CSotD: Operating without a clean end
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Pardon My Planet reminds me of my last (three-dimensional) editing job. I had a staff of about a half dozen, which sounds small but was fewer people than it would have taken to do what was being demanded of them and, thus, of me.
I was aware that people checked Facebook from time to time and it didn't bother me. None of them were smokers, and it was more productive to have them flipping over to Facebook from time to time than to have them getting up and leaving the building for a cigarette.
I was also aware, of course, that modern reporters need to be on social media, though I still get the colly-wobbles when I see some newspaper requiring that their reporters tweet and post and so forth, because while that may be a good idea at major papers whose staff has all made their foolish rookie mistakes elsewhere, it will be read as gospel by publishers of tiny papers staffed by the aforementioned foolish rookies.
And even the major outlets are occasionally forced to publicly regret stupid off-the-cuff social media commentary.
But management reads the trades and believes whatever they see there, so we'd have managers' meetings where the publisher would say that reporters at both the daily and at the weekly (I edited the latter) needed to be blogging and I would say "About what?" and he'd say "Anything they like!"
Now, I don't know when they were supposed to write these blogs to begin with. We were already under orders not to let anyone rack up any overtime, which basically meant that — given the demands being made from above — we were under unspoken orders to have our staff falsify their timesheets.
But beyond that, they were 23 years old. "Anything they like" is a pretty dangerous set of guidelines when you're dealing with 23 year olds, because I may be old, but I still remember what I liked when I was 23.
However, one of the reporters at the daily took her orders to heart and began blogging and, behold, there was great joy. (yay!)
The brass knew that she was blogging and getting a nice number of hits, but, since they couldn't actually find the Internet with both hands, they didn't realize that (A) it's possible — particularly if your clueless bosses went the cheap route on software — to give yourself a nice number of hits without anyone else seeing a word you've written, and (B) that thing I mentioned before about what 23 year olds like.
One of her blog entries was about how incredibly stupid you have to be to believe in the Bible and another was about how puking drunk she got on her vacation in Mexico. Thank god her hits were all bogus.
Or, at least, they were for awhile, because finally, somebody actually saw what she was blogging about and the great joy was re-assessed.
Meanwhile, getting back to the Facebook thing, I had a reporter who kept leaving her page open when she left the building, which pissed me off not because she was on Facebook during working hours but because either she was that stupid or that disrespectful, but, either way, she wasn't providing either of us with plausible deniability.
My management technique was based on the theory that, given our pay rate, we weren't going to attract experienced reporters, so that it was more efficient to train the ones we had than to fire them and hire new ones who would be just as green.
Repeatedly leaving your Facebook page open on your desktop was a real test of that theory.
Which brings us to Juxtaposition #1
One of the ongoing themes in Retail has been that Marla, having gone from assistant manager to manager, is now having to manage a staff that had until recently been her colleagues.
Bringing everyone up to date on everything being discussed in today's strip would take too long and is unnecessary anyway. You can see the interplay, which tells the story.
The challenge of middle management is finding the balance between representing the brass to your subordinates and acting as the people's representative in the executive offices.
Your bosses want you to pass along the orders and get the results; your subordinates want you to be a moderating force, to communicate why some expectations are impractical and unreasonable.
Neither end of the stick you are required to grasp is the clean one.
So Marla, having played "good cop" as assistant manager, is now having to play "bad cop" a lot more often than she'd like, and, though she may be the ranking presence at the store, she's still just a cog in the middle of the machine.
And then there's this
Besides wanting to be liked, I always wanted people to know what was expected of them without my having to give actual orders.
Yeah, good luck with that. It may be your flesh-and-blood kid, as in today's Betty, or it might be your "kids" at the office, but that which seems perfectly obvious to you still has to be specified to them.
And there's nothing wrong with handing out orders, just as there's nothing wrong with getting a little pushback from time to time.
Master K'ung said, "How can he be said truly to love, who exacts no effort from the objects of his love? How can he be said to be truly loyal, who refrains from admonishing the object of his loyalty?"
Of course, he also said, "You are there to rule, not to kill. If you desire what is good, the people will be good."
And I can't help but think that Master K'ung would laugh at the notion of a middle manager anyway. "A horn-gourd that is neither horn nor gourd! A pretty horn-gourd indeed, a pretty horn-gourd indeed."
Now here's your moment of confucianism:
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