Tuesday, January 20, 2009

How It Works Sometimes

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This guy did a masterful job of landing his plane in a very dangerous situation. He did it in a manner which saved each and every life on board. It's commendable. He should get all the interview suck-off time the news would like to give. But give the damn co-pilot some love, would you?

Look, I'm no Lou Gossett Jr. (Though I've been told I look like him if he were even more handsome than he already is. No homo.) but I'm guessing the co-pilot wasn't just sitting there doing nothing. Although, maybe he was. Maybe he was like half the people we get teamed up with in our normal lives.

Captain: We've lost two engines, prepare for a possible water landing!
Co-Pilot: Whoa, what did you do? I know I didn't touch anything.
Captain: I think it was a double bird hit. What's our vector?!?
Co-Pilot: Heh, what's our vector...vector's a funny word.
Captain: Are you kidding me right now? I need the fucking vector!
Co-Pilot: My job isn't just giving the fucking vector, you know. I can fly a plane probably better than you.
Captain: This isn't a pissing contest. We are going to die if we don't land this thing safely somewhere!
Co-Pilot: You're on your own. I ain't taking the fall for this shit. Not. My. Fault.

But chances are he was just as important as Sully was. I imagine him sitting at home with his wife, all sorts of bitter that nobody wants to interview him. Meanwhile Sully is going to be paraded around like the pope for the next couple months, get a multi-million dollar book deal, and continue to get the best routes at work.

Sucks to be him.

I can relate to the situation because my company has a bunch of idiotic programs in place that end up rewarding people who are less worthy, or in some cases, not worthy at all. Constantly.

In my line of work there are three of us responsible for our territory and products. We make an identical amount when it comes to bonus. We also have a large number of factors that influence what happens to our bonus no matter what we have to say about it. Things can go really well or really bad because of someone else's decision. Decisions outside of the company, even. We are mostly at the mercy of these decisions. We can fight hard to lessen the blow of a bad one and grapple equally as hard to ride the wave of a positive one. You could literally end the year ranked #1 in the company without ever doing anything. Just because you got lucky.

What makes my job maddening is how one member of the team can ride coattails and earn the same bonus when it's all said and done. Unfortunately, it's pretty easy to slack off in my type of work. You can go through the motions and make it seem as if you're being productive. I have a co-worker, who I recently found out, has failed to make either her name or face memorable to one of our top customers. IN TWO AND A HALF YEARS! He told me he honestly has no idea who our co-worker is, and this dude has ridiculous recall. Not good.

But it won't stop the company from giving them equivalent recognition if our team wins an award.

I guess sometimes you have to suck it up. So you feel more deserving. So you KNOW you're more deserving. It doesn't mean anyone is going to bother to look far enough into it to ever see it. All you can do is control what you can control and hope someday someone will notice. The payoff will be much greater when people realize they were wrong for so long. And Generally, those who don't contribute will eventually get rooted out.

At least that's what I keep telling myself. In the meanwhile it'd be nice to stumble upon some incriminating evidence.

2 comments:

Left-Sided Player said...

http://tinyurl.com/9jvmx7

The Bracelet said...

Well, yeah. There are some stories about him. But just by looking in the mainstream media for coverage of the crash there was hardly a sentence mentioning him anywhere. It was Sully Fever!