Thursday, March 24, 2011

Why Not Working for the Man Kicks Serious Butt

Reading blogs like Evil HR Lady really make me appreciate the fact that I don't have a full time corporate job. So do articles like this one.

Personally, my feeling is that if you want me to do extra work & aren't:

A) Paying me extra money
B) Giving me overtime; or
C) Giving me some other incentive like more vacation time, business equipment, or something else to motivate me

then...you can go pound sand & I'll tell you as much. I refuse to go making a boss look good (#5) if that boss is a sociopathic cretin who isn't going to recognize me or follow quid pro quo. Nor would a lawyer last long anywhere outside a law firm by never delivering bad news or playing devil's advocate (#4). Heck, I feel it's a lawyer's duty not to be a "yes" person. Lawyers should be speaking up if a course of action is going to be bad for the business or lead to a multi-million dollar lawsuit it will likely lose.

#17 is also something I'd never do for a sociopathic cretin; furthermore, you have to have limits or you could end up doing janitorial work or other tasks that are a complete waste of your time in light of your skills. It's just foolhardy to expect a lawyer to clean toilets, you know? Finally, lawyers had damn well better not follow #13 if the boss is breaking the law. Keeping silent on certain things like investor fraud makes you a complicit party or at least like you're giving tacit approval & could get you in trouble with the state grievance committee.

Maybe my experiences have been unusual but I do think they prove you can't be a "good employee" at the expense of your ethical duties or your ability to keep a law license. Clearly, the rules are different for in-house lawyers & after you've had experiences where you had to fight to get your paycheck, you tend to be far less altruistic or sympathetic to an employer.

I recently discovered one plus to being a freelancer: you literally can't bitch about paying taxes to Uncle Sam since he didn't already take taxes from your pay like he did for the employees of the world. Plus, there's the added bonus of not having to worry about the government being too broke to give you a refund. You have that money right there if you set aside too much.

I also saw this article today & I realized why I'm better off doing what I'm doing. Much of this sums up my feelings on typical employers. If it's not a smaller company or someplace that doesn't expect me to give up everything for it, I'm just not going to be happy. Not getting to talk to the CEO or significant higher ups is also a huge problem for my working with anyone.

Finally, it's great to work for yourself because you will never have to write a "mission statement" for any prospective employer. Just today, I saw a Craig's List ad seeking interns & stating that "interns who do not submit a mission statement will not receive a response."

It got me thinking: what would my mission statement be? Kicking ass & taking names? Actually, that should be the mission statement for any attorney, effective government official or Mafia employee.

Seriously, though why does an INTERN need a mission statement? Are you a non-profit organization? A for-profit organization? Or are you a human being? Human beings have goals & aspirations, not mission statements.

Furthermore, if you're a recent college graduate or college student, how would you know what your mission statement is? You wouldn't even have much of a clue on what you wanted to do yet. When I'd graduated college, all I'd done was retail, telephone interviewing, babysitting, research at a presidential library, pet-sitting & helping give out food samples. I was someone who'd had some work experience; imagine people who never worked in high school or college. There are some people who get out of law school never having worked a job in their lives. Do you think they'd have a clue what their "mission statement" is? I didn't get out of college thinking I'd be doing what I do now.

There are older people who still don't know what they want to do. Some of them are living off their parents. Others just fell into jobs that they violently hate. I'll take limited income over being in a job I violently hate, thank you.

I think you have to have done some stuff in life & know more about the real world before you can even contemplate a true mission statement. That is, if you don't find it impersonal to even have one to start with. Do you write that on a resume? Get it tattooed somewhere on your body? It's the first time I've ever seen that as an application requirement.

Mine, if you really want to know is "kicking ass & taking names" or if you like my husband's idea, it's "mating with your men & destroying your society from the inside." If you're dumb enough to ask me for one, I'll have to put it on a resume so you can be all offended by the use of the word "ass."

Life lesson: ask for something asinine, expect to be offended.

1 comment:

  1. LOL - I know I was asking the same thing while reading this. Who needs a mission statement as an intern?? So strange. Another great post.

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