Tuesday, May 14, 2013
DREAM JOBS
It has been many, many years since I had a real job. In an office or a company.
But I still dream about it.
The most usual dream, which I had today, is that I return to my first job out of college. The engineering office of the late great Acme Markets in Philadelphia. I just take over my old job which was, actually, mostly doing nothing.
I was brought in because my boss wanted an MIT guy around. I didn't know that at the time but that is my conclusion.
There were "plans" for my future in the operations wing of the company. Bakeries, canning operations, dairy.
I think that I was a chess piece being played with the other managers.
It is not important.
In the dream, it is as though I have been in exile. Some of the same people are there. The job is still as indistinct as it ever was.
I go up the elevator, down a hall and there is my desk. Untouched. I have been away for awhile. There is some inconsequential paper work. I sit and attend to it.
I am happy to be there but also feel, as I did then, that no one else knows that I am there. Or cares.
I was attached to various senior guys from time to time. I would have an occasional project of my own. I would visit plants. I did inspections of all the plants once a year because no one else wanted to do them. I loved that part. Snooping.
But, it is wearing when you have nothing to do.
I never really got an evaluation.
Towards the end, they sent me to outside training. It was life changing. They sent me to one of the early T-Groups.
I got it. I was never the same again.
I left when I was 26 and went back to Massachusetts where I got a real job in operations. Fulfilling.
After that, I got into management training, made useful partnerships, learned the trade and started my own company.
Why do I keep returning to this first workplace? I think that it is the incompletion of it.
I never got anywhere. It was almost like Kafka. Or what I think Kafka wrote about. Inconsequentialness.
But that is only one part of it.
What I got without, almost, knowing it, was a keen observation of work, of company life, of how people work together, how hierarchy creates suffering. A world of insight. All recorded.
When it came time, all this observation would pour out into aspects of training for people who felt empty or directionless. To give them power.
Not only that, the T-Group experience stayed with me to such an extent that I partnered with a T-Group pioneer to take those ideas further into a more practical realm.
Without realizing it, my first years were seminal. The learning I had laid in my lap was incredible.
But, still. It is unfinished business for me. I go to work, I find my desk and there is still nothing to do.
I have had a charmed life and one of the charms was to get a job at the beginning which was so totally non-engaging that I had to find my own way and make something of it.
I am obviously still doing so.
