Dear Evil HR Lady,
It seems like when I truthfully state my work experience from other employers and from my apartment-building-owner/landlord mother, I never get job interviews or the job 99 percent of the time (high job or low job). I am university educated, worked for private sector companies and government in temporary jobs. I did election volunteer work for politicians that were known to my parents. Wouldn’t some of this name dropping at least push some people’s buttons in my favor?
When I do get a job, bosses, supervisors, team leads and staff workers seem like they want to avoid talking to me, or being in the room with me, as if they were afraid of me or something. I find I have to deal with my bosses and some peers like a poker player or politician and be Machiavellian. The amount of workplace politics I have to play is incredible just to protect myself from the games of others. I’m not desperate for jobs to survive because of my resources, but this gets a little old and boring. I’m always passed over for the best assignments and promotions. People say I always have a serious, all-business demeanor in my facial expression.
I like to have more than one part-time job for “leverage,” as opposed to one full-time job. One job alone is a weak position with nowhere to go if it goes bad. More than one part-time job means you can play your multiple bosses against each other for the best deal if any of them becomes unreasonable. They can’t back you into a corner and try to take advantage of you. Don’t tell each of your bosses who you work for, be vague and keep them on the edge, and you can pull their strings easier, if necessary. Nice or bad bosses will toss you away if it benefits them. They are not 100 percent loyal to you. Why would you be 100 percent loyal to them?
That is my general work-life strategy. It had worked well in the past, until around 2010 when the world economy really crashed. I could have gotten some nice jobs if I would have given up my multiple-job leverage system, as their HR people wanted me to do. However, that would have left me without backup. Why would I give up my jobs-leverage strategy, since as a landlord kid with background resources, I can wait for the ideal multiple part-time job-mixture? How do you feel about this tactical plan for an uncertain work world?
To read the answer click here: Are you unemployed because you’re a spoiled brat?
Wow! Seriously, you made this one up, right? That’s too rich.
You weren’t a fan of his “strategy”?
I think his strategy is similar to guys who act like jerks to get women because they figure girls like the bad boys. The problem is that the only women they end up with are the bad girls.
My mind is boggling. Someone who “leverages” several part-time jobs and then complains because “I’m always passed over for the best assignments and promotions”? Someone who complains about an “incredible” amount of office politics to “protect myself from the games of others” while at the same time withholding information from his employers because “you can pull their strings easier, if necessary”?
Has this person even read his/her own question? I’m not Christian, and I still want to pull out the Bible quote about removing the plank in your own eye before you deal with the speck in your brother’s.
Suzanne, Please tell me you posted this for purely entertainment purposes? The rant is a little overkill.
I was so excited to read your response because I don’t know how I would have coherently answered this question. But you did a beautiful job. Loved your answer and was snorting and eye rolling through the whole question. Great post!
I read “landlord kid” as someone who is actually a young landlord himself.
Otherwise, the best part to me was how no one talks to him. I hope he understands that unfortunately, this is the nature of the game with most part-timers. Since you’re never there, no one wants to take the time to get to know you or ask you to work on anything.
And the game-playing doesn’t help, either.
Hmmm, maybe he is a landlord himself. I didn’t read it that way, but I’ve certainly been wrong before.
His mother certainly is a landlord, though.
“I hope he understands that unfortunately, this is the nature of the game with most part-timers.”
I disagree with this. I’ve worked quite a number of temp and part-time jobs, and I find that people are generally friendly if you’re friendly with them. True, you might not get the big projects that require a lot of time in the office, but that doesn’t mean you’re going to be a pariah. As with so many things in life, you get out of your relationships (at work or otherwise) what you put in.
Dear Joe/Jane Doe,
Your colleagues are treating you as a pariah because you act like one. The more you pull tactics out of Machiavelli, the less trustworthy your colleagues and employers will feel about you. Untrustworthy employees are a threat to the ongoing business in a company. Bosses treat such employees as they would something smeared on the bottom of their shoe. Employees breathe a collective sigh of relief when such co-workers quit. You have earned the respect about which you are complaining.
A succession of part-time jobs is not a career or the foundation for one. In one of Tom Peters’ books, can’t remember which one, there is a graph that clearly shows the correlation between professionals’ higher salaries and longer planning horizons required by their jobs. A part-time employee will almost never have a job that has any more than a very short planning horizon. As long as you maintain your “work-life strategy” you will never earn promotions or get the better assignments.
Dump your “work-life strategy” and acquire a career plan that is both mature and professional. Faithfully exercise your new plan for a few years. Make mistakes and learn from them. You will benefit and you will feel the favorable effects.
Excellent advice! Thank you for chiming in.
Wasn’t it Shakespeare who once said something along the lines of ‘man(kind) reveals himself best in the games that he plays’?
As long as you work in any job below upper management you always have to deal with other people’s crap, and yes people might screw you over, but at the same time you are also _dependent_ on being liked obviously. If you look at politicians, you’ll observe that even blatant lies are fine as long as they don’t count against your popularity. You don’t like to be played with yourself right? No one does. Yet you seem surprised when this comes back to bite you in the ass.
And while I don’t have any HR experience, I don’t agree that employers only look at achievements. I’d say that depends on the economy. In tight times it might be for the most part true, but in a company with solid economy, your face-factor becomes more important. Just concentrating on doing a good job on the expense of relations is a terrible idea (regardless of where you are in the food-chain).
Well, that’s my 2 cents.
Your advice was spot on. No wonder people think my generation acts entitled – yeesh!
I grew up privileged in the sense that my parents were able to put me through college debt free – and I graduated top of my class. However since I graduated in 2010 my prospects were bleak. Guess what I did? I sucked it up, joined a temp agency, and ended up getting promoted out of a receptionist temp gig into a full time higher level position in a different department. Is it my dream job? No. Is it where I expected to be at this point in my life? No. But it is what it is, and life is what you make it.
Life is not fair, and if you sit around picking apart the levels of injustice (perceived or real) you will gain nothing. This person needs to have a serious reality check – if for no other reason than the fact that they name drop their own mother (and connections they only have due to their parents). As a general rule, nepotism is not an attractive feature in a potential employee.
Unfortunately, the more you protect yourself from risk, the more you protect yourself from reward.
My son worked scnopiog ice cream at Brusters at 15 1/2, played baseball and graduated with a 3.5GPA. You can do anything if you put your mind to it.Fast food, some restaurants, vet clinics, Blockbusters, grocery stores, CVS, Walgreens, after school programs at the local ementary school balancing is all about talking to your employer about your schedule, being honest, trustworthy, reliable, dependable,a a self starter. Try it for awhile and if it is not working examine why talk to others who have a job good luck to you!
Evil HR Lady, you speak the truth! I wanted to strangle this pompous kid just so he would stop writing, but you did an excellent job of keeping your hands to yourself!
Now, come on, did this letter really come from a real person? Is this an early April Fools’ Day joke? Is there some sort of January-prank-day I don’t know about?
Oh. My. Goodness.
How much you want to bet he comes as a complete set including helicopter parents and over-inflated LinkedIn profile?
Yikes.
This person needs to work for my former boss! I once worked for a boss who would play ‘games’ and would tell employees about how ‘awesome’ they are and that they would soon receive promotions only to hold them in their very low-paying positions. Many employees stayed for years waiting for their ‘promotion’. Some of them even had their families to leave town and move to the town of the company based upon the ‘promotion’ that they were about to receive.
Needless to say, most of these people did not receive a promotion. In fact, one person was fired without cause two days after she was told about her upcoming ‘promotion’.
Many people, including myself, figured it out and eventually left the company. However, I ran into one of my former co-workers at the supermarket and she was still waiting on her ‘promotion’ – she has been waiting for two years. I didn’t want to ‘bad mouth’ the boss, so I didn’t tell her that I’d figured it out. 🙁
If this person should ever work for a boss such as my former boss, it would put a lot of things into perspective. From my experience, I’ve learned what type of person I should not work for and what type of person I should never be if I should ever become a manager.
I agree that the guy is spoiled and immature. That being said, he’s young and still has time to turn things around. Here’s my two cents: If this guy has money, I think he might be better suited to starting his own business –maybe something related to property management or campaign consulting. He’s clearly uncomfortable with authority and has some social skills deficiencies, but he’s also got drive and a big ego. He might make a decent entrepreneur. Not everybody is cut out for traditional employee-hood, after all. I say, if he thinks he has any good ideas, call the Small Business Administration and start asking questions about how to get started.
If starting a business doesn’t float his boat or isn’t an option right now, he might want to look for a union job, where the risk of termination on a whim is somewhat constrained by collective bargaining agreements. This could ease his fear of being at the mercy of a single employer. A union job might also be a good place to get solid training in a particular trade. As everyone knows, the only real security for the working class is in the skills you have to offer. He may have basic carpentery or other skills learned while helping his mom. These could be the basis for a trade apprenticeship. Obviously, as Evil already pointed out so well, the game playing has to stop. Remember, Machiavelli himself was arrested, tortured and exiled from public life at age 44. (Moreover, some scholars now think that “The Prince” was comical irony –Machiavelli may have been a Florentine John Stewart.)
Oh…the propensity of the well-to-do to exxagerate their problems beause they believe they should be exempt from them.
Ha! That is an excellent saying.