Professional Low-Level Corporate Pretenders

We socialized throughout long meetings and then told everyone how late we always worked

We fictionalized our progress on computer, using expensive project management tools

We concentrated upon hidden agendas for pursuing our own personal advancement

We acted as if we worked like dogs while loafing about as much as we could get away with

We scheduled all our work tasks down to a nonsensical n^th degree

We created tasks to simply figure out just where it was we thought we stood

We laid serious plans which we were never permitted to admit were actually fairy tales

We carefully placed blame on factors that were beyond our control

We pretended to find great worth in our so-called shared corporate values

In the meantime, we all worked strictly towards private and personal goals

We maintained fantasy records of all our activities in scrupulous detail

We raced into every next new project taking no time to learn from past results

We were models of political correctness during all of our endless meetings

We were each unequally driven by lust and rage and greed

We were decreed to be professionals in an effort to control our behavior

We were laid off like illegal domestic labor by an invisible and far-off numbers guy

We kept ourselves looking busy doing scheduled tasks without any real goals

We watched the big boys grow ever richer, no matter the results

We were amused at management’s description of our work to the outsiders

We vowed that on our next job, things would somehow be quite different

We checked off little tasks and did not need to see the bigger picture

We were treated like the foolish children of always-absent parents

We idled comfortably online and complained bitterly at every opportunity

We came in late, took long lunches and went home early every chance we got

We spent time networking through vicious gossip and kept up with our hobbies online

We swore loudly and treated fellow employees without their due respect

We ragged upon and second-guessed even the smallest management decision

We gossiped and backstabbed, teased and hoarsely laughed way too loud

We invisibly dragged our feet when we did not get exactly what we wanted

We sabotaged their ornate project plans with a surprisingly subtle grace

We took pleasure in other’s failures at the expense of our teams progress

We evolved from angry young men to bitter old fools within short lives of empty work

We gorged on fat-laden free pastries and sucked up lots of carbonated caffeine

We controlled our precious information by doling it in tiny spoonfuls

We gave up and pouted and then took to passive-aggressive backbiting and innuendo

We were quite full of macho bravado except in the presence of real men

We held to their core hours and kept a professional looking, quite tiny, workspace

We arrived in vehicles larger than the veal pen cubicles in which we were fattened

We studied sports and movies with far greater diligence than any work-related skills

We knew better than to participate in their matching 401K savings plan scam

We planned our time off with far more care and detail than we used on our work

We proudly rested a simplified bible among our various technical references

We missed many hours of work due to our spoiled and ignorant children

We listened politely, being those who were never intended to grasp the bigger picture

We pretended feedback was important and that our doors were always open

We decided things in a vacuum, relying solely upon our own infallible gut instincts

We spun events both good and bad and trumpeted of new opportunities and great challenges

We never had problems but we always kept a few open issues on the table

We spoke of opportunities for synergy even as we outsourced our best veteran workers

We strove to be sure it always looked like we had a lot on our plates

We spoke emptily of the local community at the behest of distant management

We took the pulse of the entire company via the noses of smarmy little suck-ups

We used up so many sick days that they made them part of our vacation time

We lost our will to speak after years of our so-called feedback going silently unheeded

We made sure the lines were always open but...we were always so very busy

We were always late and in a hurry and so, once again we did the quick and dirty, just for now

We lived under the gun of concocted deadlines that we missed with great consistency

We sucked up in public and backbit among each other in the office shadows

We blindly managed every project using identical unproven and unquestioned techniques

We admired their salaries but despised their smiling, self-serving falseness

We all pretended that we were going to go on working together just like this, happily ever after