The Editor's Mess

Like the majority of Americans, ever since George W's appointment as President the idea of professional incompetence has been on my mind. Incompetence is a phenomenon so totally rampant in the corporate world today that the very notion of finding someone able and willing to do their lot is almost entirely relegated to comic book fiction. There was NEVER an incompetent superhero; these guys could always do their jobs well. Can you imagine Superman saying, "Well, I would've saved the planet from global thermonuclear war, but nobody gave me the manual on how to disarm the warheads"? Not even collectors would buy that series. If they wanted to see that crap they'd just go to work, if they could only remember where that was.

Anyone who has faith in Corporate America's mystical ability to be the single most efficient way imaginable to divvy up the earth's resources has obviously never spent a single day dealing with all the deadweight, dolts, dweebs, lugheads, hacks and boobs who live there. The typical American Corporate Structure is a haven for incompetence, inefficency, low productivity and more politics of personal destruction than you'll find in even the most poorly run government department.

dorksizing (n.)- A business strategy of employing lots of people with marginal skills so you can fire them when things get tough without decreasing productivity.Competition for salaries and recognition among the dullards of middle managers creates an atmosphere riddled with antagonism and full of back-stabbing loafers, each increasingly desperate to protect their pay stubs but too lazy and stupid to do their actual work. Unlike a government agency, these corporate organ-doners are "subject to the job market," which gets translated quickly into "becoming as unaccountable as humanly possible for any work in the company" so nobody can really feel comfortable firing them since nobody but God himself could actually determine what (if anything) they do during a work day, and even He would need a week or two to figure it out and another few days to shake His head in utter disbelief.

Why do companies do this? Why employ these meat puppets? Wouldn't it be much better to fire them and boost profits? My theory is (glad you asked) that it's actually the result of an shrewd corporate strategy for "recession-proofing" the company. You employ a hefty percentage of these chuckleheads so that when the inevitable merger or economic downturn hits, you have a very comfortable margin of people to slap with pink slips without affecting productivity. Machiavellian isn't it? I call it "dorksizing." You can quote me. Whales do the same thing.

How else can you account for Joey in accounting who hasn't done a single, continuous 8 hours worth of work since the Reagan Administration? Or Maggie in purchasing whose only physical output is gossip and only demonstrable product is exhaled carbon-dioxide? Or Jackie in customer support who answers every phone call with "please hold," and then hangs up seventeen minutes later when he comes back from taking a dump? You can't. So when the next CEO goes on a rampage and fires a bunch of people, all he's really done is clear the way for the next generation of numbskulls to be hired, at a reduced salary of course. Why pay a premium for ballast, right?

Take the welfare state, add three parts privatization and two parts employment protection laws, shake it around and bake for an hour and voilá: you've made a corporate structure full of incompetent people who feel entitled to a paycheck and whom you can't fire for fear of prosecution. Kinda makes you want to hand over your Social Security check to the bozos at Morgan Stanley, doesn't it? (If they could figure out how to deposit it, that is.)

Welcome to Corporate America. The land of the brave, the free and people who routinely believe Mexico is somewhere next to Somolia, presumably because they copied it off some other brain-doner in 8th grade geography and have been too busy since to crack an atlas.

After all, you'd be surprised how many games of Tetris you have to play before enough drool pools on the floor to create an OSHA violation.