First things first, and maybe the 2nd and 3rd

A job is a source of income. The problem is double speak. In America we don’t even know the language even if we speak English. A job has nothing to do with work. People might ask about your career of what you do for a living as if they are interested in the process, the aesthetics, but their primary objective is always the numbers.
Growing up we’d always hear, get a good job. If you were like me, you’d think that meant “Get interesting work” or “Do something that makes a difference.” Close, but wrong. No one cares what you do. Not no one “really cares”. No one cares period, what you do, at least not until after they have ascertained how much you make. That’s why no one really frowns on weapons dealers and drug dealers until they get caught. They have “good jobs”. Some jobs out there answer both questions at once. Maybe that’s what they mean, get a job that answers both questions at once, satisfactorily, is what you do interesting, and is how much you make a lot? Take a line from the CEOs, make a lot of money so you can run, before you have to explain what exactly it is that you do.
There’s a lot of catch 22s with that one. If you got the good salary you have to forget what you actually do for it, especially if the answer is “nothing”, more than half the time. That’s right folks downtime is major in a lot of American Jobs. It causes you to question if they really even need you, or your education for that matter. If you have any pride or a slight grasp of economics you might even ask yourself at work, “Why am I even here?”
I mean really if you are satisfied with your pay and benefits (haha) but your workplace mantra is “Look Busy” your job is subprime, dude. Best believe you are going to be laid off, eventually, (looks at today’s headline) SOON. You were replaceable (looks at today’s headline) before you even walked in the door.
No matter how much money you make your termination is going to be long overdue and right. There’ll be nothing left to do but go out there and find the next sucker to convince that you are “qualified”, that you “have experience”, that you “bring value” to the organization. Looking at Wall Street, trillion of dollars of value was never brought in, but is going to have to be paid for by taxpayers.
So it’s not really about entitlement and the whole “Don’t bullshit us like you did our parents” is only partially correct. The bull is, in fact, so deep. It’s beyond Wall Street. It’s beyond Standard of living. Downtime is going to be the word of 2008 because it’s the bubbles of this in workplaces that is the cause of the economic downturn, it’s a mitigating factor.
The all important factors of interconnecting. Corporations along with the economy are interconnected, huge duh, right? Not with their productive workforce and the value that they weave, they are interconnected in fueling misconceptions. An example of this is mass media.
For example, the media constantly drums “Must have a degree to have a good life” (I fell for it too). That statement is not true because the degree is not the “be all, end all”.
Media messages, not results, is what makes the any organization look respectable and makes the bottom line happen. Collegiate enrollment, for example, is spurred by mass media. Mass media brings on employees to make ready, which leads to more employment opportunities once customers flock in and gaps are identified and the next thing you know, 60% of all the employees “looking busy” and not actually working. Or 100% of the employees are looking busy 60% of the time. It has all been stacking up like a house of cards, which brings us this recession.
Next I am going to blog about the contradictions of a good job, then about the excitement of a recession, and then about Obama.