Irony Becomes Her

A Cog in the Bureaucracy II

Employment is a negotiation between two groups who are unsatisfied with each other. If they were both satisfied without you, they wouldn't have hired you.

Let me explain. If you're a cashier, you are negotiating between customers and suppliers. The customers aren't satisfied until they have the goods they came for; the suppliers aren't satisfied unless those goods are exchanged for the assigned amount of money. Your job is to make this situation satisfactory, and in order to do this, you have to take more money from the customer than quem would like to give and hand over more goods for it than the suppliers would like to see go. Most of the time people understand the less-than-ideal nature of that system and are not unpleasant about it.

Being in the newspaper business may be one of the touchiest of these positions; in this information age, we have a monopoly of sorts on certain types of information, so many people with a negative opinion of our work are still dependent on us. They cannot simply go to another supplier, so they stay engaged but unsatisfied with what we provide. This business is destined to leave many unsatisfied, evidenced by the fact that I have been accused of membership in both a vast right-wing media conspiracy and a vast left-wing media conspiracy.

So one does the best one can, and occasionally one will slip up. I made a decision the other day that was probably worse in the long run for the two unsatisfied groups than its reverse. As I wrote an e-mail, I could feel how narrow was the strip of fence I walked on to try to appease the consumer group without sacrificing the consistency of the production end. And if customer outrage (measured in ad hominems, or AHs) were really a measure of my incompetence, the response to the e-mail would have placed me in a hospital for the mentally underdeveloped.

Thankfully, my employers understand the difficult place I am in, having been in this industry themselves for decades. They really do watch my back, sometimes when I don't even feel like I deserve it. Tenure already? Nah. But a few AHs.

posted by Lynn @ 3:44 AM