it say? What does it relate to? What is its meaning? - No one truly knows. It's an arbitrary number at the end. - But ... "Hey, it is a Great Number, very promising, we are doing very well!!!" Well, and then you find yourself in yet Another Great Success that will mysteriously need urgent fixing, patching, cost saving, job cutting, blah blah.

The wonderful example was yearly personal rating. You had teams with equal proportion of under/over-achievers, some with only lazy/lame folks, some where everyone was bright and working their ass off. But the upper management commanded that "thou shalt have this percentage of achievers, this percentage of average, this percentage of under-performers" - and poor lower management had to divide their teams into those artificial compartments regardless of the reality. Sometimes one had to invent "good guys" and "bad guys" based on trivialities and feeling, even if they did not exist.

Farewell Titanic, I am happy I was thrown out in the middle of the ocean on a lifeboat.

Imagine a great great great ship, overcrowded with a lot of panicking crew who are afraid to drown, persistently anxiously doing their routines in their random positions ... the ship that is somehow drifting somewhere. It was supposed to sink long time ago, but miraculously it is still doing something that resembles floating. No one is ever able to reliable say if it is sinking or floating or flying - and that if anchored or forward.

The ship is not full of those vicious greedy capitalists who want to take over the world. It is full of human beings who want to "keep their job" "preserve the current comfort" "get a monthly payment" with "beautifully diverse" range of moral flexibillities performing all the known forms of coexistence: synergy, symbiosis, parasitism. Those who need to feed their family and thus do whatever possible to keep their job and make the machine running. Whatever the machine is doing. There is the encapsulated caste of smiling captains with feudal habits and without sanity checks, who regardless of their failures will just not go. Always shifting, reorganizing, renaming, rebranding, splitting and merging departments, arising and vanishing positions - with their same faces still there. This whole planet is mistreated by clueless people appearing confident and acting as the professionals "who know the dance".

Unlike the visionary/deluded feudal upper management, the surviving individuals do not want to build "great futures". They want to have fun while spending the best part of their day (and often the best of their years) locked inside the glass-and-steel office cubes for the compulsory 8 hours. They want to build social environments, feel cozy, joke. The best moments in this career farce were not my professional achievements, but the warm fuzzy feelings around human beings, if and when they happened.

I remember seeing one French movie long time ago: La question humaine. It took pleasure in presenting endless dull scenes with various austere office building corridors and rooms and its corporately dressed species doing their "business as usual" stuff. And then in a twist, comparing the dehumanized corporate language to the execution reports from the Nazi concentration camps. Well, in my experience the corporate newspeak was just another lingo that one had to master to be able to communicate within the specific culture and to achieve daily successes. No one, on any level I was in close touch with, took it seriously. The "decorated speech" is actually a subject and source of internal jokes and mischief. A bit like those idiotic polo shirts.

The corporation is like the lab environment, imitating the society. I appreciate the fact, that I (and we all) had to find a way to work, daily, for years - with people that we normally would probably shoot cannot stand for even a minute in the mile radius. People who genuinely love number, machines, coding ... and do not like warmth, light, green things, natural smells or communication with human beings. I do not wish to work with some of these autists, sociopaths, parasites, bureaucrats, homophobes, machos ever again. But it feels like a sort of achievement to have run the functional business with them for a while, employing their more positive traits for "common good".

I wish this [particular corporation] the best of sarcastic luck with the crew from "the cheaper geographic regions" that proved over the decades and after various reforms as still basically incompetent & unfit ... well, because some prejudices do not arise on the account of people being mean, some are just a result of a statistics and experience and culture. I'd agree there are clever and amicable folks there as well, but there is disproportionately too many of them who just are not. Maybe their peculiar local customs make it easier for the survival of the most complacent and sycophantic. "Yes-sir"-culture, that attractively appears "so motivated" as much as it is a technical fraud. Perhaps even this experience contributed to the fact that I have lost much of my enchantment with multiculturalism. There are many "cultures" "traditions" and "habits" of this world, that do not make it "richer" or more diverse in fact and I do not need for them to survive (I talk of the culture, not people as human beings). I feel more of aculturalist nowadays: Just make people safe and sane and don't bring out and perpetuate and conserve the worst tendencies in them.

Sort of "thank you"

Despite the initial distaste, the life around (or in parallel) to my late corporate experience ironically happened to be "the best time of my life" so far. Permaculture designer course. Pottery course. Scything course. Strawbale building workshop. Folk festivals. Rainbow gatherings. Innumerable trips into the nature. Innumerable parties in Vienna, Berlin, or elsewhere in Europe. Naked bike rides. Folsom festivals. Radical faeries.

I have lived the best of this experience amidst the community that in its fundamentals (and the kind of folks it attracts) is the very antithesis of this corporate world. Anti-capitalist, anti-hierarchy. Well, still, I saw so many parallels: Faeries and IT-kids can be the same mischievous unmanageable gremlins, experience of "herding cats" - not sure where did I use "yes dear, you are special, important and beautiful" more. 😁🤷 The surrealities of the corporate and faerie space were sometimes on a par. Perhaps the opposites mirror each-other well. I called it a "conversation of spaces" that happened continually throughout the year, traveling there and back, switching between two realities, experiencing something in one and finding a reflection or continuation on the other side. Living one foot here and one foot there, interconnecting them, exploring the center and my in-between position.

Surprisingly, I did not stand out that much in taking the corporate monarchy with a bit of salt. We were mostly sane and irony-capable human beings. On the other hand, I admit that I was significantly transformed by the first-hand experience of that "evil corporate environment" - often vilified and mystified by the alternative folks (who often never experience it). Observing some peculiar social dynamics in real life - that I had only opini-onions about before. Even if challenging, the exposure to the different perspectives of the people whose company I would normally avoid, seeing their motivations and human side - allowed me to see beyond the usual caricatures and alternative prejudices. It distanced me from a few non-mainstream delusions. I lost patience with some of the frequently recited esoteric thesis. 🤷

Well ... in the alternative spaces and communities, there is also a prominent caste of gurus, teachers, healers, shamans, esotericists - who teach & preach every day: "why do you do what you hate, leave it, enjoy life, look at me, be free" - while they sustain their prominence and lifestyle mostly of the contributions of supporters who still work steady boring jobs (thus have resources to spend but surely also some corporate ails to heal) and will continue to look up to the stars, feeling insufficient, uncourageous, reminded viciously that they are "remaining in their misery of their own accord" - because they are not yet "their own masters" "be-free" "doing what they like", and were not (and maybe will never / cannot ever be) lucky to become members of the postmodern ar(t)istocracy. Because in this odd system healers need the wounded, the preachers need the followers, the chronically-free artists need the reliably resourceful sponsors. I leave it tactically/tactfully to your personal imagination to evaluate how much both sides need each-other in almost a perfect (vicious?) loop, or to untie the ancient paradox: Can everyone become one of the chosen few?

"And now something completely different"

I have the choice that many of my (mortgage-, wife-, kids-, traditions-, heteronormative-lifestyle- -burdened) colleagues do not have. And for the counterbalance, I have the solitary personal anxieties to live with that many mortals do not have either.

Coming back to the beginning, in a circle:
I still do want to change ...
[✅] job
[✅] profession, calling
[✅] opus, legacy
[✅] impact I have on the ecosystem through what I do
[✅] also my social environments (friends, family, support)
[✅] and the litral place (culture, human vibe) that nourishes me

If you have any creative ideas how to merge sysadmin experience with environment-benefiting purpose, let me know please 😉

Otherwise I let The Mean Entity Up There (😈) to do its job to weave The Life that happens while I focus on Something Else. 😂