Cutie is going through it at work. yesterday they cried.
around august last year, there was an inflection point in the history of the company and after that it was reorganised into two teams. this inflection point will be hereafter referred to as the flood, or the mass extinction event, because after that everyone started polishing their resumes (except for two people who are actually doing just fine). that was when people stopped all being friends and coworkers moving towards a common goal and all united against management and became Sophie’s team and Happy’s team (there’s actually quite a lot more to the story, but we can simplify as that, i suppose).
there was also the team of the senior manager, in the beginning (my team), but when they quit, we became a subdivision of Happy’s team.
we all know that everything goes right when people are divided. especially if they are divided by mere circumstance but are told that there is some intrinsic personality characteristic that divided them, so that the division becomes the identity. especially when one of the groups gets huge raises (you know. for their intrinsic personality characteristics) and the other does not.
the mean age in the company is 25, so this is a lot of people’s first or one of the first forays into real life (i am 27 but i’ve been working for 10 years and an immigrant for 7 so i feel like im built different honestly).
at 25 and in your first ever job, i don’t think any of these people have a very solid identity as workers, so they are quite easy to divide, and the american managers are leaning quite hard into it. for example, one of the executives told my friend on Sophie’s team
“those other guys on Happy’s team, they are not like us… they like vacations, 9-5… but we are motivated by the work itself”, which is a pretty transparent suggestion of identity if you know how to identify these things. incidentally, my friend loves vacations and loves to work “only” 8 hours a day.
the same person told me “you know, jojo, those other guys on sophie’s team, they code very fast, but what the company need is people like you who have brains…”
so, you see, they like to divide.
so now the vibes are all off.
thank god we are still united enough to tell each other our salaries (even me, as one of the oldest and more educated AND lowest paid). so when someone got another offer and they covered it, that triggered an avalanche of people getting other offers and having them covered by the company. as it should. we have nothing to lose but our chains.
something was urgent so i stayed late today, which i almost never do because hello, i’m trying to write a fantasy epic over here!! i need my evenings!!! (i also have a husband and a cat and do you have any idea how hard it is to be a dink in today’s world? especially with a cat???)
Happy saw me staying late, which i never do, and thanked me for it. Sophie heard it, since they always work late (they have no husband and no cat so they have the time). and i thought that it might have been unfair to them, because i was thanked for something they always do. but also they got a huge raise.
Happy also recently complimented me for something, but sadly i have been traumatised by a horrible man who weaponised compliments in my first work experience so manager compliments mean nothing to me anymore. as they should.
words of fiction written: cf. “something was urgent and i stayed late today”
