I Don't Know

This is one of those posts where I know what I mean, but I may leave you wondering. I received an email today that a former coworker died either today or yesterday, it was unclear which. This fellow was a person who made it clear to me that he didn't like me very much. I don't think that it had much to do with me personally, but was because he was an hourly union employee at Tedious systems and I was salaried. For as long as I worked around him, he acted as though we were combatants on opposing sides and that I was out to get him. After all, I was "Management". Perhaps it is the old management styles that cause these sort of working relationships or maybe our natural inclination to order things. Perhaps we are all so alone that we invent ways to assign worth to ourselves. As A.E. Houseman put it, "I, a stranger and afraid, in a world I never made." I remember back when I started at Tedious Systems in the 1960s, there were many things designed to distinguish among the hierarchical layers of the organization. For instance, when I was an hourly office worker my chair didn't have arms on it. Armchairs were reserved for first-tier managers and above. Second-tier managers had offices, in addition to their armchairs. First-tier mangers sat at desks in the open work area, caught between the higher ups and the rabble. One time we moved into a new work area of the building where there was a cubicle at one end of the room. It wasn't even a real cubicle, but the old bank walls, with glass tops. Maybe 4 feet tall. Our boss moved his desk in the cubicle. Within a week his boss had it disassembled, because he wasn't entitled to an office. He sat at the desk while the workers disassemble the cubicle around him. Sadly comical. This sort of segregation of the ranks gave a lot of people an inflated sense of of themselves and they behaved accordingly. The lovely Mrs. Sneed and I went to my pal's birthday party a couple of years ago and several people were there whom I had worked for back in the 60's, 70's and 80's. They are mostly in their 70s now and long retired. It was interesting to see how very ordinary they were stripped of their corporate veneer and the power it vested in them. I used to be afraid of the power theses folks wielded and now they are just harmless senior citizens. I wanted to remind them of the bad old days and ask how important their phony corporate power and status turned out to be, but I didn't. Instead, we left early. My bitterness, my problem. The death of my former coworker gave me pause to think about how we define ourselves in relation to others and how we cling to things that make us feel important or even superior. At the end we all wind up equally dead. Things in this blog represented to be fact, may or may not actually be true. The writer is frequently wrong, sometimes just full of it, but always judgmental and cranky Tag: Daily Life Personal Finance Humor