Challenge #02424-F234: Revolution Temporarily Postponed
"Ok look, I haven't eaten anything since this morning, and the meeting was THREE HOURS long, I'm sooooo stressed I just want to play punch something" -- Anon Guest
Is there anything more frustrating than a day that goes nowhere due to circumstances beyond your control? The boss buttonholes you for two hours about inefficiency. The staff meeting drags on as someone in the higher echelons demands a full explanation in small words of the exact, precise, fine details of the problem that literally everyone else there already knew how to solve. Then, once the explanation was finally accepted, the selfsame upper echelon representative pushes the entire meeting away from the one solution that would fix everything in the long term.
They preferred, instead, a series of small patches that would make everything more complicated for everyone and increase everyone else's problems for the immediate future and for potential years to come. No arguments against it would be heard. No explanations of how it would work were heeded. In the end, the vote was in this abominable decision's favour just because everyone else wanted to get some lunch. A lunch that was cancelled because the meeting dragged on thanks to the aforementioned upper echelon member's pontificating after the fact.
The first patch implemented crashed the workplace's network and efforts to reinstate connectivity dominated most of the afternoon, which was the natural cue for the upper echelons to insist that everyone work overtime to reach their quotas for the day. Revolution began to coalesce in the air when one of the upper echelon said something about the staff not being paid overtime.
Tammy broke first. "Okay look," she said to her immediate superior. "I haven't eaten anything since this morning, and the meeting was three hours long, and I am so stressed I just want to punch something until I lose feeling in my entire arm. If you continue to keep treating us like robots, today, that something might just be you. Do you understand?"
The boss stared at her as if he had just realised that he was talking to a human being. "You aren't allowed to behave like this... That's unprofessional."
"So's enacting a set of actions that will inhibit workflow and efficiency for the foreseeable future. Actions, I might add, that caused the clusterfluff of errors that we're still working to fix. So's preventing your entire staff from having a lunch break. So's forcing us to work overtime without pay. Did you have a point, sir?"
It was four thirty in the afternoon, and only the people in charge had had anything related to a snack, since the office refrigerator was locked for anyone without executive privilege. A day fuelled entirely by shitty office coffee and shittier shortbread biscuits was not a day of joy and productivity... especially when the shortbreads ran out. The general atmosphere of the entire office was that of hair-trigger revolution.
In a self-preservation instinct born of the memory of madame guillotine, the executives unlocked the office refrigerator and ordered in some pizza and doughnuts. One even went as far as to acquire some small crates of popular soft drinks for the late workers. In a rare display of benevolence, they also added double-time and a half for the extra hours in the evening.
Once in a while, employers remember that employees are human beings, just like them. On those supremely rare occasions, one might have cause to possess faith in humanity.
[Image (c) Can Stock Photo / Krakatuk]
If you like my stories, please Check out my blog and Follow me. Or share them with your friends!
Send me a prompt [44 remaining prompts!]