There are three types of employees in Corporate America: Those that, when you give them the ball, they make forward progress. These folks might be moving forward because they have needed expertise or just because they have common sense and are tenacious. Group two is the people who hold on to the ball but can’t get past the line of scrimmage. They may huff and puff in a misguided effort to make progress or they just kneel with the ball cause they’re lazy as shit and don’t want to be responsible for running a play. Whatever the reason, these people are completely ineffectual and you just have to take the loss of down and call another play. Then you have group 3: The routine fumblers. These people not only fail to advance the ball, but they are actually counter-productive. They fumble routinely and the rest of the team has to scramble to clean up the mess. While group two is categorized by professional incompetence, group three suffers from professional incontinence. Piss and shit everywhere that group 1 must come in and clean up. The fact that group 3 even exists is a sign of (to use my buddy’s term) corporate social welfare. Group 3 people are an embarrassment to civilization. Let me give you a specific example:
The most useless group in America: Executive Assistants. Perhaps Marc Cuban and Richard Branson have smart, capable, hard-working people as EAs but the rest of corporate America does not. The typical faux-executive is assigned some 23-year-old out of college who is a waste of oxygen: A strong representative of group 3 – the incontinent corporate fumbler. For whatever reason, meetings with these pretend executives must be booked through EAs. To nobody’s surprise, when you ask them to do so these recovering frat-boys and sorority girls do jack shit. Then I have to go and book the meeting myself; and that’s when step three occurs. These morons take a break from their online shopping or happy hour planning to decline my meeting “on behalf of” faux executive X. Now, we’ve officially wasted 3 or 4 days to NOT schedule a meeting. Discussions are delayed, timelines are missed, clients are pissed. Corporate protocol requires that the ball pass through the fumbler before we can try and move forward. What a surprise, now everyone is scrambling to make a last minute 630PM meeting because schedules booked up over the course of the last few days. The ball was fumbled, actual grown-ups scrambled to recover, and the EA has soiled her uniform.
The only way I’ve learned to deal with group 3 people is through relentless pressure. Constant emails and angry phone calls that disturb the serenity of their Anthropologie Catalog browsing. If I know you’re a routine bed-wetter, and we unfortunately share the same corporate house, I’m gonna be up your ass every minute so that you can’t possibly doze off and piss yourself. I bulldoze until I notch yet another worthless, corporate win like the one below.
“Jess Pinnal has accepted your meeting on behalf of Clarissa Anderson”
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