Honestly, I thought I'd be blogging much more this week, seeing as how I fully expected to be unemployed.
My job, such as it is, has been tumultuous from day one, but in recent weeks it had crossed over into abuse. Twenty-four hour abuse, with demands coming it at 4 in the morning or the dead of the night. Things escalated over the weekend and it seemed only a matter of when, not if, things came to a head. And who would pull the trigger. I can't say what exactly my boss was thinking (and Lord knows, I've been trying for months) but I do know my resignation letter has been sitting on my desktop, ready to go, since Monday, just waiting for the red line to be crossed so I could hit "send". When that didn't happen, although we came close, I simply changed the date on the letter to Tuesday and waited for it to happen the next day. And the next. And the next. And then today.
And then, like a scene out of "The Hurt Locker", most of the major bombs appear to have been diffused during a lengthy conference call this morning. Now, suddenly, we're all singing "Kumbaya". I don't believe it for a minute, but I'm hoping the faux goodwill holds at least until the new year. Looking for work during the holidays sucks, unless you're aiming for department store elf and I think we can all agree I'm too tall for that. Although, at the rate I'm going, I don't think we could rule out a slot as "Santa" for next year.
Summer for us officially ended this past Sunday. We won't be going to the mountains as we traditionally do for Labor Day because the boyfriend will be out of town attending to family business. I'm especially disappointed because tomorrow marks our 10th anniversary and we'll be celebrating it apart. We'll no doubt make it up when he returns, but somehow it just won't be quite the same.
Sunday was also, coincidentally, the day I finally finished reading the biography of Steve Jobs. I actually bought it last December and took it to the mountains to be my winter reading. Then came the unexpected job offer and subsequent house sale and move to OC and months went by without a trip to the cabin. We missed most of the Spring and it wasn't until June we began visiting more regularly. And that's when I finally started reading the book. A few chapters a week whenever we were up, week by week, month by month, until, with perfect timing, I finished a few hours before we left for the season.
Look, I'm a Mac guy going back 20 years. I'm not one of those freakish people who camp out overnight whenever a new gadget goes on sale, but I would definitely consider myself a "true believer" and a Steve Jobs admirer. So I was really quite anxious to read the book, which I found absolutely fascinating, but also a little disheartened to discover that there was one overarching impression you came away with after reading it...
Steve Jobs was a dick.
Brilliant, but a dick.
Genius, yes, but... a dick.
I mean... page after page, chapter after chapter, an unending litany of bad behavior and people wronged. There doesn't appear to be a single person in his entire life he didn't fuck over at some point. And he made absolutely no apology for any of it. I kept waiting for the chapter where there was some sort of redemption, maybe when he discovered he had cancer, maybe after he had a liver transplant, maybe, I don't know, on his fucking deathbed. Nope. His theory until the end seemed to be that if you're a visionary, if you're brilliant, if you're ahead of the curve, then you can afford to be a dick to everyone around you because despite your bad behavior, you're somehow advancing mankind.
I suppose that's fair enough, as far as it goes, in relationship to Steve Jobs. I mean, for better or worse, he's certainly advanced the way we see and interact with the world over the past twenty years. It's a much different world since the launch of the iPod, and there's no further proof of that than the fact that the biography I just read may be the last physical book I ever buy; I've already downloaded my reading for the coming Winter on my iPad.
And here is where the tale of Steve Jobs bodes ill for the future:
Most people are not geniuses.
Most people are not brilliant.
Most people are not pushing the envelope and ahead of the curve.
Most people are, at best, middle management.
And their takeaway from the book will be that the key to success is being a dick.
And the way I know that this is true is the way the boss ended the conference call:
"I believe in running a company just like Steve Jobs and by pushing people to do their best..."
No, you don't.
You believe after reading the book that you have a license to treat people abhorrently with no consequences. Thanks to Steve Jobs, being a dick is now the goal. And after this week, I think we can safely say... SCORE!
