Another note to those on the private beach

Another note to those on the private beach

This is another note for my friends on the private beach. If you don't have access to that beach, I'm sorry but this will make no sense.

If you go back to January 31, 2018, you will find a "live" video I recorded totally extemporaneously while sitting on my couch at home. In it, I reference the "what is it you say you do here" line from Office Space.

Using that as inspiration, I described what I was doing at the time and what "paid the bills", so to speak.

However, knowing what you know now, you should be able to go back to it and find some more meaning in the passages. Nobody speaks from the heart without injecting some data about what's actually happening in the background, and that video is no exception.

Pay attention to the parts about what this industry does to good people.

Watch that again and tell me with a straight face that everything was OK. I bet you can't.

For those people who weren't part of the problem, thanks for the questions you asked yesterday. You had to know that you'd never get a real answer, but you asked anyway because it was the right thing to do.

The rest of this is for the people who were creating the problem. I'm talking to those scarce few with the outsized amount of power.

You there. Since you were contributing to the badness, ask yourself why you would ever let that happen. What possible benefit to the business would come from putting me in that kind of place? You had to know that I'm a writer, and that once my brain came back online, I'd sharpen my pitchfork and tell everyone exactly what happened.

You have to know that other people will be affected by this, and will adjust their own behavior to keep their heads down and not take chances. You will get less out of them because they know what can happen if they color outside the lines.

They now know that "nothing is someone else's problem" carries no benefit, and only serves to set them back in their career goals.

They will find their own jobs less enjoyable because they liked wandering around, working on random things that interested them. Not doing that any longer will suppress that happiness, and they will start looking for places where they can bring out that part of themselves.

They also now know that their posts, whether to internal groups or to their own internal timeline, can and will be used against them both informally and explicitly during the biannual review cycle.

You have to know that other people on the outside world will hear about this through the infamous 3.5 degrees of separation, and you'll have even bigger problems ever bringing in good people from various underrepresented populations to your door.

I can say this with confidence because all of this happened before, and it's starting to happen again.

Is this really what you wanted?

I'm guessing you couldn't see this far down the road.

Gee, what will I write about next?