Pronouns Are Our Top Priority!
Pronouns Are Our Top Priority!
Clownworld employees always love it when upper management focuses on fundamentals.
For my day job, I work for a large organization that I’ll call Peter Principle Enterprises. For the past few years, I have noticed a steady deterioration in pretty much every area of our day-to-day operations. Senior management seems oblivious. The disconnect between our “leaders” and the reality on the ground is really incredible.
Equipment is out of date and poorly maintained, so we lose a lot of production time just trying to work around things constantly breaking down and taking forever to get repaired or replaced.
Our work processes are ridiculously inefficient. Metrics that were originally designed as tools to help achieve end results, have now become ends in and of themselves. All too often, big-picture values are sacrificed to make sure every meaningless “I” is dotted and every insignificant “T” is crossed. We mindlessly follow policies and procedures that have long outlived their usefulness, but which management lacks the imagination or understanding to reevaluate. The bureaucratic hierarchy is bloated and Kafkaesque. Problems that could easily be addressed by front-line workers are left unresolved, because making such changes requires approval from distant administrators who have no interest in fixing what doesn’t work — but things that do work? Well, that’s a different story. Nothing delights our senior management more than taking something that is still somehow functioning properly and turning it upside-down and inside-out with childishly inane ideas, until it breaks.
Since the start of the scamdemic, employee turnover has accelerated, and we are now chronically understaffed — or I should say, every department except for HR is understaffed. While the rest of the workforce has shrunk, HR, also known as “Flunkie Central,” has grown fat with Marxcissist apparatchiks who churn out endless emails and announcements and bulletins, creating extra work for all non-HR employees, thus keeping frontline workers away from their regular job duties as much as possible with tiresome meetings and pointless training on issues entirely unrelated to the underlying business. But outside of H.R. and other such administrative staff, the entire organization is extremely shorthanded, and employees have seen their workloads increase faster than anyone can realistically keep up.
Morale is at an all-time low, and pretty much everyone is either looking for another job, trying to start side-hustles in the hopes of growing it into a new career, thinking about going back to school to reinvent themselves somehow, etc.
Almost all the customer feedback we get is negative. And the employees receiving this feedback pretty much don’t care. At all. Why should they? Everyone knows it’s just a matter of time before the whole thing goes bankrupt. Long-term, the numbers just don’t add up, and senior management is happy to keep it that way. Somehow, the worse things get, the better their bonuses seem to be.
We got a new chief executive a couple years ago, whom I’ll call Lord Bosslady. The new boss has done little to inspire confidence among rank-and-file workers, which is not really all that surprising, given her very unremarkable prior career accomplishments, her lack of intelligence or imagination, her poor leadership skills, etc. But Lord Bosslady does have one very important quality that made her the right person for the job: she is very intersectional. As in, she definitely checks just about every favored identity marker except possibly “trans” (although it’s unclear whether she’s a butch cis-female lesbian or post-op trans — but either way, she’s definitely representing the Rainbow Pride Coalition). And in today’s marketplace, with diversity being our strength and all, intersectionality is really what makes a leader great, isn’t it?
Anyway, I was overjoyed and amazed this past Friday when I saw the companywide email Lord Bosslady sent out to inform everyone of her plans to address Peter Principle Enterprises’ most urgent problems. We were really going to be turning things around! Our fearless leader, in concert with all the other top executives, would henceforth be focusing on accomplishing the company’s core mission. She would make sure that we were delivering quality results to our customers, that frontline employees had all the tools needed to achieve those results effectively and efficiently, that — oh, wait. Sorry. That’s what what the email would have said if Lord Bosslady was competent. However, competence is not ESG. In fact, the mere idea of competence is a white supremacist, patriarchal, and transphobic construct, and it’s probably anti-science and conspiracy theorist to boot.
No, our leaders are not competent; they are intersectional! Because unlike competence, intersectionality is ESG. Very ESG!
And our intersectional executives have decided that our organization must make pronouns the top priority! Yes, pronouns. Because the correct usage of pronouns, in accordance with the infallible diktats of the Holy Marxcissist Creed, is what will ensure the long-term success of both Peter Principle Enterprises and all its employees.
Even though our core objectives are not being met, even though employees are all burned out and eager to find another way to earn their living, even though we have an impossible backlog to the point that we’re constantly missing deadlines by weeks and even months, even though customers are increasingly pissed at what they see as incompetence and neglect on our end, even in spite of all that, we employees of Peter Principle Enterprises will shortly be required to take time out of our busy workdays to receive mandatory training on pronoun usage and building a more trans-inclusive and trans-affirming workplace. Because making sure that we validate the psychotic delusions of a fringe minority of Marxcissist maniacs is Lord Ladyboss’s top priority right now.
At times like this, I look heavenward and cry out from the depths of my soul, “Where’s a fucking asteroid that will put an end to this Clownworld?!!!”
It’s also at times like this that I think Mike Judge’s movies Office Space and Idiocracy weren’t comedies: they were horror movies. Terrifyingly and prophetically accurate horror movies. Horror movies that are becoming reality, before our very eyes.
You watch. Any day now, President Brandon is going to appear at a press conference with the Secretary of Agriculture to announce a bold new initiative to combat hunger by watering plants with Brawndo, “the thirst mutilator,” because it’s got the electrolytes plants crave! Our civilization is now a mashup of Mike Judge movies and Monty Python sketches.
In the meantime, I’ll be making sure to take my training in pronoun usage very seriously. I thought I mastered pronouns in elementary school English class, but apparently not. Maybe after teaching us pronouns, our HR apparatchiks can design some reeducation in arithmetic for us, to help us see that 2 + 2 really can equal 5, if The Party says so.
Welcome to Clownworld, where pronouns are our top priority!
You can also listen to a reading of this post, along with some additional lighthearted ranting and raving:
I suppose your pronouns can't be "fuck, off."
Good thing you have such a healthy sense of humor. Or you would be miserable. Or, I would.
I imagine a mass walk out and nobody comes back. That would be funny.
Up until the point of pronouns and EAG/DEI, this described my local government, public safety organization, which I left ten years ago, after 30 years of patiently trying to make positive changes.
A Lady Bossypants promoted to an upper level supervision and managements levels because of her intersectionalities (even though back then, the word wasn't used), the idiocractic destruction of tools and techniques need for those who actually did the job, and perks, time off and promotions for those who just talked about it until they committeed any hope of excellence into the memory hole (or any other handy orifice).
The story isn't all that new, sorry your job is being eaten from within. Usually the best option is to seek greener pasture before you are a part of the menu.