MICRO MANAGING MADE SIMPLE

If there’s one thing I despise about the workplace, it’s micro managing. In fact, it’s safe to say it sends me into a silent rage that, if harnessed into energy, could destroy planets and black out suns.

In my not-so-humble opinion, one I know for a fact is shared by scores of lesser beings called “humans,” it is the one thing aside from blatant discrimination or abuse that can result in justifiable homocide If that sounds harsh, I suggest you avoid working with me and if you must work with me that you call in sick on that day. But I might find you anyway: No promises.

All jokes aside, micro managing has a two-fold purpose and neither of them is positive. The first one is to justify positions. In some cases, individuals who feel the need to prove that their continued existence is vital to the entity for which they work instigate micro managing. The second and more common reason is to wear down individualism until we’re such self-doubting basket cases we can no longer function on an intellectual level. We become automatons, trying desperately to keep up with what our controllers insist is necessary, the grim specter of job loss and financial ruin hanging over our heads at all times.

I’m not sure who is worse when it comes to micro managing. The case could be made for both the public and private sectors. I have experienced both and neither of them seemed less reprehensible than the other. In most cases, I found it occurred in the public sector as a method of job justification and for maintaining a lack of solidarity between departments. In the corporate world, however, it’s because of both of those as well as other issues including profit, monitoring for non-conformity and keeping everybody in their place.

The (dis)Information Age has brought with it a whole new level of obnoxiousness when it comes to micro managing. Much like the nightmarish science fiction tales of the 1970’s that cautioned us about losing our humanity to machines, the New Wilenium dehumanizes with aplomb in the name of efficiency. That’s how corporations pull things, you know. While the government pulls its fast ones with constant reminders about safety and security, corporations use efficiency and profit to wear us down and get what they want.

In many cases, micro managing has been almost completely taken out of the hands of human beings. Now it’s an ingrained “process,” an automated system of checks and balances implemented with the intent of keeping everyone constantly off-balance. Now that even includes the middle management types who would have been doing the micro managing a generation ago. Such is the case where I work.

Micro managing is an automated process that runs constantly in the background, prompting one-on-one meetings to go ver one's "stats" on a bi-monthy basis. What do these stats include? Here is a list of all the shit I and everyone who does my job must worry about while dealing with angry, frustrated and sometimes simply confused customers on a daily basis:

1. Amount of spent time on a call
2. Amount of calls handled in a day.
3. Amount of time customers are placed on hold.
4. Amount of times our phones automatically log us out when we get up to commit such sins as running to the bathroom or refilling our coffee cups.
5. Amount of customers whose contracts we renew monthly despite repeated insistence during the hiring process that we aren't working in a sales position.
6. Amount of time we press a certain button that takes us out of the rotation for incoming calls.
7. Amount of times we have to "dial out" to another department for assistance including calls to supervisors.
8. Percentage of time we use a specific path to pull up information for customers despite other paths often being more efficient.
9. Percentage being in conformance with all stats/metrics combined.

All of this is in addition to being "Coached" on five calls per month for "quality." Now if this seems like a bit much to you, I did inquire as to whether or not there was an actual "going to the bathroom" metric and received a humorless blank stare by way of response. So there goes my cameras in the toilets theory.

If you want to know what really disgusts me about all this, and you must or you wouldn't have made it this far, it is the total lack of regard for tenure implied by micro managing, at least where I work. After three years of enduring the same mind-sapping tedium, one would think I knew my fucking job, wouldn't one? But ok, even if that's not long enough, surely my beloved co-workers who have worked there for nine years and longer must! Yet they are treated no differently. Nor are the supervisors whose job it is to enforce the micro managing. They too are monitored and measured like lab rats, perhaps even more so than us...although that would probably entail a gentially based microscope and a trained parrot.

Will this stop any time soon? Are you crazy? If anything, it's going to get worse as the younger generations join the workforce. Those dumb-fucks have been raised in an era where being watched and monitored is just a normal, unquestionable part of life. Remember, these are the kids who thought it was ok to censor the press if it meant the government could keep secrets for our own good determined by...the government.

So, micro managing is here to stay but nobody has to like it. In fact, nobody has to put up with it either. I would love nothing more than for this post to be the impetus by which a movement gets underway to restore our basic decency. I won't hold my breath, though~