Tag: job

What is leadership?

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Overvalued.

Now I could be real nihilistic and period full-stop this post with just that and call it a day, but then it would sound like something traumatic had occurred, and I wanted to be vaguebooking about it or something, which is not accurate at all. 

This post stems from a conversation had over dinner a night ago where it was determined that I lacked ambition, because I don’t really want to strive for any leadership positions in my career. The thing is, I’ve been in positions of leadership already, and although I did take a lot of satisfaction in being the best leader I could and the relationships I cultivated with my reports, it really still amounted to a tremendous addition of stress that I feel is wholly unnecessary at this juncture of my life, and I would much rather just be given objectives and the space and means to do my job to the best of my ability and be for the most part, left the fuck alone.

The problem is that I feel that the working world we live in places a tremendously inflated sense of worth in leadership, and not nearly as much in the ability to get shit done, as in the people with the ability to actually move a company’s objectives forward.  I’ve made no secret that throughout my career, the most difficult people to work for are the people that I know can’t do my job in a moment of need, and I find it tremendously difficult to respect and accept any sort of judgment of my talent from those who have zero idea of what I do.

If I could rephrase my original statement, it’s not that all leadership is overvalued, but there’s just so much piss poor bad leadership exists out there that it just makes me feel like all of it is overvalued, overrated and feeds the narrative to how the working world is just so broken and misguided.

At my previous employer, I was promoted into a position of leadership, which I willingly went into, because I felt that I had reached a ceiling with my entry-level designer role, and I felt ready to move up and try to climb the ladder within the company.  But the thing is that even though I was in a position of leadership, it was always, always important to me that I still know how to do the jobs of my former peers now reports, because there was no way I could be any sort of leader unless I knew the job at the same granular level from those who have to do it.  But because I was promoted from within and I wasn’t brought in to abruptly lead people whom I didn’t know, I felt that I was very successful at being a leader on my team, because everyone knew me, knew my background, and knew that I was good enough to be a decision-maker.  It’s just that I had a massive cunt of a boss above me that actively made my life a living hell to where I had no choice but to cut and run, regardless of how much my team brought satisfaction to me professionally.

So that’s where I’m really going with this, is that it’s not that I lack ambition and don’t want to be a leader, it’s that my whole idea of leadership is that it’s something that grows organically and leadership rises and takes shape, and it’s definitely not something that can just be plugged into a team or a company, by someone who has fluffed up their resumes and qualifications in order to get the job.  That type of leadership is the leadership that I don’t want to strive for, even if it makes it look like I’m not ambitious.

I’d like to work a job where I’m paid well for the work that I do, and I want to get so good at it, that I organically rise to a position of leadership, to where I can lead in the best way that I think I can, which is typically by example, and typically in a servant leader capacity, and not some game-playing schmuck who only knows how to delegate and live in Excel and Outlook all fucking day and have no actual talent.

Unfortunately, like so much world, that’s just now how things operate these days, and short of me winning the lottery, it doesn’t seem likely that I’ll be a part of a working world that jives more with my ideals and ideas that work ethic and talent competency is what’s needed, instead of the ability to “play the game” and “it’s who you know” and other flaky bullshit that shapes the job market today.

Subject line: In-Office Schedule

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

When I saw that subject line in an office memo that came out, I knew exactly what it was going to be about.  And sure as shit, starting in August, my company is now going to four days in-office, one day remote.  Rather one day “flex,” which all but guarantees that 90% of the people who have it as a flex day won’t be coming into the office.  I know that my ass will never be coming into the office on a flex day, unless I directly told that I had to.

When I started with my company, we were still full-remote, since pretty much the whole world was still operating full-remote at the time.  It wasn’t until about April of 2022 that we were brought back to the office, and at that time, it was Monday and Wednesday in-office, Thursday being a flex day, and Tuesday and Friday being remote.  This was a good way to ease people into coming back to the office, and seeing as how my now new office had a gym that I could work out at, I relished in the opportunity to go hit the weights again, even if it meant having to come into the office again.

That being said, I came into the office on most Thursdays, despite it being flex, because it was more conducive to a workout schedule, and it turned out that I was getting more work done in the office, because at that time, my childcare situation was still an abyss of flakes prior to getting an au pair.  It also didn’t hurt that upper management acknowledged that I was present on Thursdays, which is always a plus to get brownie points from superiors.

Eventually, Tuesdays were deemed mandatory office days, with Thursdays remaining flex, and Friday being remote, which is where I’m at now.  It’s definitely a step in the wrong direction as far as personal comfort goes, because my exercise weeks are front-loaded since I’m going into the office M-W, meaning my cardio days are Thursdays and unfortunately on Saturdays too to ensure I’m running at least twice a week.  First world problems, I know, but the main thing is that the weeks now feel longer with three consecutive mandatory office days, and by the time Thursday rolls around, there’s a zero percent chance that I’m going to actually flex into the office on those days.

And as of August, it’ll be four days in the office, with Friday being the lone day where we can work from home.  I would wager money that by no later than January 2, 2024, my company will be five days in the office again, with the lone incentive to try and seem humanitarian will be a degree of leniency with working from home in the event of sickness or logical reasoning.

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Yeah I doubt this was an isolated incident

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Veteran maneuver: employee of the year-caliber teacher found to have alcoholic beverage on school premises during school hours

Considering mythical wife’s choice of profession, stories like this always catch my attention.  Frankly, even if she weren’t a teacher, it would probably still pique my interest because of how ironically funny and horrifically frightening it is at the same time.

The thing is, this teacher was caught very recently having booze in the classroom, but I would wager a substantial amount of money that this is far, far, faaarrr from an isolated incident.  Make no mistake, this teacher has probably been microdosing her alcoholism for years, and this was the only time in which she got caught.

It’s the classic suburban white Karen move, of carrying around an innocuous-looking reusable plastic cup with a straw that looks like it’s just water, green drink or some Karen-y shit like Crystal Ice, but it’s really one of those things plus three fingers of Dewars or Ketel One, or it’s straight up a screwdriver or a Sex on the Beach, and the lid helps obscure it.

Except that this broad was a teacher, and doing all of the above, on the clock while being in charge of at least 17+ children belonging to other people, and not smuggling her margarita out of TGI Friday’s in her kid’s sippy cup, which adds to the horrific revelation of this story.

Like I said, the scariest part about this is that there’s no question that she’s been doing this for a while.  Like a functioning addict, her justification to herself is that the booze is probably what makes her as effective of a teacher worthy to be an employee of the year, to where she feels justified to keep doing it.  But I guess she got a little too cocky, too complacent, or a little too tolerant, and she was a little heavier on the sauce than usual to the point where she slipped up and put herself in a situation where she was discovered.

Obviously, she’s gone, and no longer in charge of any other human beings, but the damage in trust has been done.  It’s bad enough there are schools in America that have metal detectors and bag searches for the students, I’m sure security protocols would be thrilled with having to add bottle sniffing onto their responsibilities, not just from the students, but the teachers as well.

It’s all about perspective

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I had a thought today, that I realized that since 2023 has started, my job has kind of sucked.  This isn’t to say that I need to update my LinkedIn profile and start fervently looking for an exit strategy, but that coincidentally since the start of the new year, everyone coming back to work after the holidays and lots of people who feel they need an arbitrary date of a calendar before they start tryharding, it’s been a bit of a lengthy rough patch.

I still work with good people, and I like a lot of the people I work with, but it’s just been frequently busy, the nature of the work I’m doing often feels somewhat pointless, and not particularly gratifying.  I feel that due to employee turnover on the project management side, there’s some communicative chasms that are forming that’s creating a lot of job tickets that are full of incomplete/inadequate information, and I’m spending more time on the clock playing detective and trying to track down information versus doing my actual job, and when I am doing my actual job, there’s a backlog of job tickets, because of insufficient project management.

Seldom do I have as much downtime as I used to have, and I’m often going from ticket to ticket, and in this frustrating game of stop-and-go with trying to work versus knowing what I’m supposed to work on, and all the conversations with my superiors and skip-level meetings haven’t really gotten any traction at improving any of the frustrations of the job.

Here’s the thing though: no matter how unsatisfying and occasionally frustrating my job has been over the last six weeks, I still realize that I had to think and analyze and come to the conclusion that things aren’t particularly great on the job front right now.  And compared to where I was at prior to 2022 and changing jobs, it’s still a relative cake walk, and just how abysmally terrible things were prior to switching.

Like, my old boss at my old place of work made my life a living hell every single day I was on the clock.  From her endless pursuits of hyper-analyzing everything I did, looking for any and every angle possible to criticize me about, to initiating a timeline in which I could have potentially ended up fired, because I didn’t CC her on an email once, the word “toxic” doesn’t even come close to being adequate at describing my work life at my old job.

I was driven to such misery that I’ve become partially numb to when work is actually sucking, because my current situation isn’t that great right now, but I’m able to compare it to where I was before, and it’s really not that bad in comparison.

Ultimately, I’m just glad to be employed.  I’ve had moments of concern for my job, because I’ve seen more people let go by this company in 13 months than I had seen in six years at my previous place, and when my workload becomes too trite and full of projects that don’t seem worthy for someone at my paygrade to be doing, not that I personally feel that I am above anything, perception is reality to the working world, and it’s not about what I think so much as it could be seen by those above me, that I’m getting paid too well for the scope of work that I’m being assigned.

But as long as I stay busy and am helping keeping shit assignments off of people who don’t want to do them, I suppose I can feel some modicum of job security.  And as long as I don’t have to deal with the c-word of the old boss I used to have, pretty much any job in the world is perfectly fine.

Observations of doing online food delivery

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

A while back, I came to the conclusion that in spite of the fact that I make more money than I’ve ever made in my career, I basically still have no money when it comes to any sort of leisure or just wanting to treat yo-self on rare instances.  To no surprise, it’s all going towards my children or expenses related to my children, and this is one of those instances where I think about how much simpler life can be for those without kids, not to say I have any regrets at all for having them they’re perfect and I love them until the end of existence.

But I don’t really do well when it comes to financial anxiety, and a lot of my general well-being is often tied to how comfortable I feel about paying bills while staying out of debt, and over the last few months, as much as I loathe and avoid it at all costs, I’ve had to carry partial balances over with my credit cards, simply because my outgoing money was surpassing incoming money, no matter how much I try to avoid it.

In the prior two years, I made a pretty penny on doing online surveys for nickels and dimes, enough to make people take notice in like the ten new wrestling blet replicas I was able to get with all of them, but that well has kind of dried up in the sense that the circumstances in which I was able to do them aren’t really applicable anymore, because my kids command a lot of attention, and I can’t absent mindedly bullshit my way through multiple surveys a day like I used to.

Needless to say, I had this revelation while I was in the car one day, that my household now has a third car that’s kind of dormant, and how it would be an ideal ride if I were to get into online food delivery.  It’s small, gets great mileage and is pretty fun and agile to drive, and it would be getting some use, instead of just sitting around deteriorating in dormancy.  Plus, the take home from doing online food delivery would be exponentially larger than doing online surveys, and it was something that I could do when the girls were down for the night.

And so I signed up for both DoorDash and UberEats, and over the last 6-7 weeks, I’ve embarked on moonlighting as a delivery driver.  Suffice to say, I’ve learned a lot in that span, but overall I can’t say that it’s been that negative of an experience as far as wanting to make some side cash for only as much effort as driving around picking up and dropping off bags of food takes.

It’s also been giving me a lot of perspective of being on the other side of the transaction, and naturally a remark like that isn’t said if it wasn’t to commentate on the sheer lack of respect and consideration customers have for their drivers.  Which is all a more eloquent way of saying that the vast majority of customers are a bunch of cheap motherfuckers who by all right shouldn’t deserve to eat if they’re unwilling to pay the people that bring their food to them.

For every generous tip I get from a customer who seems to recognize that I beat the estimated time, took into consideration the swing of their doors when placing their shit so they didn’t hit it, or other little things I do to make sure everything is right, I will have probably like 6-7 cheap motherfuckers who tip the bare minimum it takes for their order to not get outright rejected by all other drivers.  Like in 98%* of instances, I won’t even entertain a request where my take away is $2.75 or less because there’s a 100% chance that $0.00 is a tip and you’ll just be getting the base fare, and these are the shitheads that truly don’t deserve to eat if they’re not willing to pay for any labor.

*why not 100%?  Because sometimes UberEats will do these quests that give you bonus money for completion of trips, regardless of their amount, so if I’m teetering on a quest completion, I’ll take a shit fare if it means getting a bonus afterward

But the majority of tips that I accrue are somewhere in the $2-3 range, and these are orders that looking at the things they’re ordering, are usually well over $20-30, meaning on average, these are barely 10% tips.

The point is, it’s a good thing that I’m doing this as a side hustle and not relying on this to be my primary income, because I think I would go insane by how much passive abuse I’m getting from cheap-ass customers who use the veil of anonymity to justify being cheap assholes to have their shit delivered to their doors.

Another thing I’ve observed is that initially, I thought doing this, I’d be exposed to a lot of new restaurants where I could passively learn about through delivering their stuff.  I mean I’ve found a few places that I wasn’t really aware of, but when it really comes down to it, I’d have to say the majority of the drops that I’m doing are usually delivering someone their fast food, or Chinese food, or chain-establishment pizza, which really befuddles me, because I’m usually passing a number of Chinese or pizza joints on the way to these delivery spots, so I have no idea how these algorithms are when it comes to people and their choice of food.

I’ve learned that chain joints like McDonald’s, Popeyes and other massive chains don’t really give two shits about service time and having an order ready for pickup, because no amount of negative feedback to them is going to really improve their operations, so when I’m able to be picky about things, I try to tell myself to avoid them, because the bane of my existence is waiting for these businesses to prepare orders, and not a single night has gone by where there hasn’t been one pickup that hasn’t made me wait because I’m fast and they’re slow, and as far as I’m concerned, they’re the ones who cost me the chances at getting better tips on account of being extra early.

Favorite words to see: Leave at door
Least favorite words to see: Meet at door
You guys are assholes: Customer PIN required

Overall, the experience hasn’t been that bad.  I’m making some side cash in about 60-90 minutes on the nights I decide to go out, and I can usually do like 2-3 drops whenever I do go out.  It’s a decent way to clear my head and do something mindless, but at least make money in the process, and with these funds, I’ll hopefully be able to supplement my income for the ever-mounting expenditures that seem to be creeping into my life, or maybe even sack some of it away for some me-shit like a new raptop or inevitably, moar wrestling blets.

And to get in front of an inevitable question: yes, I have taken a French fry from a customer’s order before.  They didn’t tip, Chick fil-A didn’t seal the bag, I was hungry, and I didn’t know how to cancel orders yet, so in order to feel like I was getting any sort of retribution to an asshole, I totally took a French fry out of their order.  So the picture of Johnny Lawrence from Cobra Kai isn’t entirely just coincidental.

Blame yourselves and god

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Y’all did this to yourselves: The Home Depot changes pay policy to pay hourly associates down to the minute instead of rounding to nearest quarter hour

When I was an hourly associate for THD, I learned pretty quickly about the quarter hour rounding mechanism of the time clock.  I typically liked to work 8-4-ish in order to help negate Atlanta’s shitty traffic for this was still during the age of commuting a long, long time ago.  I learned pretty quickly that I had until 8:07 to punch in and still “be on time,” and that I could begin my walk out the building at 3:50, and make sure to punch out at 3:53, and I would be credited for having been there until 4.

I wasn’t really ever a massive nickel-and-dimer while I was hourly, but I’d be lying if I didn’t let the notion of “giving away” some work influence some of the things I did in the office in order to make sure that I would be on the more favorable side of the rounding than on the negative.  Seldom did I let myself get rounded down, and occasionally oopsie, I’ve got a quarter hour of OT now, my bad, but I can justify it lol.

But the point is, just about everyone knew about the way the clock worked, and you’d never see more people be obvious about it than at like 3:50 or 4:50 pm where people are milling around, walking a lap around Main Street, waiting out those three minutes from where seven minutes turns into eight minutes, and it would be the right time to punch out and get credited for 15 minutes.

And of course The Home Depot knew about it too, but in spite of my shitty last boss, I still hold the company in high regard, and they knew all their hourlies were doing what they were doing, but as long as the work got done, on time, fucking let them.

Now I’m sure the initiative for the dissent of this probably started at the store level, because individual store managers are more likely to be tryhards on power trips who want to flex their position onto their subordinates, and I could totally see a blowhard store manager get on the case of associates who are threatening to encroach on a bonus quarter, and demanding they punch out before they get credited for it.  And those who get chewed out will then be salty and full of piss, and bitch and moan about labor theft, and here we are, where the company as an entire whole fucking corporation has to change their policies.

The thing is, I would wager money that there are going to be waaaayyyy more associates unhappy with this development than those who are happy with it.  Store managers will still get on the case of associates to make sure they punch out at the top of the hour, and every associate who relied on those 7-minute windows to beat traffic, school bus routes, or just be able to get out of work at optimal times, will now be forced to wait.  People punching in will be dealing with more anxiety and stress when there’s a traffic jam or a bad red light that takes too long, and nobody wins when there’s excessive nickel-and-diming going on.

But as I stated above, y’all did this to yourselves.  Companies like THD don’t make changes for one store, it’s all or nothing, and because of the dissent of a few, vastly way more will suffer the consequences.

Year’s End: Was 2022 a bad year?

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

My fantastic mother-in-law signed me up for some virtual races that give medals for Christmas, but among them was a run called F*CK 2022.  The medal of the run is a middle finger which of course I’m cool with, but what got my brain churning was the idea that there being a race with this theme, there has to be some overwhelming sentiment that 2022 was anything but a good year.

Which brings us to the question in the subject of this post, was 2022 a bad year?

Honest question, because I’ve been living in a pretty small bubble since 2022, and my exposure to the news and happenings of the world outside of it are more limited than ever, and I’ve become one of those grownups who lets theFacebook feed me curated news and really only hear of things from that, Apple News and the shit that my friends talk about in a group chat. 

I don’t watch any television beyond the specific things I want to watch, which most certainly does not include any form of television news and I don’t venture out on the internet to all the news websites and Atlanta-centric sites I used to, so I’m going blind to even local things.

In the past, I felt it was important to be well informed and knowledgeable of news and current events, because if anything at all, that could make me better at conversation, but I really just like being in the know of things.  But after the rise of COVID and having kids and having kids in the age of COVID, it’s just not as important, and far behind the priority of making sure my kids are safe and fed every day.

Needless to say, my bubble has shrunken to where I have to ask other people if they think a year was bad or not, because I don’t really think my opinion holds any weight.  Because within my bubble exists pretty much just my kids, mythical wife, sports, wrestling and working for the sake of making money in order to live, and just about everything else exists outside of it.

Throughout the last few years, I’ve created living documents for every year, where I’ve literally narrated a tiny blurb to summarize every single day, of notable things and happenings, because I’m of the mindset that something important happens every single day, be it as small as one of my kids successfully eating something new, or as momentous as Russia invading the Ukraine and daring the rest of the world into another World War.

Some years have been really sad to look back through, because there’s a mass shooting every single month, or the deaths of notable people in the world, but as far as my interests and explorations of the world via the internet go, combined with the happenings of my daily life, I don’t think I’m wrong in thinking that something important does happen, every single day.

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