Twenty Things I Miss About Corporate America
I am sitting in a conference keynote for a freelance writing assignment, and had to take a bio break. That got me thinking about the contrasts between this world and that of night clubs and salsa gigs. So, instead of listening to this panel discussion about how social networking and Enterprise 2.0 are affecting companies today, I wrote this list.
Twenty Things I Miss About Corporate America
- Sparklingly clean restrooms
- Free coffee and donuts
- Limitless supply of pens
- Butt photocopying
- Expense accounts
- Fancy restaurants and no haggling over the bill
- New computers
- Expensive shoes
- Nice hotels with comfy beds
- Frequent flyer miles
- Health care
- Button-down shirts
- Infrequent swearing; no shouting
- Infrequent drunkenness
- Blazers
- Cubicle banter
- People with large vocabularies
- T1 Internet connections
- Paychecks on the 15th and the 30th
- Being middle class
posted by Alexa Weber Morales @ 11/04/2009
5 comments
5 Comments:
Don't forget corporate Monday's infamous opening line, "How was your weekend?"
Yes, back when the weekend didn't blend into the week in a blurry haze of days spent sleeping till 1 pm.
Wait, what? Clean bathrooms? PENS??? Even on The Other Side (private sector) I never got those. It was either tiny broke companies with brilliant people (e.g. Point Line) or successful ones who got that way with fanatic attention to the bottom line (like Cole-Parmer). Either way, fancy restaurants...not so much.
Big vocabularies, though, I guess I've been lucky there.
Market opportunity from #4: hawk those photocopies to the wetsuit-watcher list. You'd makin' with the expensive shoes again like that.
Just sayin'.
Actually the restrooms here aren't bad; it's the six-legged wildlife in them that's the problem. Many of the buildings in this part of campus are connected by utility tunnels, and they had a little problem in Entomology a few years back. So now descendants of those escaped giant African cockroaches haunt all the basements around here.
Ha ha! I have yet to make money off the dang wetsuit watchers!
My perspective now allows me to see how lucky I was to be working in a multinational media company as an editor in chief of a software pub headquartered in the most beautiful city in the US. Even though the print media ship was sinking, those of us on the IT side of the publishing biz had it good.
And as an editor you just ingratiated yourself to the sales staff or the publisher, and they would take you out to dinner and expense it. Try doing that in the music biz -- I did it in NYC and it got ugly at the end of the night when we divided the over-priced bill!
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