My hiatus

It’s been exactly one year since I last posted on this blog and that might seem like a sign that things are going well, seeing as the last 5 posts were not so much prose as they were a series of thoroughly detailed complaints. 

So what’s different now is not that I don’t have complaints, because I do, but they’ve become of a finer grain. The indifferent battering of unemployment has been replaced with the more sinister, needling gripes that come from a job you begged God for. The gripes that you must hide deep deep down due to the fact you invoked the heavenly realm and it’s breathing down your neck.

I got the job after praying for a miracle and getting it. Ping me for the details, but essentially I had a mental breakdown, bartered with God for a writing job, and the next day a stranger entered the gym I was working at and said he needed a writer for his marketing agency. I sent him this blog and he came back an hour later with an offer. 

Of course, I could just as well have been offered $20 bucks to clean his car and still I would’ve claimed divine intervention, but the specificity, the timing, well, now I go to mass.

Since getting the job, I’ve worked my way up the ladder. I started as a writer, and once they saw I could do that without catastrophe, I was made responsible for the entire fulfillment side of the business. It happened suddenly; what seemed like an innocent series of small handoffs ended with me donning a new title. This systematic doling out of tasks is a tactic I would quickly master myself and use on others. It’s a little trick I like to call “delegation.”

Delegation is basically where you make someone else do your work. But from my own experience of being delegated to, I’ve learned how to approach the craft artfully, tastefully, strategically. You don’t just say, “here’s what you’re doing today,” but instead you must cloak it in a thick layer of deceit. 

To start, it’s important to introduce every assignment as, “ours”. It’s not so much my task, but of the group. From here, it’s easy to start calling on supposed skills of your staff you can pretend complement the task at hand. The sign of a great delegator is the ability to get the victim to not only accept the assignment, but to believe they chose to do it themselves. 

“It not only complements your skills but challenges your weak points,” you say. Make them believe the task isn’t something to just “get done,” but an experience that can mold the assignee into a greater version of themselves. 

They say the best teachers are the ones who teach by example, and I’ve learned this to be unsettlingly true. My underlings, my task rabbits, my keyboard warriors, have learned from my example, building on what I’ve taught them and, over the course of the past few months, I’ve come to a damning realization that these little hacks are using my tricks against me.

“Hey I’m so confused,” they start. This feeds into a sick part of my ego; they’ve come to me for help. I’m flattered and they know it. 

“I’m just, lost,” they say. 

You have to pay attention or else you’ll miss it, but what starts as mere confusion will slowly build. In a moment they’re no longer just confused but completely overwhelmed. Suddenly a strained panic consumes them, you can hear it in their voice, see it in their eyes. I tell myself to not be fooled, this is all a show, but it’s no use. I’m caught and they’ve already started tightening the net. 

“I know you’re busy, but at this point, it would take longer to go back and forth with me, then if you just did it yourself.” This is the crux of the performance. They’re not redelegating for their sake, but for mine. This is the final blow of the whole charade. My only retort is to insist on their abilities, that they can do it. But at this point it’s too late. Any attempts to reignite their self confidence fall flat. 

“You can do it.” 

“No, I really can’t,” they say. 

Then (without being asked) they tell me what they have going on for the rest of their day; all the other things they have to do. You can even hear the fluff, the filler. 

“I have to go through my email.” 

“I have a thing at 4.” 

“I still have to review a few things.” 

Amazing, I think. Masterful. No detail, no real metrics at play, and yet I crumble. The task has been redelegated and they’ve ridden off into the sunset. While most would finally accept the task at hand, I have one last trick up my sleeve. Devin, I think, and his experience hunting—just the background we need to perform a comprehensive audit and end-to-end configuration health check of our clients’ email-sending infrastructure. 

-Tim

P.S. Thank you for everybody who shamed me for not writing. It’s proof I’m not as mature as I thought I was because unfortunately my main driving forces are still shame, guilt, and dread. Not so much a belief in myself, but a working disdain—I’m a high-functioning basketcase who made a website to be reminded monthly, when I’m charged for the domain name, that my inaction not only costs me my character & integrity, but my money too. So keep the uninterested disappointment coming; it’s the only thing that spurs me to action.