Self-Muzzling



I have a million hilarious, sad, rage-inducing stories to tell about my former career, but if ever there was a time to keep my powder dry, this is it.
So here I am, a veteran Blogger with a head full of topics and the sense not to write about them just yet.
I'll have to keep things generic for now, m'kay?

As it turns out, I am not the corporate type.
Suiting up every morning at 7 a.m. and having to arrange my hair and make-up was bad enough, but folding my car into rush hour traffic and carrying around a briefcase in a 16-story office tower made me feel like I was miscast in a bad movie.
I was Vice President of Public Affairs.
That means I was supposed to do a lot of writing and schmoozing with outsiders, which suited me well.
What did not suit me were the constant staff meetings that seemed to be called for the sole purpose of letting the tiny little egotistical prick of a CEO sit at the head of the conference table and pretend to be running a business.
That, and a zillion redundant reports, reports about the reports, and reading others' reports consumed way too many hours per day.
At one point, weekly staff meetings on Mondays spun off into department meetings they spaced throughout the rest of the day.
So, we'd waste an hour or two in the morning meeting bragging to each other about what we were allegedly accomplishing, then we'd meet with the tiny CEO and his cronies later that day and rehash everything for another hour.
Sometimes he'd want a written report summarizing the meeting, then once that was handed to him, he'd ask what it was for.
Toward the end, we had an emergency, mandatory meeting where the COO laid out the new rules: No talking to each other about the business, no threatening each other and no sex talk.
Seriously, wouldn't those three forbidden topics make you want to ask everyone in sight exactly why those rules had to be made?

Ooops, I am getting a little beyond generic.
Never mind.