Since when did shit-slinging get to be a full-time job?

At some point in the late twentieth century, just before the famous "millennium" bug, the total mass of the horse-shit generated by the job market reached critical mass, and became a vicious, stinking, self-evolving black hole through which no intelligence could escape.

Gone were the days when your average corporate lackey could run an ad like this:

… and look forward to showing up down at the shipyard before dawn to behold a hundred desperate souls with calloused hands and furrowed brows.

Nowadays, they just get a bunch of foreigners who'll die for a buck, but they Don't speak a whit of English -- not even cuss words. There's just no sport in it anymore.

Besides, when was the last time any modern country made a washing machine, or a refrigerator? The last real carpenters died with the World War II guys. We import woodwork from countries that aren't afraid of chopping down their own rainforests.

The real jobs these days are "service" positions. Even software is generally classified by the government as a non-manufactured item. If you ever apply for a non-service job, you better know what you are doing, or you'll have to learn a new salute. They use real machinery, and it's noisy as hell. Ever try talking to some old duffer who made his living in a machine shop? It's like talking to Helen fucking Keller. It gives new meaning to the phrase, "Say with Sign."

Here's the modern spin on our classic employment ad from long ago:

Not only that, in order to win this job, you'll need to build a resume and cover letter that specifically targets the hot points mentioned in this steaming pile of crap. Welcome to the new job market.

This table should help you dredge the real meaning out of modern employment ads:

The End of the World Is Nigh

David Letterman was known to pronounce that "The End Is Near" when he found some newspaper headline like, "Man Eats Neighbor; Sues Family for Indigestion." I had a similar epiphany one day during my job search. I ran across the following "job description." I was tempted to edit it, but have resisted, to paraphrase the Coen Brothers' famous disclaimer in their masterpiece, Fargo, "out of respect for the victims":

Is it my imagination, or is there some witch doctor in Borneo right now, swatting his departing warriors with baboon urine as they run off to cannibalize a neighboring tribe, who is fully qualified for this position? That is, assuming we could get them to stop laughing?

Modern Capitalism started out as a revolution in manufacturing methods: first, mass labor (translation: kids with stumps), and then, standardized machine parts (translation: hot cars, and adults with stumps). But that laid the seeds for organizations based on specific roles rather than on teamwork and job sharing. After all, every cog has its wheel, doesn't it? Why should people be any different?

These days, HR (Human Resource) Departments are themselves such rigid bureaucracies that they could not hope to do anything but propagate their own assumptions. The ads look like they were written by Franz Kafka: HR Assistant III, Novice Typist II, etc. Everybody is somebody else's sequel. And if you want to get ahead, somebody has to fucking die.

So when they want to set up a new division of their company, they put the bean-counters in charge. These guys know their numbers. They look at the list of roles they have hired over the years, see what roles are needed, and then plug them into the new situation, complete with salary ranges. Just like stamping out an Edsel. In fact, too much like it.

So you thought I was making fun of tribesmen from Borneo? Hey, these guys know teamwork. Look at how they operate:

• The lead trackers find some poor bastards out scraping the dirt for veggies. They create a distraction.
• Their teammates encircle the ill-fated farmers.
• On signal, they all converge and snatch their victims, splice them onto bamboo poles, and cart them home for an old-fashioned barbeque.
• Now let's see how the Masters of Capitalism (Bank Manager, HR Manager, Corporate President, name your own fool) would handle this enterprise:
• The leader immediately assigns a Vice-President in charge of Foraging. The trackers seem a little sneaky, so he gives the job to his nephew, a mongoloid teenager feared and hated by everyone in the village. Sensing some sort of pending dispute, the leader heads down to the river to watch the maidens scrub their privates.
• The nephew has never been on a hunt, but he has read Robert's Rules of Order, and spent a lot of time watching the only TV in the village. He gives all fifty members of the hunting party specialized jobs based on:
  • How much he likes them; or, lacking that
  • His "gut sense" of what they "were meant to do"
• Each person reports to someone else, and also manages someone else. At the very bottom of this pyramid are the squirmy, whining trackers. He still can't figure out what to do with them, so he gives them all the title, Novice Assistant I.
• It's about noon, and everybody is getting a little cranky from hunger. The nephew orders them on to the hunt, then goes down to the river to watch his uncle from behind a tree.
• Chaos ensues. Meetings are called but canceled because of conflicting schedules. The various managers cannot decide how to conduct a hunt. The trackers refuse to help because they are insulted by their job titles, which they feel should have been at least Novice Assistant II. The entire day passes, and the group grows more famished.
• There is no time to actually hunt now, and besides, the various managers strike upon a simple solution: they will eat the lowest members of their organization. They pass Corporate Downsizing Order #22-C with a majority and promptly consume the trackers, which made up the entire Novice I crew. All seems well.
• Three weeks later, the only living beings in the village are the leader, his nephew, and a bunch of very clean maidens.
• The maidens get pissed off and eat the two men, then decide to grow a nice vegetable garden with the leavings. Eventually they export their crop to organic food stands throughout North America. Everyone wants to know where they got the "great flavor."
• Several years later, they publish a book entitled Unabridged Empirical Corrections to the Seventieth Edition of Robert's Rules of Order which was remade into a porno classic. The rest is history.

If you were looking for a simple moral to this story, what can I say? Life is complicated. The baseline is this: we are not savages. We are a modern culture with proper etiquette and a strict hierarchy of rules, behaviors and rewards. Without bureaucracy, we would all end up in the (yuck!) organic food business. Or a (yum!) porno movie.

The only real threat to our safe accommodation was the birth of the Computer Age. We thought for a while that if everyone got a computer, they would develop their own reward systems. They would communicate openly with each other, discover their commonalities and stop fighting. They would build healthier, happier lives through shared knowledge. Their businesses would be based on proaction, not competition. They would stop feeding the bear.

Feeding the Bear

Think of the British. As recently as 1900, the sun never set on their empire. You couldn't take a leak without a picture of the queen peering down at you. Okay, it was fun in that way. But otherwise, it was terrible! They ruled with an "iron fist" of self-righteousness. They really believed that they had carried the White Man's Burden to the lost, dark continents of the world. But they were over-extended. They got knocked on their ass.

Enter Rod Serling, palming a cigarette. "Picture if you will a train station in the middle of nowhere. No one knows where the trains come from and no one cares where they go. But there is a smoking section, because this is… The Twilight Zone."

The train arrives bearing the American flag. We're famous, powerful and self-righteous. Everyone hates us, and everybody wants to knock us off our perch. But what we are really standing in for is the great tradition of Capitalism and Bureaucracy. The question is, will you get on that train? Or will you take door #2, a teepee in a national forest and loads of negative ions?