He was a practical guy, this friend of mine. He does his job and keeps the waters around him calm. What more could anybody want from him! As long as he does his job and others did theirs, everybody lives happily ever after. There is only one problem; the world doesn’t work that way. Innocent souls thinking of life as a walk in the park on a sunny day need nerves of steel. The disappointment would have a tsunami effect. Simply, the rules of the game have changed.
One dreary morning several weeks back I ran into this friend. Before even offering him proper greetings I sensed something was wrong. His face looked like someone has vacuum-cleaned a congested warehouse with it.
“What’s the matter?”
“Nothing…” he mumbles.
It couldn’t be ‘nothing,’ not with a face like that!’ He certainly is not George Clooney. But his face that morning wasn’t one you wanted for company.
“What is the matter?” I insisted, ready for one of those dreary stories you hear so often these days.
Maybe, his wife read him the riot act in the dead of the night; you know, the ‘pink lipstick on the white collar’ sort of stuff. Or maybe, he put away a lot of Gin the previous night and the demons were still playing rugby in his head.
“There was a meeting yesterday at our office…” he started.
Aha! One more meeting where everybody went for everybody’s throat! Being an efficient employee he has stayed clear of the verbal hair pulling and character bashing of meetings. Even the patience of the Sisyphus guy would have been drained by the magnitude of accusations and counter accusations; we’re in dog-eat-dog times.
But, our guy had nothing to worry about. He pretty much kept to himself. Why should a model employee with a reputation for impeccable performance have the slightest worry! He could even have served as the company’s poster boy had someone been creative enough. If anyone deserves d a ‘Cloud 9’ treatment he was the one. So, he feigns interest for an hour so until the sword of Damocles falls with a bang.
A low level clerk he barely recognized singles him out calling him an arrogant man who even doesn’t greet people properly and also looked down on other coworkers. Him arrogant! Him looking down on others! No, this wasn’t happening! Unfortunately, it was.
The accuser sprinkles his denunciations with tired political jargons playing the patriotic card and gesturing to his handlers, “See! I’m doing my homework with passion!” The fellow goes on to say, “He isn’t playing his role in our organization’s development efforts;” What! What the hell was that about? What that was about is the decision has probably been made to put our model employee on the chopping block. His accuser wasn’t some employee with chicken brain acting on his own; no, this was carefully planned strategy to force him play second fiddle to the powers that were. He has failed to go with flow, and it was time to teach him ‘conformity 101.’ The battle lines, so to say, were drawn.
Confirmation came when a few others echoed the same accusations and by the time they finished his name, his reputation, and his sense of well being were carpet bombed to splinters. Their vocabulary became so rude they tittered on the verge of personal insults; it was as if each one of them was trying to prove who threw the hardest punch. On the receiving end was a guy who didn’t deserve any of this. Yes, the order must have come from some leather-bound chair, “Clip his wings, and let’s see how high he flies.”
Though a bitter pill to swallow the fact is the Iago mentality drives many meetings. Being a best worker doesn’t mean one is out of the firing line.
Even after they blitz him so vigorously he offers no response. That is not going to go down well with his accusers or their puppet masters. The rallying call would be, “Who the hell does he think he is, Julius Caesar!”
He should have played the nice kid on the block. He should have almost fallen to his knees and say something like, “Yes, I accept what my colleagues said and I’ll do my best to correct my faults.” Even if he had said, “Had I not given the Judas guy the thirty dinars the world would have been a better place,” he would probably get a standing ovation. Who cares who Judas is or what the thirty dinars were all about! When it comes to meetings, things are that weird.
One wonders what purpose is served by character assassination and the annihilation of someone’s reputation just because he/she refused to be one more pawn on the chessboard!
My friend is already talking of resigning. If he had to go he wanted to go his own way, walking tall and proud. Marching orders on the table would horribly deface his self confidence and sense of independence. The vultures were swooping down and next time around their claws would lock on his throat. They might even accuse him of having a soft spot for this or that political entity. After all, by his silence he has refused to play along.
There is so much negativity in the air these days. Many meetings are not about what the colorful banners claim them to be. They have become a sort of free-for-all where personal grudges, political prejudices and simple stone-age envy steal the show. Why don’t people discuss ideas? After all, ideas and not hate put bread on our tables. Maybe we’ve to rethink our ways. Maybe it is high time our spines stopped shuddering every time the term ‘meeting’ is uttered. We don’t have to plead “God save me from meetings and I’ll walk from the Sahara to the Kalahari if you wanted me to.”
I just hope my friend and poor souls like him make it safely to shore before the sharks close in on them.
Ed.’s Note: Ephrem Endale is a freelance writer, editor. He can be reached at [email protected].
