Peeling shrimp and swallowing oysters.
So, I was up in Reno this weekend having dinner with my brother and sister in law. They were here/there for a national bowling tournament of some kind. I went up to ski with them while my brother was not bowling. We were sitting in a brew pub located in the Eldorado Casino eating “You Peel It” shrimp and I was doing oyster shooters. The two of them arrived late Saturday. I drove up Sunday. We skied on Monday. It was a casino restaurant, so the “You Peel It” shrimp were numerous, and as we were spending a lot of time peeling, I was remarking that “I had had to take a day off from work to do this.”
My brother remarked back that “I didn’t have to work on you hard to do that.”.
I retorted “Getting me an excuse to take a day off form work lately is not hard.”
My sister in law then followed up with a question that kind of left me speechless. She asked: “Exactly what is it you do?”
I have difficulty explaining that. It’s like peeling a lot of shrimp. It’s messy and you need cocktail sauce to make the main substance not be bland.
The easy answer is, I work for the phone company. Telling people this in a bar usually gets you a tirade about the fact they didn’t pay their phone bill at one point and now the company won’t let them have a phone. If they haven’t goofed up their credit rating by excessive 976 calls they explain how much they hate our DSL or Wireless service. So I try to keep public utility employment closeted. When they ask what I do for the phone company, I’m at loss for words. For one thing, I’m not a lineman or an operator, which is pretty much what people think of when they think of the phone company. I’m something much more nebulous. I’m in middle management. Not, senior management, not upper middle management, not lower middle management, but middle-middle management. I have only managers reporting to me, and I only report to managers. I’m a traffic cop for managers at a crossroads of the management track. My job is to keep traffic running. To do this I take irritating poorly thought out laws handed down by senior management (the governor and the legislature as an example), and therefore poorly interpreted by upper middle management, (the bureaucrats) and try keep people moving in appropriate and productive directions. While directing traffic I may not irritate the members of the governing body or its citizenry. I must also keep injury accidents to a minimum. Well, that is my interpretation of my job.
To most people in the company I would be considered the second level of deity. One of the gods, but only in charge of like snow flake patterns, nothing dangerous like wind, or thunder. Okay, maybe the let me do a little vengeance by implementing an earthquake on occasion. I did get out source eight employees this year. Woo Hoo! But like most perceived gods, I accomplished this by slight of hand. I’ll get to that in a minute. Most of my godly worship comes by means of my hire, fire, and compensation powers. When you want something or get in trouble, you have to come pray to me. All the managers below me can’t hire, fire, promote or give you a raise. They really can’t do much to affect your life. They just advise you to pray to me, or complain with you and agree life can be miserable. They are like priests: mortals. Educated, possessing certain high skills, but still just mortal. Mortals usually have to go to Gods to solve the problems they can’t figure out. But being a second level god praying to me is like praying to the patron saint of something. You don’t want to bother the real God with your issue, so you pray to one of the lesser deities. Us lessor gods are more likely to help out because we aren’t so busy running the whole universe. But unlike a patron saint, I’m the guy most people’s supervisors/priests use as a threat to keep you under control. “We could always bring this up with “The Director.” I mean, nobody every says, “Do what I say or I’ll ask St. Peter to lock the gates of heaven when you show up. --So much for being a saint. Actually, I’m a Senior Technical Director. I think this means I’m an older cop who understands how traffic signals work or something. But senior or not, I’m just a threat. But that’s what cops really are to most people: a threat from the government. We’ve all used that threat: “Cut that out, or I’m calling the cops.” Well at the phone company, a lot of people call me. --Mostly for domestic squabbles between workers. Then I’m not really a cop, I more of a counselor. But because I’m a cop and have a little authority and power in me, I get to lecture those squabbling. (I enjoy that part of my job.) When I’m not settling squabbles, I just sort of patrol my assigned area looking for problems. Occasionally I get asked for directions (hence the director title, I think) When not much trouble is brewing I spend a great deal of time filling out mindless detailed reports on squabbles I’ve long since settled or trying to figure out where I’m going to get lunch. Doesn’t this seem like a cop?
But that’s where I get back into this lessor deity thing. I was asked buy upper middle management to out source eight employees this year. To most employees this would be a disaster of biblical proportions: their jobs and lives are being threatened by the gods from Mount Olympus. But being a lesser deity with minor powers, I really just created new interesting jobs that eight of my employees had been praying for, then hired eight foreign contractors, to replace them. I laid off no one, but told the gods on the mountain I had done their bidding. (This was the slight of hand.) The Olympus gods smiled and wrote down this miracle to tell Zeus the next day. I’m sure they took credit for it.
But even understanding my job as a lesser deity/cop I was still at a loss an exact description for my sister in law could relate too. So I just kind of muddled through a abridged explanation of what I just discussed, and then swallowed another oyster shooter while she dipped a shrimp. She looked at my brother, peeling open his shrimp and said, “Why is it, he can just never answer my question?”
But have you ever met a cop or a lesser deity that gave you a straight answer? It’s a bit like “You Peel It” shrimp. There is going to be work on your part to get to the juicy morsels.
My brother remarked back that “I didn’t have to work on you hard to do that.”.
I retorted “Getting me an excuse to take a day off form work lately is not hard.”
My sister in law then followed up with a question that kind of left me speechless. She asked: “Exactly what is it you do?”
I have difficulty explaining that. It’s like peeling a lot of shrimp. It’s messy and you need cocktail sauce to make the main substance not be bland.
The easy answer is, I work for the phone company. Telling people this in a bar usually gets you a tirade about the fact they didn’t pay their phone bill at one point and now the company won’t let them have a phone. If they haven’t goofed up their credit rating by excessive 976 calls they explain how much they hate our DSL or Wireless service. So I try to keep public utility employment closeted. When they ask what I do for the phone company, I’m at loss for words. For one thing, I’m not a lineman or an operator, which is pretty much what people think of when they think of the phone company. I’m something much more nebulous. I’m in middle management. Not, senior management, not upper middle management, not lower middle management, but middle-middle management. I have only managers reporting to me, and I only report to managers. I’m a traffic cop for managers at a crossroads of the management track. My job is to keep traffic running. To do this I take irritating poorly thought out laws handed down by senior management (the governor and the legislature as an example), and therefore poorly interpreted by upper middle management, (the bureaucrats) and try keep people moving in appropriate and productive directions. While directing traffic I may not irritate the members of the governing body or its citizenry. I must also keep injury accidents to a minimum. Well, that is my interpretation of my job.
To most people in the company I would be considered the second level of deity. One of the gods, but only in charge of like snow flake patterns, nothing dangerous like wind, or thunder. Okay, maybe the let me do a little vengeance by implementing an earthquake on occasion. I did get out source eight employees this year. Woo Hoo! But like most perceived gods, I accomplished this by slight of hand. I’ll get to that in a minute. Most of my godly worship comes by means of my hire, fire, and compensation powers. When you want something or get in trouble, you have to come pray to me. All the managers below me can’t hire, fire, promote or give you a raise. They really can’t do much to affect your life. They just advise you to pray to me, or complain with you and agree life can be miserable. They are like priests: mortals. Educated, possessing certain high skills, but still just mortal. Mortals usually have to go to Gods to solve the problems they can’t figure out. But being a second level god praying to me is like praying to the patron saint of something. You don’t want to bother the real God with your issue, so you pray to one of the lesser deities. Us lessor gods are more likely to help out because we aren’t so busy running the whole universe. But unlike a patron saint, I’m the guy most people’s supervisors/priests use as a threat to keep you under control. “We could always bring this up with “The Director.” I mean, nobody every says, “Do what I say or I’ll ask St. Peter to lock the gates of heaven when you show up. --So much for being a saint. Actually, I’m a Senior Technical Director. I think this means I’m an older cop who understands how traffic signals work or something. But senior or not, I’m just a threat. But that’s what cops really are to most people: a threat from the government. We’ve all used that threat: “Cut that out, or I’m calling the cops.” Well at the phone company, a lot of people call me. --Mostly for domestic squabbles between workers. Then I’m not really a cop, I more of a counselor. But because I’m a cop and have a little authority and power in me, I get to lecture those squabbling. (I enjoy that part of my job.) When I’m not settling squabbles, I just sort of patrol my assigned area looking for problems. Occasionally I get asked for directions (hence the director title, I think) When not much trouble is brewing I spend a great deal of time filling out mindless detailed reports on squabbles I’ve long since settled or trying to figure out where I’m going to get lunch. Doesn’t this seem like a cop?
But that’s where I get back into this lessor deity thing. I was asked buy upper middle management to out source eight employees this year. To most employees this would be a disaster of biblical proportions: their jobs and lives are being threatened by the gods from Mount Olympus. But being a lesser deity with minor powers, I really just created new interesting jobs that eight of my employees had been praying for, then hired eight foreign contractors, to replace them. I laid off no one, but told the gods on the mountain I had done their bidding. (This was the slight of hand.) The Olympus gods smiled and wrote down this miracle to tell Zeus the next day. I’m sure they took credit for it.
But even understanding my job as a lesser deity/cop I was still at a loss an exact description for my sister in law could relate too. So I just kind of muddled through a abridged explanation of what I just discussed, and then swallowed another oyster shooter while she dipped a shrimp. She looked at my brother, peeling open his shrimp and said, “Why is it, he can just never answer my question?”
But have you ever met a cop or a lesser deity that gave you a straight answer? It’s a bit like “You Peel It” shrimp. There is going to be work on your part to get to the juicy morsels.
posted by Stan at 1:11 AM
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