Buddy jobs

Ah, there you are.  You ought to check your watch when I say that, you know.  Otherwise you don't look quite – ah, let's say dedicated – enough.  And you're late.
Well, you might feel that ten to nine is good enough, but it's not really, not at this level.  You need to be seen being here before everyone else, and be seen leaving after everybody else.  You have your own office, it's not as though you can't spend three or four hours a day doing your own thing.  Except not that thing with your hands and the magazine in the locked drawer of your desk.  That's starting to upset the cleaners.  We know because of the hidden camera in the ceiling tiles.  Well, you'll only be able to prove that it's an intrusion into your privacy if you can find the camera, won't you?
Well, thank-you for asking at last!  I'm Buddy, your guide to corporate culture and the fast track up the greasy pole to the top.  What?  Well yes, most people do find greasy poles rather hard to climb, that's why you need a guide.  And why getting to the top is so worthwhile, and yet so hard.
Your problem, you see, is that you don't work enough.  At this stage of your career you should be empire building, creating a foundation for later on when you'll be able to spend your days drinking coffee, doing the crossword, and occasionally getting some exercise on the golf-course.  What?  Wives are expendable, and, if she's the woman in the picture on your desk then you're going to want to trade her in in the next year or two anyway.  Start simple, get a trophy wife; go for someone with an attractive but fatal wasting disease.  There are some excellent ones available from the right kind of package holiday tour to Africa or South America these days, and you get the benefit of having someone on your arm who makes Victoria Beckham look like a fat heifer and knowing that in two or three years time you'll be able to upgrade again, guilt free.  In fact, make mutual life-insurance policies part of the pre-nup, and you'll even get paid for the upgrade.
Love is a many splendoured thing, to be sure, but it has no place in business.  I can recommend an excellent divorce lawyer for you.  Don't worry, he can find a reason for you to get a divorce.  Actually, if you've got any kind of impotence, that would help a lot.  You haven't?  Well, there's no need to take that tone, I was only asking.  Well, yes, you do look a bit impotent, now you ask.  No, I'm not leaving, not until we've finished talking.
About your working; there's a job you were informed about yesterday in your department.  No, I'm not suggesting you change jobs, I'm suggesting you do two at once.  No, really.
Well yes, it is more work, but you seem happy to turn up at ten to nine, so there's at least two hours of the day you're missing out on.  Come in at seven, go home at seven, skip lunch and you've got nearly a full working day there.  The job's in the same department, so we can acheive synergies and economies from overlaps, and you can easily do both jobs as once.  And, – and this is the key point here! – you deprive someone else from that job.
To successfully build an empire you need to have control.  If you manage multiple jobs, then you can appoint your own people to take out parts of your work, which means that you can end-run the whole recruitment process and steadily fill the department with people who owe their jobs to you.  And when the department is full, you know that it is loyal to you, and if you do it right (I suggest weekly indoctrination meetings) they are loyal only to you.  And then you have people to stand on to help you ascend the greasy pole.
There's another advantage: those people you deprive of jobs while you're doing two or more once: they can then be hired by you privately for a pittance, essentially as slave labour.  They can walk dogs for you, babysit for you, cuckold you to help you get that divorce, and sleep with the stick-insect trophy wife for you since people who are all bones are rarely fun in bed.  You can gradually erode their pay, partly as a function of inflation, and partly because as you tread them down they become more passive and accepting, until you have slaves in a very real sense of the word.  And slave labour can be trained as a private militia.
Ah, I see you're interested now.  Shall we start then by filling out this job application form, and discussing how you're going to convince your boss that you should do both jobs?  Excellent....

Right or happy?

Well hello there once again! I heard that you've been missing me when I'm not here; I have to tell you to stop that. Stop it at once. Naughty boy! Bad!
It's like this, you see, I'm not your own personal Buddy. This isn't a Depeche Mode song, you can't put my picture in the little pocket in the sun-visor on the passenger side of your car... well, I'm afraid you'll have to take it out and give it back to me. How did you get hold of it anyway? Look, we can do this the easy way or the hard way, but either way I get my picture back and you get something broken.
But like I said, this isn't a Depeche Mode song, and you should probably do something about your hair. That much grease can't be good for it, even if it is Premium Lard. Actually, no, I don't think Asda do Premium Lard. Well, at that price, it has to be their Economy lard. You have to scrape it out of the hole yourself? Then I think it's just fat from the sewers and it's probably hazardous to your health even to collect. I certainly wouldn't put it in my hair. Definitely not my chest hair. Nor even – actually, I think you should stop talking now. And sit further away from me.
I'm Buddy, I'm your guardian angel, at least as far as corporate culture goes, and I have wisdom to impart.
Would you rather be right or happy? Obviously we'd all like to be both, all of the time, but that isn't always possible. Being right can make us very unhappy, and being happy is often a consequence of being oblivious to what's right. Let me explain with a simple parable. Ok, koan then. I didn't know you even knew that word.
Once upon a time there were two worker bees who were tasked with taking the toxic waste from the hive and disposing of it. The first worker bee was cheerful and always looked on the bright side of life; for him the glass was always half-full and the clouds had solid silver linings that could be sold for drug-money. He picked up the first of the barrels of toxic waste and flew happily away, pleased to be helping to clean the hive and make it a better environment for everybody to live in. But when he arrived at the designated dumping site he realised that it was a children's playground, and when he saw that his instructions were to put the old, leaky barrels into the paddling pool where the water could cool them he saw that the barrels wouldn't stay cool enough, and that the children would be poisoned by the gradual seepage.
And so he flew away and took the barrels home with him, hoping to find somewhere else to dump them, or to change his boss's mind about the dumping ground. But because he needed to fill his quota to get paid, he had to keep more and more barrels at his home, and eventually he got sick and his wings fell off, at which point he also lost his job. And so he ceased being happy, and the knowledge that he had done the right thing was no comfort to him at all.
The second worker bee was morose and grumpy; for him the glass was always someone else's and they were demanding to know why he'd been drinking from it and wanting him to compensate them for their loss. He also picked up a barrel of toxic waste and flew with it to the children's playground, and there he was cheered up by the realisation that children would sicken and die and there would be other people in the world as miserable as he was. And so he flew back and forth with alacrity, the smile on his face getting wider and wider until he'd met his quota and exceeded it and was, for possibly the first time ever, ecstatic with joy. So he was happy, but only because he knew he wasn't in the right.
The moral of this tale, is, of course, that when you buy a house you should always make sure it has a deep enough cellar to store barrels of toxic waste safely.
Now, which of those worker bees would you rather be?
Really? Well, that is interesting. I have to go now, and if you should happen to see me talking to a policeman, well that'd be about a completely unrelated matter. You can trust me. Really.

The wisdom of Buddy

Hi, my name's Buddy. I'll be your spiritual guide for a while. There's a lot I have to teach you before you'll become enlightened, but the journey's part of the learning process and trust me, it's going to be fun. But before we start, I want to tell you a parable.

Years ago, when I worked in an office for a while, I was stood outside a meeting room telling a group of colleagues how I'd managed to clinch a business deal the day before with an inspired use of judo when one of my colleagues, a tall man with a saturnine aspect, said distinctly, "I hate you, Buddy."

"Do you?" I replied. "Do you really hate me? Do you wake in the morning fresh from dreams of burying me alive in an unmarked grave in Epping Forest? Does your breakfast have an iron tang to it, because you know in your heart of hearts that it should be seasoned with my freshly spilled blood? Do you drive to work focused intently on the road ahead, hoping that I'll appear at the roadside so that you can veer to the left and run me down? Is your day spent planning in meticulous detail how to get me to electrocute myself in the washroom?"

"Or is your hatred of me the weak, insipid kind that etiolates your spirit, drags your mood down with your low-level revulsion, not only of me, but also of yourself for your inability to do anything about it? Do you earn yourself an ulcer for never releasing your rage? Do you deprive yourself of happiness, hoping that some spiritual voodoo will transfer it over to me, and that karma will kill me for you?"

"Where is your passion in your hatred? When I hate, I hate intensely, like the bright light of a supernova, and just like the supernova, my hatred explodes outwards in wonderful, fantastic luminence, slaughtering everything in its path."

"I don't hate you that much," said the tall man looking sulky and disappointed. He shuffled his feet and frowned.

"Do you hate like that all the time?" asked another colleague.

"Of course not," I responded. "But I carry my passion throughout everything I do. In the absence of hatred, other emotions may take the stage. When I love, I love so thoroughly that everything else ceases to matter. I never have to ask if the earth moved because if you'd even noticed the earth, then it wasn't me loving you. And when I set out to make a deal, I make my deal and the handshake that seals it is like the sonorous ringing of the judgement bell for all concerned."

We dispersed at that point and went back to our desks. The tall man continued to hate me in his small, mean way for another two days, after which time he unaccountably opened a window and stuck his head out while the trees outside were being pollarded. The chainsaw sliced messily through his neck, and I looked up just as his head fell past the window, and I know I saw recognition in his eyes.

The moral of this parable is, of course, that tall men can always be cut down to size.