CSotD: Send not to know at whose desk the box stops
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Today's On The Fastrack cracked me up.
A million panhandler cartoons have gone for topical jokes about the economy, but they're so expected that it's hard for them to come out of hiding with a punchline. Panhandler with a sign, read the sign, get a laugh, sure. Nothing wrong with them, but nothing surprising, either.
And, of course, Dilbert was created to mock office politics, but the characters are pretty two dimensional and, while I like the strip, it is more polemics than storytelling, and not particularly topical (nor does it attempt to be).
But Fastrack is more about the people in the office and Bill Holbrook set this one up a while ago, with the introduction of the fact that Dethany is going out with the security guard, which we accept as part of her character.
I don't know where else he's going with this, but he got a good gag out of it today because even those who have avoided the corporate perp-walk have seen it happen to good people for no reason.
And that's what makes this gag work: Fear is a good trigger for humor, and this one pokes at a tender spot in current corporate culture.
Even if you don't see it, word goes around. "Did you hear? Matt's gone."
I worked at one place where I came in one morning to the news that a long-time bureau reporter, not terribly old, had died of a heart attack the night before. It was a shock, but we were able to sit on the corners of our desks and talk about it.
When someone has been handed the cardboard box, you don't dare.
When Steve died, management was as stunned as the rest of us and, while they still needed us to get out the next day's paper, they understood and sympathized with our need to absorb the news and they also needed us to brainstorm how we were going to cover Steve's beat in his sudden absence.
And he'd been a friend to them as well as to us, so they were mourning also.
When somebody has been handed the box, management has probably seen it coming for weeks. And they may be looking to hand out more boxes, so it's best not to openly question what has just happened. Just keep your head down, your mouth shut and your resume current.
I had a publisher at one paper who refused to make the kind of franchise-killing, idiotic cuts that newspaper publishers are being ordered to make these days. He was one of the old-style publishers who tried to be part of the community and had a pretty good sense of who the people were who worked for him, and he wanted the newspaper to be part of the community as well, even if short-term profits took a hit while we worked our way through a downturn.
So one day the corporate overlords flew out from HQ with a box for him to fill. And they brought with them a new button-down interim publisher with an apparently unlimited supply of cardboard boxes for anyone who wanted one and several who did not.
From that point on, all our publishers were "interim" in the sense that you would never again have the kind of publisher who settled in for 25 or 30 years, sponsored the Flower Show, became president of Rotary and helped run the golf tournament each year.
And while having that sort of publisher meant yearly pressure to put the damn Flower Show on Page One, it also meant the yearly Flower Show insert, with 16 pages of articles about gardening, flowed in around all the ads from the pubisher's Rotary and golfing buddies, which helped pay for a fully-staffed newsroom that could turn around and reveal the mayor's tendency to make zoning decisions based on his brother's real estate business.
Moreover, it meant that, when you first got wind of the mayor and his brother and their little game, you might be able to go sit in the publisher's office with the door closed and get some gossip that would save you a fair amount of wheel-spinning. Like any tipster, the publisher would be cagey and would have angles to promote and interests to protect, but he'd also have excellent connections deep in the business world.
Today, the publisher is just some pencil-pusher from HQ who comes in with orders to hit certain goals. A pubisher who hits the goals gets promoted and is out of there within five years. A publisher who doesn't hit the goals gets a cardboard box.
Either way, the newspaper is no more a part of the community than the Rite-Aid next door.
It's just another business full of frightened, disheartened workers watching for the box that has their name on it.
In every office, in every industry, everywhere in the country, people are bent over their desks, glancing out of the corner of their eyes, watching for their box.
And, yes, if they saw someone walk out with a security guard, it wouldn't matter how productive she was or how much the company needed her. The rumors would take forever to die down.
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