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    Nobody Told Me... The Cynic’s Guide for New Employees
    Nobody Told Me... The Cynic’s Guide for New Employees
    Nobody Told Me... The Cynic’s Guide for New Employees
    Ebook146 pages2 hours

    Nobody Told Me... The Cynic’s Guide for New Employees

    By Jeffrey Tharp

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    About this ebook

    During the 2012–13 school year, America’s colleges and universities are expected to award 1.8 million bachelor's degrees, sending almost two million fresh faces into the workforce. While those schools may have taught this army of potential office drones about critical thinking and problem solving, they didn’t prepare them for life after college.

    Nobody Told Me... The Cynic’s Guide for New Employees picks up where our institutions of higher learning leave off – readying these poor unfortunate souls to learn the hard lessons of life in the office.

    With biting cynicism honed by years in the trenches of the cubicle wars, Jeffrey Tharp presents a slightly twisted perspective on work, philosophy, and life that perfectly captures the smoke and mirrors environment of the average office job. It’s a must read for graduates, bureaucrats, and anyone who spends their day in a cube.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherJeffrey Tharp
    Release dateMar 14, 2013
    ISBN9781301421374
    Nobody Told Me... The Cynic’s Guide for New Employees

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      Book preview

      Nobody Told Me... The Cynic’s Guide for New Employees - Jeffrey Tharp

      Preface: Bottom Line Up Front

      I started working a few days after I turned sixteen. My parents thought it was character building. I'm sure they didn't anticipate the experience would end up building a character that was suspicious of authority, slightly misanthropic, and kind of a smartass. Then again, maybe they did. Contrariness and malcontentery is a bit of a family trait.

      Since 1994 I've worked for large corporations, local government, state government, and for Uncle Sam himself. As different as they are on the outside, once you've cut through the exterior details like what they do and where they're located, they're all pretty much the same in the chewy nougat center.

      Experts in the field of management will tell you that an organization is like a rowboat, with everyone in their assigned seat, pulling the oars in the same direction towards a common goal. It's been my experience that large enterprises are more akin to a cruise liner. There are thousands of people aboard who spend a great deal of time being hopelessly lost, most of the crew speaks a foreign language, and in the event of a catastrophic accident, it ends up being every man for himself.

      The truth of the matter is somewhere between the extremes. Working in a cube-based office is rarely as good or as bad as the stories make it out to be. Some days you'll feel like you're on top of the world and others will leave you wondering why you didn't listen to your 10th grade algebra teacher and take up welding. Work, like life, is mostly what you make it.

      This book isn't a tell all. In fact, I tried to remove any references to specific employers and instead let the focus fall on the commonalities that you're likely to run into during your first year or two of arriving in any cubicle, anywhere. As you'll learn through hard won experience, this list isn’t exhaustive. It's not even close to exhaustive. No matter what brand of bureaucracy you work in, there are certain features they have in common. All I've tried to do is point out some of the worst offenders so you can try not to look too surprised when they eventually jump up and bite you in the ass.

      If you don't bother to read any further, here's the CliffsNotes version of what you need to know to find your way in a dangerous world:

      1) Empires rise and fall. Civilizations flower and collapse. Leaders come and go… But the bureaucracy endures.

      2) Don't use simple words, when you can completely obfuscate your point using complex technical descriptions, acronyms, and jargon.

      3) No one ever died wishing they could sit through just one more meeting.

      4) Don't be first. Don't be last. Seek the concealment and safety of the middle of the pack.

      5) Nobody (especially your boss) likes a show off. Try not to make anyone look too bad by comparison.

      6) You will have at least one ridiculously annoying coworker. Beating them with blunt objects may be a community service, but sadly that doesn't make it justified in the eyes of the law.

      7) The phrase office technology is a contradiction in terms. Your iPhone is the best-connected and most reliable electronic device in your cubicle.

      8) Forgiveness is not easier to get than permission. They're both equally improbable.

      9) There’s never going to be money for training, travel, equipment, pens, paper, or binders… but the budget is always big enough for new executive furniture.

      10) You're only new once. Try to make all your big mistakes in the first few years while you still have youth and/or inexperience to blame.

      Remembering these ten simple rules can go a long way towards keeping you out of trouble in most situations. Unfortunately, you can't realistically hope to ride out a career just keeping yourself out of hot water. At some point, probably sooner rather than later, they're going to expect you to start earning your keep. That's where the rest of this book comes into play. It takes the basic rules and expands them into real world situations you’ll face as a new employee .

      The people you work with, the ones you work for, the very structure of the bureaucracy itself will conspire to drive you slightly mad over time. Show me a veteran of 30 years in the trenches of the Cubicle Wars who isn’t a cynic and I'll show you someone who hasn't been paying nearly enough attention. Having a healthy dose of cynicism about the world around you is one of the only things that will keep you sane during your long, exciting journey towards retirement (or unemployment if you happen to become a mid-career victim of rightsizing). Sorry, I'm just keeping it real up in here.

      If you approach your career with the right, slightly warped sense of humor and manage to avoid most of the common new employee pitfalls, you'll find you can thrive under even the strangest circumstances… and there are going to be some very, very strange circumstances. I'm a living example that you can manage to put food on the table without selling your soul to the highest bidder - even if you do have to sell your body eight hours at a time.

      I wish someone had pulled me aside and let me in on a few of the secrets to success before I showed up for my first day on the job. Instead, I got to pick up most of them through a painful period of trial and error. Heed my advice, or don't. That's strictly up to you, of course. Just don't show up in a decade or two complaining. Consider this your fair warning.

      Chapter 1: A Foot in the Door

      Congratulations! You graduated. If you're not still hung over from the end-of-the-fun-part-of-your-life party, it's probably the first time you've done any thinking at all about what you want to do with the time you've got left. Sure, you might want to be a pro surfer, teach English to impoverished Bengalese villagers, or land your own reality TV deal, but since the likelihood of any of those things happening is infinitesimal small, it’s time to make some hard decisions. Yeah, sometimes reality sucks.

      Since you should have started worrying about a job six months ago, you're already near the back of the pack. That's ok – there's no shame in living in mom and dad's basement for a while. Well, technically yes there is, but let's ignore that for the moment. The important thing right now is finding a job that doesn't involve wearing a costume or asking people with real jobs (and their kids) if they want fries with their order.

      The thing no one at your college or university mentioned when you were selecting a major is that unless you plan on someday teaching the subject in question, no one cares what your degree is in. The further away you get from the hard sciences, the more truth that statement carries. On your resume, an art history degree is every bit as good as the ones your friends got in creative writing or Phys Ed. Unless you went to Yale and double majored in physics and dead language studies, having a Bachelor of Something degree from your average college is only another box prospective employers need to be able to check off. Seriously. No one interviewing 22 year olds for their first job is impressed if you can recite whole passages from Beowulf from memory. It might be a neat trick for picking up impressionable young English majors on the quad between classes, but no one at Big Faceless Corporation, Inc thinks it's all that impressive.

      After graduation, you're going to be tempted to think of yourself as exceptional – as being at the height of your charm and abilities. In the interests of wanting to get a job, you're going to need to muzzle that temptation. You might have delivered the valedictory address to your class, but the rest of the world is looking at you and your peers as a commodity. This isn't the time to let your ego get in the way of paying back your student loans.

      You're going to apply for many, many wonderful jobs at many, many large and prestigious organizations. Some of them might even call you in for an interview. This is a good thing. That's not to say you should jump on the first reasonable opportunity that comes your way, but here are a few realities you'll want to consider: 1) Rent is expensive; 2) Food is expensive; 3) Driving your car is expensive; 4) Having a social life is expensive; 5) Having a job makes you more likely to be able to deal with items 1-4.

      It's a first job, not a life sentence. If you find out you hate what you end up doing (and you will), you can always find another job later. Looking for a job when you already have one is far, far better than looking for a job when you've already run out of money to pay the bills.

      This is a good time to mention the importance of internalizing one of life's little lessons: It's not fair. It's never going to be fair. Get whatever bitching and complaining you feel the need to do out of your system right now. Your first job is not going to pay what you think you're worth. It's not going to be in the field you studied for four years. It's not going to have the Cadillac health, dental, or vision plan (unless you stumble into a government job and then the rules are completely different). Those are the breaks, kid. Everyone is there at some point.

      The one thing your first job has going for it is that it's a foot in the door. It doesn't sound like much now, but it's still one great big giant step ahead of where you were the minute you walked across stage and became a newly unemployed college graduate. Unless you're going to work in the family business or you have a smarmy uncle working in a human resource office somewhere, this is your ticket to bigger and better things.

      Take everything you can from your first job. Get as much training as you can, learn how the payroll system works, ask questions, and watch everything around you. You'll be amazed how much you can learn about human interaction and getting ahead in the workplace through simple observation. There are people there who have been around for years and some that come and go with the wind. You can learn much from both types of people that will help prepare you for your next job or even your next career. You won't be spending a career doing the same thing in the same office, so learn all you can from every opportunity.

      You've stuck with it this far, so you deserve to be let in on the great workplace secret up front. Nobody

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