Have you ever noticed how executives have an overdeveloped sense of entitlement lately? Lord Black of Cross Harbour (Conrad Black to Canadians) is currently getting his fingers burned in a Chicago court for conveniently forgetting that money belonging to shareholders in his companies is not to be used for his - and his wife's - personal spending.
But there's a lot more dishonesty going on in the boardrooms of our country due to this "I'm entitled to my entitlements" view, and it effects even the smallest entrepreneur trying to make pocket change. But how can a feeling of being entitled to perks make you unhappy even if the perpetrators feel no remorse, even when confronted, even with photographic proof? Here are some interesting facts on administrators, executives and their weasel ways...
Take, for instance, the low-tech "Honest to Goodness" snack system, which is a cardboard tray filled with sweet and salty snacks, left in office lunch rooms by entrepreneurs trying to make a buck.
There is an integral money box with a slot, into which the buyer places coins or bills, all on an honour system, to pay the posted price of whatever they have just lifted out of the open tray.
The cardboard trays are replenished every Thursday by an "Honest to Goodness" employee - often the owner - the money removed and balanced against the products sold, and those remaining. Honest to Goodness statistics show some revealing corporate greed occurring in offices that house the executive, clerical and administrative staff on different floors within the same building.
First understand, Honest to Goodness figures an eighty per cent return, or 20 per cent theft rate, as the cut off point where they pull the vending box.
On the floor with the clerical workers, the rate of honesty for Honest to Goodness snack purchases is a steady 92 per cent year round.
Regular folks these clerks, most of whom have children at home, bring their lunch to work, are often timed by punch clocks, and are breathed down their necks by the administrative staff to "do a good job, be accurate and don't think up new ways of doing things - just follow our orders". Most clerks get their job by passing a time limited test on computer, and the test is set up to catch cheaters, who are eliminated from the competition. Written work rules and job descriptions cover every available loophole.
Clerks are a convivial lot. You can see them "wasting time" chuckling around the water cooler, trading day-care stories, talking prices on groceries, gasoline, clothes, guffawing at crude jokes... the essentials. But honest they are, and there's a certain peer pressure for them to stay that way. They don't steal much, because they don't have much themselves, there they know if someone stole from them, the consequences would likely be life altering.
But on the floor where the administrators work, there's not so much pressure. At times the work environment is like being at a mixed gender country club, where the women rule the roost. Just smell the designer perfume on the air when you walk in the room!
There are no timed lunches - a simple in-out board instead of punch clock - and no one has to tell them how to dress because the administrators use peer pressure instead of rules to enforce an unwritten code of office chic. They have the salary to dress better than the clerks, along with the leisure of not having to account for their time spent actually working on anything.
Like the clerks, administrators are convivial lot, but it's here where the ugly head of entitlement starts.
Most administrators get their jobs on the strength of the past education and their self written resumes. They lie on their resumes because they think all the other administrators (the competition) are lying on their resumes, so there's little guilt involved in lying. After all, the reasoning goes, if I have to compete with liars, I have to lie myself - right? It doesn't end there, but more on the entitlement to lie later.
On the administrator's floor the theft rate from the snack box varies between 15 per cent on regular weeks, then spikes to 25 per cent after some major holidays like Christmas, Thanksgiving and Easter. Why the spikes at the high holidays and not, for instance, on Labour Day or Canada Day? Because on high holidays , mostly family gatherings, the administrators have higher-than-clerk expectations of what constitutes a good time.
They feel compelled to spend more time and money in this pursuit to make everything "perfect" than the clerks, and have correspondingly higher stress levels before the holiday - which leads to more theft from the snack box - a bigger disappointments then the clerks after the holiday, because their bigger efforts than clerical staff do not yield commensurately better satisfaction.
Up on the executive's floor, predominately male with a token attack-trained woman sprinkled here and there, where the pay is astronomical, the Honest to Goodness box lasted only three weeks before being pulled by the operator. It's the executives who say, "They pay me for what I know, not what I do."
The executives are accountable only to their own consciences or lack thereof, and they hold long talks around the table in their lounge egging each other on to shameless exploits in business that quickly extended to the snack box. Fully half of them ( 50 per cent) regularly stole items in week one, and in week two some enterprising exec stole the money from the cardboard cash box.
The final straw for Honest to Goodness on the executive floor came in week three when the entire box, snacks and all, disappeared. The executives blamed the clerks, claiming their floor had been infiltrated by some low-life when no one was watching. So now, not only theft and lies, but false blame too!
Next article: Why are professional engineers put in the position of supervising people while human resources people are prohibited from building roads and bridges?
Musing for the next-next article: Why I gained 20 pounds of belly fat after I was promoted.
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