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.
