The founder and CEO of the company I work for, he's an unusual cat. I enjoy Dilbert and Max Barry novels, but really, I don't work in that kind of cubicle farm. It's a cubicle farm, true, and I have shared a cubicle for five years or so with a guy who won't speak to me except on the phone, but still.
What makes it different? Well, the aforementioned guy had every reason on earth to fire me a few years ago when I was a supervisor. I'd risen by Peter Principle to my level of incompetence. I don't even know what an emotional competency is, and I don't even want to know how to fake one. Neither does the CEO, but he knows what they look like and he knew I didn't have any.
So instead of firing me, he offered me to the chance to go back to what I was good at without even making me take a pay cut. I took a pay cut but that was because I was sick of working nights and I couldn’t take the shift differential with me or it wouldn't be a shift differential. If I'd been willing to continue coming home in the pre-dawn hours and nailing the coffin lid shut, I'd have kept the differential too.
How do I explain to people not just that it's an unusual president who offers such a chance to a guy like me, but why I'd take it so gladly?
Today I had a living example of why. We have added on to our building, tripling the space we have to work with. The old building is going to be gutted and remodeled to be up to code for the new size, being that the rules are different at 120,000 square feet. It's been fun watching it go up, they brought in concrete Lego things to make the walls, and it was fun to watch guys ride cement zambonis on the huge new floor. Oh, but the example.
Moving cubicles to the new building, professional movers do the nut and bolt stuff but we move our shit over with hand carts. When it was my turn I loaded up my stuff and was waiting on an IT guy to move my computer when the CEO I'm talking about showed up and pitched in. This guy started the company from a bankrupt farm about 20 years ago and built it into a $20 million a year business. The dude is in blue jeans on his hands and knees feeding me cables for my computer through the desktop of my new cubicle. And it was the most natural thing in the world. I wasn't thinking that the CEO should be in a suit and above doing anything that involves crawling around. This is not a guy I see every day or anything like it, it's just a guy I work for, and you can't not bust your ass when you work for a guy like that.
1 comment:
I work for a guy like that as well.
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