Curb My Enthusiasm

Way back when, when I was in junior high school and high school, we would be made to endure what were called “pep rallies.” Not sure if schools sponsor these annoying spectacles anymore. They shouldn’t.

For these pep rallies, the students would be herded in an auditorium to watch the cheerleaders cheer and be told we didn’t have enough school spirit. During one particularly dreary conclave, a mousy member of the student council who came from a good family and was going to a good school (you know the type) stood at the podium and told us, “I’m your school spirit and I’m dying!” Ug! I kid you not. Sadly, no such speech would be made in a school today.

Even to my young, not-yet-fully-formed cynical mind, I thought these assemblies were ridiculous. How did they know we didn’t have school spirit? On what criteria were we being judged? We didn’t attend enough sporting events? (The few times I went to a football game, the stands were full.) That we were apathetic and sullen? (Um, it’s called being a teenager.) I could never understand why we were subjected to this. As long as we went to school and were reasonably well behaved (we were), why were we being berated that we didn’t have school spirit? As if that were so important. Wouldn’t we be better off learning something, like math or English? Sure, the cheerleaders were peppy, but that’s their job. The rest of us? Not so much.

For an unpopular bottom feeder like me, mocked by classmates, ignored by teachers, I couldn’t wait to get out of that building everyday (so I could go home to my equally indifferent family). So maybe you can understand why these pep rallies were particularly painful for me.

I often think of these high school pep rallies whenever I get an email at work from upper management telling us how the new direction the company is going in is oh-so wonderful (of course, they bury the lead in the fourth graph when they admit about a half dozen people lost their jobs) or whenever I hear a CEO tell us how important their workers are to the company.

As my late Italian-American mother would say, bull throw. I don’t believe a word of it, not a word. Like those meaningless pep rallies, all those empty platitudes do is curb my enthusiasm and make me wanna run and hurl.

Yet we’re expected to peppy and enthusiastic about our work when it’s pretty clear to us that upper management will get rid of us in a hurry to save themselves and their drinking buds. (To be fair, the All White Males Club at my workplace did decide recently not to jettison our department. For now.)

We’re given double workloads, crappy health plans, no or miniscule raises and bad treatment, yet we’re expected to show enthusiasm for our jobs. The deck is stacked against us. The system only works for CEOs and upper management.

At my former workplace, they had a list of core values. One was respect for their workers and how workers were the company’s most valued resource. Ha! The former CEO pretty much gutted our division and made the head of our department (a drunken idiot) cut dozens of staffers.

And it’s not as if we have any recourse. Go to HR? What a joke! HR’s only job is to protect the company and that means upper management, not the lowly cubicle dwellers. (Again, to be fair, if you have a problem with your health care plan, I’ve found most HR people to be helpful.)

One lady I work with now told me her supervisor routinely criticized her work and told her she was fat. Now, if there was a problem with her work or office behavior that should be addressed. However, she won an industry award for her work, so how bad could she have been? No worker should have personal insults hurled at him or her. That’s workplace harassment. To me, she seems like a perfectly nice woman, not a high-strung nutcase. So what was the problem?

When she complained to HR, she was told that it wasn’t their problem and that she had to work it out with her supervisor. Yeah, right. She was eventually laid off.

So you get my drift here. If companies choose to treat their workers like pieces of crap and eliminate jobs by the hundreds, that’s their prerogative. They cannot, however, expect loyalty or enthusiasm in return from workers.