Tuesday, October 30, 2012

Tuesday Tuneage
Seaweed - "Go Your Own Way"
1993

I hear that voice on my answering machine still, fifteen years later. The voice of a man trying to maintain a steady confidence, the voice of a man wanting to make a sale, but suddenly not sure what goods he had to offer or at what price he could sell them.

“Bill? Hi, it’s Mitch. I heard that you had been offered to come back and do the payables job, but turned it down. Just want you to know that we think you should come back. It’s a team, here. Gotta think of the team.”

The phone call was an odd one to be placed. Mitch worked at a company where I had just finished up a temporary accounting gig. I had been let go during a staff shuffle, and a short time later my temp agency called and said the company would like me to come back and handle the payables job as that person had left. I turned it down flat as I didn't want to handle payables, which is one of the least enjoyable of accounting duties. You field phone calls from people looking for payment, and generally people who feel they are owed money aren't very pleasant.

Mitch's boss had called my agency with the offer. The agency called me, and then the agency called Mitch's boss back with my decline. That was the chain - company management talked with temp agency management and vice versa. So when Mitch, a staff accountant, called me at home about my work situation, I was chagrined. And it wasn't just the invasion of my privacy and going outside the normal chain of the temporary staffing game that stuck with me; I think it was invoking "team", which by that time in my mind had become a foul word.

I've been self-employed for thirteen years now, so I need to reach back to that mid-nineties era to cough up the proper bile I had for the "team" concept:

This is that “whole is greater than its parts” or “team” crapola that fronts phony community in the workplace in an attempt to suck the individuality out of you. The word “team” was appropriated from the sporting world, where greed and winning at all costs drive things. (They drive things in Corporate America, too, but management will lie and tell you otherwise.) If you are on a sporting team, then by all means synergize. That way you can win your league championship and get tons of bonus money and endorsements and fame. If you’re just a regular ol’ working stiff, this team stuff at work is bogus. Unless you think work is fun, and you enjoy that wacky workplace humor and can’t wait until the next office potluck. Then the team thing is okay, because your much brighter team members will end up doing your work and covering for you. If you’re bright (and I know you folks out there are) you’ll think of yourself. Thinking of yourself is what capitalism was built on. Your boss and coworkers will disdainfully say you’re “not a team player”, but you’re too good for the junior varsity, aren’t you?

Yeah, that's how much I hated the word "team" being applied to the workplace. Things are so much better these days of self-employment. The hours are better, the coffee is better, the people are damn swell. Teams are something I see on TV in brightly-colored uniforms.

(Note: Tip of the pen to my pal Turk for coming up with the "junior varsity" line back in '91.)