The thing is, Tamara didn't make any money for her agency because you didn't get the job. If she had been more conscientious, she would not have called you back all the way from Illinois for a job that you were unlikely to get. Rather, she would have searched among her local clients for a more appropriate candidate. I don't know how her commissions were figured, but she probably didn't get one in this case. If she was being paid a straight salary or hourly rate, it would have been no skin off her nose I you didn't get hired but, if she screwed up like that all the time, she eventually would have been let go. If she had been working for a state run agency in Soviet Russia, she would not have been worried about her work performance as much as she would have been worried about kissing up to her boss and looking good on paper. It seems, then, that a lot of American corporate executives behave more like commissars than capitalists. Why do you suppose that is?
Of course it's important that a businessman make money because, if he doesn't, then he will soon be out of business and not be able to provide goods or services to anybody. The flip side is that, if he doesn't provide goods or services at a competitive price, he will eventually go out of business anyway. I think the key factor here is the competition. Without it there is little incentive to keep your shoulder to the grindstone and your nose to the wheel, unless you have an internal work ethic, in which case you do a good job just for your own satisfaction. Even then, though, you need to keep an eye on the competition, or you might end up expressing your work ethic by chopping wood in the swamp for free. Well, that's not all bad either, provided you have some other source of money. Sometimes forces beyond your control intervene and it doesn't seem to matter what you do. Even then, however, you are responsible for your own destiny to a certain degree. You can't control what cards you are dealt, but you can decide how to play them, which ones to keep and which ones to throw away.
What's wrong with sausages? I thought everybody liked sausages. Be that as it may, I got to thinking about Sergeant Kaminski after I signed off last night. Funny the things you remember when one thing leads to another.
We were conducting an escape and evasion exercise. Escape and evasion is what you do if you end up behind enemy lines and are trying to get back to your own people. They were short on aggressors (bad guys), so we were told to pretend that every aggressor we saw was really 20 aggressors. Our orders were to avoid the enemy rather than to engage him, and to beat a hasty retreat if we made contact. About 50 of us were sneaking through the forest, all spread out and tactical, with Sergeant Kaminski in the lead. At one point, he held up his hand to signal us to stop, and then motioned for us to get down and keep quiet. We crouched there for 10 or 15 minutes before I heard somebody coming towards us, walking and talking like they didn't expect us to be there. There were only two of them, which meant 20, and they walked right in among us without a clue. I figured we would just lay low and let them go by, but somebody racked a round into the chamber of their rifle, "ka-ching!" Then everybody started shooting (blanks, it was just pretend) and, the next thing I knew, we were all retreating across this big open field, where we would have been sitting ducks if it had been real.
Later, I heard that Sergeant Kaminski was disappointed with our conduct, although we had done exactly what we had been ordered to do. He said that, since we had those aggressors surrounded, we should have stood our ground and "killed" or captured them. Orders be damned! Looking back on it now, I think that's why we won World War II and lost the Vietnam War. It was people like Sergeant Kaminski that won World War II for us, but now they had all been mustered out except one, and he was stuck in Berlin conducting fake wars with people who didn't have any more sense than to do exactly what they were told.
No comments:
Post a Comment