One Big Bad Boyfriend -- The Way We Worked

I was talking to someone -- okay, okay, I'll come clean -- I was talking to ... no forget it, you don't need to know. Anyway we were talking about how your old job sucked. Anybody's old job. Everybody's old job. Your old job was like one big bad boyfriend -- you knew there was everything wrong with the relationship, but you just weren't sure how to get out, until he dumped you.

And you hung around the house loveless, but free. You hung around the house jobless, but free. You learned to live with less. You were jobless but FREE for a while, for QUITE a while and then one day you realized, you'd never go back. Hell no we won't go.

Memories of the way we were. Memories of the way we worked. I mean THE WAY WE USED TO WORK. I mean when we were OFFICE CAGE MONKEYS. When you went selling your body -- yes, you were selling your body like a hooker -- to an office from 9:00 to 5:00 and they kept coming by to check to see if your monkey butt was still in your swivelly chair. That was the idea of work. Even in 1999. It was no different from 1899 really. That's the strangest part of it, that we didn't notice in a century it hadn't changed the littlest bit, but then it changed big time. But now you don't have to sell your monkey butt no more. The song has changed.

This is that stealthy side of this "jobless recovery" -- very off the grid -- but hard to explain, even harder to imagine how we go from here. That we won't have THOSE jobs anymore, they are gone like one big bad boyfriend. And instead we cobble together something else. Something we can live with. Something that's about living first, working second.

We say, "here's what I can do, here's what I need you to pay me." And we make it clear that stepping into their monkey cage is just not going to happen -- well, to be fair, maybe it will -- once a month, not much more.

And we say to someone else, "here's what I can do, here's what I need you to pay me." And we say it again. And we say it again. And we say it again. Until we have a portfolio of bosses and if one of them gets out of hand, we tell them "We're terribly sorry, but we're going to have to let you go." We don't cry when they leave, because we remember they didn't cry when they dumped us either. And we can replace them with a new boss.

I saw this called "Boss Diversification" by Scott Adams in an article a long time ago. He was absolutely dead-on.