Human Inertia, Part 2
Continuing the story of my efforts to hold down a job
When I worked for Human Inertia, we’d have weekly meetings in which the next week’s “action items” would be assigned. Occasionally Human Inertia would take an Action Item, presumably just for laughs, because everyone knew that he was incapable of doing any actual work.
If productivity were measured in PowerPoint presentations, Human Inertia would have single-handedly skewed the GDP. He had slides for every possible made-up statistic or unlikely hypothetical situation. There was virtually no correlation between anything on the slides and anything that actually existed. There were slides for profitability, customer satisfaction, gnomes, unicorns, etc. I used to imagine his presentations devolving into a impenetrable Mobius strip of self-reference: “Here’s a graph showing the ratio of time I spend doing PowerPoint Presentations to time time spent doing actual work; here’s one showing the percentage of graphs in this presentation containing pure fabricated nonsense; here’s a graph showing the alarming escalation of the the pointlessness of these graphs....”
At one point there was a plan under discussion that involved getting approval from Human Inertia before starting any projects. I was astounded that they would consider such a plan, because it would essentially prevent any work from ever being done. Every proposal would languish in limbo forever, collecting dust on Human Inertia’s desk. I was all ready to raise a big fuss about this new process being completely unworkable when I remembered a crucial fact: before it could be enacted, the approval process itself would have to be approved by Human Inertia. The problem resolved itself. This would not be the last time that I would be spared by the H.I.P. (Human Inertia Paradox), in which the prevention of work is prevented by the prevention of work (I later incorporated this as the Bureaucratic Inertia Paradox in my first novel, Mercury Falls).
The only thing that really worried me about Human Inertia was that he was technically in charge of the company’s finances. I tried not to think about it, but every once in a while he’d say something so dumb that I’d have to immediately run to the bank and cash my paycheck, just to make sure they had real money in their account.
He was the kind of guy who used to repeat idiotic urban legends like the one about how the average person swallows four spiders a year in their sleep. I can’t fathom what, if anything, is going on in the head of someone who repeats something like that. Did he imagine that there was a university somewhere that had greenlit a study in which people were observed for eight hours every night to find out how many spiders they swallowed? I tried to envision what the log book for that study would look like:
Day 1: No spiders
Day 2: No spiders
Day 3: No spiders
Day 4: No spiders
Day 5: No spiders
Day 6: No spiders
Day 7: No spiders
Day 8: No spiders
Day 9: No spiders
Day 10: No spiders
Day 11: No spiders
Day 12: No spiders
Day 13: No spiders
Day 14: No spiders
Day 15: No spiders
Day 16: No spiders
Day 17: SPIDER!!!!
Day 18: No spiders
Day 19: No spiders
Day 20: No spiders
...
What would the interpersonal dynamics of such a study be? Would the observer tell the subject if he swallowed a spider on a given night?
“So, how’d you sleep last night, Bob?”
“Umm, pretty good. Why?”
“Oh, no reason. No reason.” (Stifles laughter)
“Did I... I swallowed a spider last night, didn’t I?!”
“Nooooo.... I mean, I’m not really supposed to say either way, but no, you didn’t.”
“Really?”
“Really. No spiders. None. I haven’t even seen any spiders, to be honest.”
“You promise?”
“I promise.”
“Okay, good. But you would tell me if I did, right?”
“Well, I’m not supposed to, but yeah, I would.”
“Good, thanks. Whew. I feel better.”
“Hey, that’s what I’m here for. So... any weird dreams last night? Like maybe about something crawling into your mouth?”
Human Inertia had almost no attention span. I used to send him long, boring emails with some crucial information that I didn’t want him to know buried in the third paragraph. He’d find out about whatever it was too late to stop it, and I would just shrug and say, “I sent you an email….”
If you really wanted him to know something, you had to break it into three bullet points, each no longer than this sentence. He could, on a good day, digest up to five bullet points, or 1 2/3 emails. He would copy and paste these bullet points onto a slide, which he would then present at the next quarterly meeting, along with a graph indicating that he fully understood roughly 14% of the bullet points he had been sent that quarter. I once joked that I was going to draw a cartoon of him as Moses receiving the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai. He would be saying to God, “This is great, but can you boil it down to three bullet points?”
As frustrating as it was working for Human Inertia, he was far from being the biggest jerk at Global Inventures. That honor went to a manipulative snake of an account executive (salesperson) who happened to also be named Rob. This is the problem with being a Robert born in 1970: everywhere you go, there is already another Rob. If you’re lucky, he’s not a complete fuckwad.
This Rob, unfortunately, was a complete fuckwad. Whenever a new employee came on board, I would introduce myself as “Rob… but not the bad Rob.” I would add that I wasn’t necessarily saying that there was a bad Rob, but if there was, I wasn’t him. This got tiresome after a while, and eventually a co-worker suggested that they come up with a nickname for me. She made the mistake of asking me what I’d like my nickname to be, and I replied, without hesitation, that I’d always wanted to be called Diesel. To my surprise, the nickname stuck. From that day on, I was Diesel. This just goes to prove that you should always have a nickname for yourself picked out, just in case.
Spider!