“if you don’t like your job you don’t strike, you just go in every day and do it really half-assed”

-Homer Simpson

One time at a TV station I worked for, the manager of our marketing department decided that three $90k pieces of robotic studio camera equipment were actually fun toys with which he could (without training) just mess around. I came into the studio that day to find two of my fellow production department coworkers trying desperately to wrangle the situation. At one point, the manager nearly crashed two of these robots into one another and my co-worker threw himself onto the emergency stop switch halting the imminent collision and, potentially, tens of thousands of dollars of damage.

Knowing we had work to do with these units shortly and having been trained on how to reset everything after an emergency shutdown, I turned to the manager at the control panel. Y’all, as the words “wait let me help you reset it” were coming out of my mouth he shouted directly in my face “I said I fucking got it!” So… I threw up my hands and walked to the break room, which was across the hallway from the chief engineer’s office. About two minutes later the marketing manager walked into the chief engineer’s office saying “hey [chief engineer], we’re having a problem with the studio robotics, can you come take a look?”

My coworkers told me that, the moment the door closed behind me, the manager turned back to the robotic controller and said “I don’t think I’ve got this.” An hour later, the GM sent out an email announcing basically “union shop rules” for the incredibly expensive robotic equipment… essentially: if you’re not trained on them, don’t touch and we weren’t training anyone else. Come to find out that when my coworkers explained what happened to the chief engineer (who had fought corporate bean counters for nearly five years to get us these robotic units), he had apparently chewed the marketing manager out to the point of causing an HR situation and nearly succeeded in getting the idiot fired.

Since then, every time I realize that I am doing something that will make the company more money or even just save them money, I always think back to that moment of “I said I’ve fucking got it” and stop what I’m doing. I’ll do a ton of extra work to make my job and my coworkers’ jobs easier long term, but I am NEVER going to intentionally contribute to making any place at which I work run more profitably. It’s just not worth it.

The company I work for likes to hold a meeting every quarter to tell employees how the company is doing and they love to talk about the stock price as if we’re supposed to care. Executives get rewarded with shares, not us, we’d have to actually use our own money to buy shares and the number of shares we’d be able to buy with our own salaries would be meager by comparison. Still, they proudly boast about share buybacks, while if you look at the publicly-available data, the execs are selling tons of shares (not just for tax purposes). So they’re using company funds to pump up the stock price while offloading their personal shares. Real inspiring leadership, really drives me to put in more effort so they can get a bigger payout while I and everyone else gets diddly squat.

I also want to receive stuff for free.

Who doesn’t want to join a co-op and receive shares of the company for free. Almost no one wants to start a co-op, financing it, taking risks and responsibilities only to give shares away for free and gain nothing in exchange.