Claw Your Way To The Top

by Dave Barry

  There are two major kinds of work in the modern corporation or organization:

  1. Taking phone messages for people who are in meetings; and

  2. Going to meetings.

  Your ultimate career strategy will be to get to a job involving primarily number two, going to meetings, as soon as possible, because that’s where the real prestige is. But most corporations and organizations like to start everybody out with a couple of years of taking messages, so we’ll discuss this important basic business skill first.

  Taking A Phone Message

  When the phone rings, lift the receiver, punch whichever button is lit, and say: “Thank you for calling the Marketing Department (or whatever). Kindly hold the line.” Then quickly punch the hold button.

  Now you should check around briefly to make sure that everybody the caller could possibly want to talk to is in a meeting. This is also a good time to go to the bathroom. When you return, punch the hold button again, and say: “I am sorry, but whomever the person is to whom you wish to speak is in a meeting at this present time and is expected to remain there until at least the next major economic recession. Did you wish to leave a message?”

  Now this is very important: the instant the caller starts to respond, you must say: “Will you please hold again for a moment?” and punch the hold button with a very rapid and sure motion. Now you should head on down to the Supplies Cabinet and get some handy pre-printed phone message forms, in case the caller did wish to leave a message.

  When you get back to the desk, push the button again and say, “I am sorry. Now, did you wish to leave a message?” And the caller will say something like, “Listen, I’m calling from France and I don’t want Marketing, so could you ask the operator to transfer ...”

  Now at this point, if you are an experienced message-taker, your sixth sense tells you the caller is just about to complete a sentence, and we certainly don’t want that to happen! So you will have to very quickly—but politely!—ask the caller to please hold the line again for a moment, and at the same time strike the hold button the way a hungry cobra strikes a small furry mammal.

  Okay, we’re almost ready to take the actual message. Punch the button again, and say (in case the caller has forgotten): “Thank you for calling the Marketing Department! How may we help you?” Now at this point, there is every likelihood that the caller will have hung up. This might seem like a major obstacle, in terms of being able to take a message, but it is not, thanks to the handy pre-printed phone message forms that you got from the Supplies Cabinet. Here is what they look like:

  WHILE YOU WERE OUT IN A MEETING

  Mr./Mrs./Miss/Ms./Rev./Massa/ (name)

  Check one:

  Telephoned.

  Did not telephone.

  Thought about telephoning, but then changed his or her mind.

  Telephoned, but could not for the LIFE of him or her remember why.

  Telephoned, then hung right up, but I am certain it was him or her.

  Wants you to call and attempt to leave a message for him or her.

  Wants to fire you.

  Wants to reveal a sordid episode from his or her past involving a goat.

  Wants to end World Hunger in our lifetime.

  Wants your body.

  Wants for nothing.

  Wants to tell you the joke about the man who finds out he has only eight hours to live, so he goes home and makes love with his wife once, twice, three times, and finally they fall asleep, and at 3 A.M. he tries to wake her up, and she says, “Not AGAIN! Some of us have to get up in the morning!”

  Ate paste as a child.

  Has the clap.

  So all you have to do is check the appropriate space to indicate what message you feel the caller would have left if he or she had had the time. The only hard part is deciding what name you put where it says “name.” I recommend you put the name of a corporate vice-president, for two reasons:

  1. It will enhance your reputation as a person who has spoken directly to a vice-president; and

  2. Nobody will ever be able to prove that you’re wrong. Any attempt to contact the vice-president about his “message” will result in failure, because he will of course be in a meeting.

  Okay. It is all very well and good to be able to take phone messages, but you are never going to get to a position of corporate power, a position where you can cost thousands of people their jobs with a single bone-head decision, until you learn how to attend meetings.

  The Corporate Meeting

  It might be useful to compare the modern corporate meeting to a football huddle, in which the people attending the meeting are a “team,” attempting to come up with a “play” in which each team member will be assigned responsibility to “block” a specific “defender” so that a “fullback” will be able to carry the ball through a “hole” in the “line” and get into the “end zone” for a “touchdown,” which will cause everybody to exchange “high-five” handshakes and slap each other on the “butt.” So we can see that in fact it is not at all useful to compare a modern corporate meeting to a football huddle. It was a pretty stupid idea, and I apologize for it.

  Perhaps a better analogy would be to compare the modern corporate meeting to a funeral, in the sense that you have a gathering of people who are wearing uncomfortable clothing and would rather be somewhere else. The major differences are that:

  1. Usually only one or two people get to talk at a funeral; and

  2. Most funerals have a definite purpose (to say nice things about a dead person) and reach a definite conclusion (this person is put in the ground), whereas meetings generally drone on until the legs of the highest-ranking person present fall asleep.

  Also, nothing is ever really buried in a meeting. An idea may look dead, but it will always reappear at another meeting later on. If you have ever seen the movie Night of the Living Dead, you have a rough idea how modern corporations and organizations operate, with projects and proposals that everybody thought were killed constantly rising from their graves to stagger back into meetings and eat the brains of the living.

  How To Act In A Meeting

  This depends on what kind of meeting it is. There are two major kinds:

  1. MEETINGS THAT ARE HELD FOR BASICALLY THE SAME REASON THAT ARBOR DAY IS OBSERVED, namely, tradition. For example, a lot of managerial people like to meet on Monday, because it is Monday. You’ll get used to it. You’d better, because this kind of meeting accounts for 83 percent of all meetings held (based on a study in which I wrote down numbers until one of them looked about right). This kind of meeting operates the way “Show and Tell” operates in nursery school, with everybody getting to say something, the difference being that in nursery school the kids actually have something new to say. When it’s your turn, you should say you’re still working on whatever it is you’re supposed to be working on. This may seem pretty dumb, since obviously you’d be working on whatever you’re supposed to be working on, and even if you weren’t, you’d claim you were, but this is the traditional thing for everybody to say. It would be a lot faster if the person running the meeting would just say, “Everybody who is still working on whatever he or she is supposed to be working on, raise your hand!” You’d all be out of there in five minutes, even allowing time for jokes. But this is not how we do it in America. My guess is, it’s how they do it over in Japan.

  2. MEETINGS WHERE THERE IS SOME ALLEGED PURPOSE. These are trickier, because what you do depends on what the purpose is. Sometimes the purpose is harmless, like somebody wants to show everybody slides of pie charts and give everybody a copy of a big fat report. All you have to do in this kind of meeting is sit there and have elaborate sexual fantasies, then take the report back to your office and throw it away, unless of course you’re a vice-president, in which case you write the name of a subordinate in the upper right-hand corner, followed by a question mark, like this: “Norm?” Then you send it to Norm and forget all about it (although it will plague old Norm for the rest of his c
areer).

  But sometimes you go to meetings where the purpose is to get your “input” on something. This is very serious, because what it means is, they want to make sure that in case whatever it is turns out to be stupid or fatal, you’ll get some of the blame. I mean, if they thought it was any good, they wouldn’t want your “input,” would they? So you have to somehow escape from the meeting before they get around to asking you anything. One way is to set fire to your tie. Another is to have an accomplice interrupt the meeting and announce that you have a phone call from somebody very important, such as the president of the company, or the Pope. It should be either one or the other. It would sound fishy if the accomplice said, “You have a call from the president of the company. Or the Pope.”

  A Fun Thing To Do If Somebody Falls Asleep In A Meeting

  Have everybody leave the room, then collect a group of total strangers, from right off the street, and have them sit around the sleeping person and stare at him until he wakes up. Then have one of them say to him, in a very somber voice, “Bob, your plan is very, very risky, but you’ve given us no choice but to try it. I only hope, for your sake, that you know what the hell you’re getting yourself into.” Then they should file quietly from the room.

  How To Take Notes During A Meeting

  Use a yellow legal pad. At the top, write the date and underline it twice. Now wait until an important person such as your boss starts talking. When he does, look at him with a look of enraptured interest, as though he is revealing the secrets of life itself. Then write interlocking rectangles. Also, if you’re sitting next to somebody you can trust, you can use your notepad to discuss various other people at the meeting.

  Special Note Of Encouragement To Timid Housewives Who Have Been Thinking About Maybe Trying To Get Into The Business World But Are Worried That It Might Be Too Hard And They Might Not Be Qualified To Do Anything Except Make Tuna Casserole

  Boy, are YOU ever in for a surprise. I mean, here you have been staying home, day after day, cooking meals and doing the laundry and praising the primitive refrigerator art your children produce and scrubbing away at the advanced fungal growths around the base of the toilet, during which time your husband has been GONE. And when he gets home, all he has the energy to do is just COLLAPSE on the Barca-Lounger and talk about what a DIFFICULT DAY he has had because the ACCOUNTS RECEIVABLE (whatever that is) won’t “BALANCE” (whatever that means). So you have naturally come to believe that whatever goes on in the business world must be just DEATHLY difficult and complex, to cause a grown man such ANGUISH.

  Well, just you wait until, following the program outlined in this book, you get your first actual job in business. You are going to think you died and went straight to heaven. For one thing, everybody there is a GROWNUP. They allow NO CHILDREN in business. You never have to take ANYBODY, for any reason, to the potty. Speaking of which, if a business toilet gets dirty, you just CALL MAINTENANCE ON THE PHONE, and THEY COME AND CLEAN IT! And if they don’t, YOU CAN WRITE A SNOTTY MEMORANDUM ABOUT IT!

  And the best part of it is—as you will see, once we get into how businesses work—YOU NEED NO SPECIAL SKILLS OR QUALIFICATIONS TO BE PART OF A BUSINESS. All you have to do is figure out what simple concept the other people are really talking about when they use their complex business terms. For example, when your husband says the “Accounts Receivable” won’t “balance,” what he means is, he has these two NUMBERS that are supposed to be the SAME, but instead they’re DIFFERENT. Is that pathetic, or what? I mean, really, would you call that a PROBLEM? Especially if you compare it with, say, a situation where you’re at the shopping mall Burger King and you have finally managed to get your food and your children and your packages to a table, and just as you start to bite into your Whopper junior, your two-year-old knocks his chocolate milk onto a priest, your six-year-old commences projectile vomiting and your four-year-old wanders off, enraptured, in the company of a toothless man with needle marks and Nazi tattoos. Now THIS is what I would call a PROBLEM, and you have to deal with it ALL BY YOURSELF.

  Meanwhile, back at “work,” your husband is drinking nice hot coffee in a nice clean vomit-free office, fretting about his two little NUMBERS with the aid of a COMPUTER and probably three or four CO-WORKERS, all of whom will eventually go have a nice quiet lunch featuring MARGARITAS and NO CHILDREN.

  So trust me, housewives. You’ll do FINE in the business world. Your husband does, right? How hard can it be?

  Chapter Four. Stepping Over Your Co-Workers

  Okay. Now you can take phone messages. You can go to meetings. In short, you can do everything that can be reasonably expected of an employee. If you want, you can spend the rest of your professional life very comfortably doing these things. Ultimately, you can look forward to getting a couple of small promotions, followed by retirement, followed by death, followed by having your body eaten by insects and bacteria and then excreted in the form of basic chemicals that will serve as fertilizer for unattractive plants with names like “duckweed.” Is that what you want?

  I didn’t think so. Because you’re the kind of person who wants to be Number One. Not in the sense of being bacterial excrement, but in the sense of having POWER. We’re talking about CLOUT. We’re talking about having a staff so large that when you have a dental appointment, you send an aide to get his teeth drilled. We’re talking about CLAWING YOUR WAY TO THE TOP.

  Getting Promoted

  You can’t expect to get a promotion right away, of course. You should wait two, maybe even three days before you start pushing for it. This will give you time to look around to see who your serious competitors are, to size them up, to evaluate their strengths and weaknesses, and to crush them under the freight elevator.

  Ethical Question: Do You Have To Be Scum To Get Ahead?

  As the famous baseball codger Leo Durocher was fond of saying before he died: “Nice guys finish last.” There is some truth in this. Take the example of Attila the Hun, who was an unpleasant person but an extremely successful Hun, one of the top Huns in the business. His lesser-known brother, Bob the Hun, was a nice guy, but a failure. Bob would show up with this horde outside a medieval village and say, “Listen, would you folks mind if we raped the women and stole everything and killed everybody? You would? Oh my gosh! Sorry!” And off he’d slink, very embarrassed. His was by far the lowest-ranked horde in the league.

  But that is just one isolated incident. There are plenty of examples of nice people who DID get to the top. Just look around! There’s, ummmm, there’s ... ah, hmmmmm. Ha ha! I’m sure there are lots of examples, and for some reason I can’t think of a single ... wait! I’ve got one! Mother Theresa! That’s it! Here’s a very nice person who nevertheless rose to the top of her profession. So the moral is: even in this dog-cat-dog, highly competitive world, you can be a decent human being and still attain a career position where you kneel in the Third-World dirt trying to help the wretched and diseased. But if you want to succeed in a large modern corporation, scum is definitely the way to go.

  Okay, let’s talk nuts and bolts. In most corporations and organizations, a person gets promoted via a five-step procedure:

  1. He works diligently and competently at his job for several years.

  2. His superiors gradually start to notice him.

  3. Somebody above him in the organization dies, retires, leaves, or is promoted, thus creating an opening.

  4. His superiors, after carefully considering all the qualified candidates, promote him.

  5. An announcement of the promotion is put up on bulletin boards throughout the building, and his co-workers gather around and pound him on the back

  (many of them aim for his kidneys).

  This procedure is all well and good for most people, but you are not “most people.” You are a highly motivated individual who wants to be on the fast track, and you cannot afford to fritter away valuable time working diligently and competently at your job. So your best bet is to skip over steps 1 through 4 and go directly to t
he only really essential step: the bulletin board announcement. Type it on a quality typewriter, using the format shown here.

  I am very pleased to announce that (YOUR NAME) has been promoted to the position of (NAME OF POSITION YOU WOULD LIKE TO BE PROMOTED TO) and will henceforth receive a much larger salary. He will report to me, in the unlikely event he ever has anything to report.

  (NAME OF RANDOM VICE-PRESIDENT) post

  That’s it! All you have to do now is put it up on the bulletin boards and wait for the congratulations to pour in from your co-workers. Don’t let them circle around behind you.

  Okay, I know what some of you are thinking. You’re thinking: “Dave, doesn’t this particular method of career advancement carry with it a certain element of risk?”

  Yes, it does. For one thing, you have to be very careful about what position you promote yourself to. If you pick a position with a highly specific name such as Auditor, people might expect you to actually “audit” something. You want to pick a position involving words that could mean virtually anything, such as Coordinator and Administrator. If you promote yourself to Coordinating Administrator or Administrative Coordinator, nobody will ever be able to pin an actual job responsibility on you. You can devote full time to deciding on your next promotion.

  Another possible problem is: What if your company uses the kind of bulletin boards that are covered by little locked glass doors? What you have to do here is find the person who has the key—this is going to be a low-level employee, of course—and make friends with him and explain that if he will let you use the key, you will promote him to a much, much better job than screwing around with bulletin boards. Like, if your company has a fleet of corporate jets, you could offer to make him a Senior Pilot.