Looking For Work

I went shopping for necessary ingredients to make Zucchini Bread; one of my favorite wife-made-concoctions. Added to those, were a host of other items we were growing in short supply; so best fetch them while I was at it. While steering into the checkout line I made eye contact with a woman, who said,

"I think I know you?"

In that vague sort of way that happens when memory doesn't serve up recall on demand. Whenever I have those episodes it becomes a game of blurting out places we've been, jobs that we've held. Turns out in this case we both served in the Reserve Troop Augmentation unit to Headquarters, Third Army. As we played catch-up from the last time we were with the command, it turned out she had become a firefighter.

   We'd shift from what we’re doing at this moment to talking about common events and people we knew in the command. The topic drifted back to her being a firefighter in a neighboring county; she was discouraged and was considering leaving. I asked why was that? She said it was the lack of leadership, that and outright on-the-job bullying.  It appears with all the local public governments cutting cost the atmosphere was turning to that of 'take-it-or-leave-it' attitude by an ever shrinking and demanding management cadre.

   "There are plenty of people looking for this kind of work and you'll be easily replaced".

  We laughed at the irony of it all. In the service, no matter how bad we thought we had it, we saw that they took care of us; at least to the degree of trying to keep us relatively safe and secure. Then we talked about looking for work. She too had her masters degree, and was coming to the similar conclusion I was toying with; that of perhaps being overeducated.

She had applied for seasonal work and was turned down at pretty much the same places I had applied for as well. We just couldn't connect the dots on what disqualified us from menial work? What qualifies you to stock boxes or greet people in retail?

  Near as we could figure it was that we were that dreaded term of being overqualified. I'm not of course convinced it was just us mastering degrees. I sense it has to do with our age as well. She was 42 and I'm 58. To be frank, we're too old to be intimidated by outrageous demands by young managers who have limited leadership skills as well as being accustomed to bullying neophyte employees into doing their bidding. I saw similar when I was with the Infantry. Years back, the draft would pull in these raw recruits who could barely read. So they had been conditioned to obey their superiors and do what they were told without a lot of questioning. This wasn't the case in the mid-80's. These kids volunteered for combat arms for the college funds. Many of these kids came into the Infantry, Armor, and Field Artillery because of the tuition kicker for volunteering for much-needed-but-avoided military occupations, such as all of the Combat Arms branches. Leading these bright-young-men was a challenge to the tried and true method of intimidation through harm if orders were not obeyed. These kids could reason. Often, they could even find a better course of action than that of their superiors.

   Now to appreciate the whole picture, the senior sergeants were the conditioned type. They came from that background and persevered the grueling years to become the senior middle-grade leaders of the Army. Most didn't have any college, they were seasoned in and by the methods of intimidation; where questioning was paramount to mutiny. It was a conflict of worlds, and I made note of it when I was a lieutenant. It was frustrating on occasion to take time to explain our logic to those who would have to follow our orders; but in all honesty, it's their lives in the balance to poor planning, maybe they did deserve to give input?

   I suspect the same sort of reluctance to hire seasoned and educated applicants. Management doesn't need a lot of thinking going on in the rank and file. When the pool of applicants included naive teenage workers eager to win approval, even along with those who would only act when told, the prospect of hiring them was superior to a thinking worker who'd question the rational of a course of action a manager-in-training would make.

It was just too much work to convince the seasoned worker what made sense; their questioning ways would cultivate a culture of questioning the management; and that should be avoided.

Having discussed those possibilities we nodded in agreement that it was probably was the case; and too bad, but what could you do? I said, 'keep looking until you find a place that isn't afraid of its workers'

We just might be looking a very long time indeed.