What I’m Blogging

Today, I’m supposed to be making my way to Detroit (again). Another small hop for Gigantic Concrete, but a giant leap out of personal life. This is a trend out of the company playbook. “The company comes first, loyalty is required, do your duty, oh and by the way, no additional compensation will be forth coming for all this extra loyalty. One should be happy one has a job at all etc. etc. etc.” Unfortunately I’m going to have to disappoint them.

…sent an email of career advancement limitation…

Yesterday was the sorting out day from the recent executive execution. The universe has changed, the protections offered by my previous manager have been torn away and the crap is now flowing freely down to my team. A team that is to get an increase in responsibilities, while sustaining a major hit to our numbers as the contractors are being lined up against the wall. Do more with less, make mud bricks without straw, and me without a promised land to hope for or a red sea to cross.

I arrived home last night after 8:30 PM. I’d been at the office since 8:00 AM. I discovered that my wife was very ill and hardly able to move. This morning she is no better. Already I’ve been getting notes on my “crackberry” of all the things I need to do today when I’m in Detroit. I turned off the evil device of instant communication, called the travel brokers, cancelled my trip, and sent an email of career advancement limitation indicating that I would not be able to acquiesce to their requests today, and quite possibly tomorrow as well. This could ultimately result in an ICE (Involuntary Career Event), but how involuntary would it really be?

Today is a stay home and take care of family day. A day of where loyalty and duty should mean something real. A day where I don’t particularly care if the rock flows or not.

It was on this day in 1933 that a man named Charles Darrow trademarked the board game Monopoly. Darrow based the game on an earlier game called “The Landlord’s Game,” which had been designed by a woman named Elizabeth Magie. She’d designed the game back in 1904 as an educational tool, to teach people about the evils of capitalism. Darrow’s real genius wasn’t in inventing the game, but in redesigning it. In the midst of the Great Depression, he turned the game into a celebration of capitalism, giving people a chance to imagine that they were rich.