The Power of Power and Absolute Power... or, No Time to be 21: The Beginning of an Accidental Career
At 21, within days of completing the last exam of my degree course, I realised my funds had run out, and that I’d need to get some money if I was going to eat. So I took myself off to the job centre to sign on. The cunt behind the desk at the job centre told me that as I’d not paid any national Insurance stamps during my three years as a student, I wasn’t eligible for jobseeker’s allowance or whatever it was back then, or any kind of benefits. Whatsoever.
It wasn’t the complete lack of help I was offered that bothered me (ok, it did bother me) or the lack of sympathy (which I have to concede did also bother me really), but the way in which this little scrote seemed to enjoy telling me to fuck off and that there was nothing they could do to help, and that I wasn’t eligible for anything at all.
I left, despondent and deeply panicked. What was I going to do? In retrospect, I learned a valuable lesson on that day – several, in fact. The first: life’s hard. Ok, so I knew that already, but this single event really brought it home. The second: the system’s fucked. Having gone through school and sixth form and then straight to university, I’d never had any dealings with ‘the system’ before. I didn’t like my first experience of it, that was for sure. Third: people are cunts. Again, I knew this already, but it was a slap in the face reminder. Job centre guy, he was ok, he had a job, was getting paid. I could fucking rot. It made no difference to him.
This meant that my plans for a summer unwinding, waiting for my results and then celebrating them were out of the window, and no mistake. I bought the local paper and began applying for every job going, and then returned to the Job Centre to see what they had, which wasn’t much. I had no experience, and besides, didn’t really think that bar or factory work was my forte. I was almost a graduate, for fuck’s sake, with about to receive a degree in English Literature from one of the country’s top universities!
Anyway, I wound up landing an admin job processing applications for life insurance. It’s a job that I’ve spent the rest of my working life trying to leave. I’ve gone part-time and returned to university, but somehow haven’t managed to break out. That, however, is a whole other story.
The point is, during my years in the corporate world, I’ve had contact with many people. They come and go, after all. I’ve met with a few people fairly high up in the company. Successful people. People so high up that they have no clue of what the workers who actually do the work and keep the money coming in and keep things ticking over do.
These high earners who dwell in boardrooms and personal offices, detached from the realities of the everyday, are obvious targets for criticism, obvious figures of resentment and general loathing by the shop-floor workers. And rightly so: how can they run a company when they have no concept of what’s expected of the people they employ (or how little they’re paid to deal with the shit), and when they never ever have any dealings with the people who are keeping it real way down the ladder? As I see it, though, I’m so far ‘off the radar’ in their world that I can play it their way back at them and make like they don’t exist in my world. The same is true of politicians: really, they’re such an easy target I’m not going to waste time or energy here, not least of all because I consider it a pretty futile avenue to pursue.
Unfortunately, there are people who aren’t as high up the ladder, and they make it their business to be nigh on impossible to avoid – because profile is everything. In recent weeks, a new project team has been assembled at the far end of the floor I work on. Big whoop, big shrug, it’s all the same to me. I try to keep out of it, it’s not my business and has no effect on what I’m paid to do on a day-to-day basis. However, every half hour or so my concentration is interrupted by one of these project people who insists on talking loudly on his i-Phone (which he holds 3” from his ear). It’s not just that he spouts corporate jargon about ‘touching base’ (the anally retentive twotsack’s probably touching cloth, too, on a permanent basis), bit the fact he feels theneed to walk around the office while he does so. The fucker does laps, occasionally performing a u-turn, or pausing to prod some drawing pin or another that’s being used to hold a poster or notice on the wall. I know that sometimes moving around helps the thought process, but I somehow doubt that he needs to think more clearly when booking a meeting or ordering some sandwiches. No, it’s all about the attention. It’s all about the power.
How do I figure that? Well, for starters, he has an i-Phone. They’re not exactly the cheapest piece of kit on the market. He wants us to see his i-Phone. He wants us to know that he knows all the buzzwords and that he’s on important business. Not like us plebs who sit and shunt papers around and type shit and take phone calls from commoners. What’s more, we can’t leave our desks because we’re tied to shunting papers around and typing shit and taking phone calls from commoners, while he has the power to wander wherever he so pleases, when it pleases him. What he’s actually saying through his actions is ‘I’m important. I have power. And if I come over and tell you to do something, you’ll do it, because I’m more important than you, and have the power to tell you what to do.’
He’s not just walking, then. It’s a power-walk, as he trots off the key phrases he’s picked up from the latest book on successful management techniques and meetings in the boardroom (not just meetings but power-meets, of course). That’s not just talking, it’s power-talking. And those aren’t sandwiches for the kind of lunch we regular plebs have, oh no. You just know he’ll be taking a power-lunch.
As you can probably deduce, I absolutely hate the guy. I concede that I don’t know him, but I don’t need to and I don’t want to – not even to improve my career opportunities. I suspect even his wife and kids hate him too, but that’s ok because he keeps them in a good standard of living. I can imagine him swanning into his home at 10pm after a long hard day at the office and after a power-shower, treats his wife to a power-shag, then has power-nap before getting up and leaving for work again at 5.30am, and driving a BMW no doubt. He’s probably too busy to shit, but if he does you can bet it’ll be a power-shit.
So it is that the people I have real issues with are the lowest of low-level management and those lower-middle creeps who are really working to get themselves somewhere not because they’re actually any good, but because they’re good at looking the part. They’re the worst because they’re ambitious and will shit on anyone to make themselves look good and pally up with anyone in a slightly more elevated position than themselves if they think it will be of benefit to their career prospects. It’s not what you know, after all.
Herein lies the problem. Because these people are ambitious and have succeeded in getting just so far, they’ve had a taste of power. This makes them hungry for more, but while they’re waiting, they’re wanting to push the parameters of what power they have, to test the extent of that power. The ways these people attempt to maximise the exploitation of power are manifold and diverse, but all too often manifest in the petty, the nigglesome, the petulant, the hypocritical, the slightly unjust... just because they can. Like deputy headmasters or even dinner ladies in schools, corporate power-trippers delight in, well, power trips.
So the Lord Acton’s dictum goes that ‘Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency or certainty of corruption by full authority.’ He may have been right, but failed to observe the more irritating fact that while power tends to corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely, a small amount of power makes a person an absolute cunt.