The American Way

Ambrose Bierce defined a career as the first day of a new job.

If so, I hated everything about my career today.

Bad managers like to make rules, because they think managing means changing things, and they think the more managing you do, the more effective you are as a manager.

A good manager realises that if you have to change things all the time, it's probably because your last set of changes buggered everything up. And if you don't have to make changes, you don't.

An actually effective manager has nothing to do - except block the imbicilities of the bad managers - and does exactly that, letting the people who do the actual work, do the actual work.

Guess which kind runs the Interlink corporation? And yes, it is an American company.

Here's an example of how it works:

Problem: Students don't come to lectures.

Solution: Initiate a complicated registering system whereby a student who arrives less than ten minutes late is marked 'Present', while one who is between ten and thirty minutes late is marked 'Late', and one over thirty minutes late - or actually absent - is marked 'Absent'. Any student who is 'Late' more than three times gets an additional 'Absent' mark, and anyone with thirty 'Absent' marks is expelled.

This is supposed, somehow, to encourage lazy students to attend. Not so they can learn, but so they can continue to pay for the tuition they're not using.

Exactly how threating to stop charging should keep customers paying, I'm not sure.

Solution to the Solution: Students come to lectures on time, then after the register is called, develop an urgent and possibly plausible reason to be somewhere else.

Solution to the Solution of the Solution: Teachers call the register at the end of the session.

Problem: Management decree that all registers must be completed and submitted in thirty minutes after the lesson starts, neatly making the whole process even more pointless than it was.

Also, my work clothes are deemed not formal enough. This from the school which expels students if they wear jeans or don't wear a white shirt. It does this officially but not really, because if it did it would expel half the students, and lose the income from their fees.

And every student must add no less than three pages of written work to both of their colour-coded folders every week. And I have to explain grammatical concepts without using grammatical terms. And I have to teach only speaking and listening in the first lesson, and only reading and writing in the second. Even though my students are still shaky on the alphabet after six years of study

How much idiocy would you tolerate for a good wage? I have yet to decide.