SCOTTSBLUFF, Neb.
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
- There's no wheeling or dealing at a car dealership in western Nebraska.
Three top executives are missing and so are about 80 cars. Police in Scottsbluff are investigating the removal of the cars from the Legacy Auto Sales dealership and the disappearance of the owner and two managers.
Dealership employee Miranda Cervantes told the Scottsbluff Star-Herald newspaper that she returned to work Tuesday after a day off and found the lot was virtually empty.
Cervantes said 25 to 30 Fords were loaded on trucks and removed Saturday, and about 50 Toyotas were apparently taken away Monday night.
She said the desks of the owner and the two managers had been cleaned out.
Police Capt. Kevin Spencer said the dealership has had financial difficulties
Showing posts with label Black humour. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Black humour. Show all posts
Friday, March 13, 2009
Sunday, June 29, 2008
Sunday Rant....
power politics, office politics... (yeah, this is a rehash of a post I had written back in '05)
Back in 2005, I was planning out my future career, and was reminded how seldom we get a chance in our lives to actually do that. Usually, people do what they gotta do from day to day, to make other people happy. There is usually a payoff in the long run, same as there is a payoff in taking the wife to the Ice Dance finals. (something which I detest so much that I have been known to pay people to stand in for me....)
Back when I was in the military, we would always be working at cross purposes. They said they wanted one thing, but always rewarded another. For instance, even back in basic training, they "said" they wanted super shiny shoes, super shiny floors and so forth, but they always rewarded conformity. If they really wanted the shiny floors, they would not have objected to the self shining floor waxes, and if they really wanted shiny shoes, they would not have objected to the lacquer. After a while, it became a bit of a game...."sure you SAY you want such and such, but you really want...what?" After I graduated, right on the grade point average....where I expected to be because of course I was too good too flunk out, but too independent to get top dog...my career followed much the same path.
I was on Bill's blog, and he posted a thing about office politics...some academic who had a theory that not all politics is bad...an excessive amount of verbiage to state the obvious that if it works FOR you, it is good, if it works AGAINST you, it is bad. So you should learn to make it work for you. Fine...in theory. I would like to meet an organization that didn't know that from the get go!Office politics is okay when it works for you, but not okay when you don't get what you want. It is there regardless, so it pays to learn how to play the game.It helps to write down your goals, put it on a paper under your blotter on your desk. The first question you ask whenever somebody comes up with an idea is "how will this aid the achievement of my goals". Second question..."If I support that fellow on his tangent, will it affect me and my goals in any way?"
Unfortunately, if they are brutally honest, most goals people would write down on that paper they slide under their blotter is "I want to get paid, get promoted, and look good to the boss, my wife, her brother and my employees." Fair enough...of course, nothing other than those goals will be achieved as long as management rewards that goal. As a boss myself, I recognized this phenomon, and roughshod over the office politics, making myself thoroughly unpopular with most people, getting the job done better than anybody had ever done it, but getting no loyalty from the organization when something goes wrong. And it did...eventually something blew up in my face, and I was disiplined not for messing up, but for not picking up a problem my idiot underling did. But a lot of airplanes got fixed right.
When did I become cynical? Well, maybe it was when a person I trained got promoted over me who had never done anything but organize office parties and file log books. He never fixed a problem, just worked in the front office handling the reports from the workers, filing them, collating them, being in front of the bosses all the time. We were aircraft technicians, and this joker got promoted without ever setting foot on an aircraft in his entire career. All cynicism aside, it was very instructive for me and my group to observe this, and re-define our goals based on solid observation....sucking up to the bosses works....so if you want to get promoted, buy the knee pads, and start organizing parties. We did that, the aircrafts languished, eventually being retired because they were "too difficult to keep repaired", and we partied and played office politics because you could get into less trouble by doing nothing than by possibly doing something wrong.
In retrospect, with the loss of the aircraft, we all lost our jobs as well, but hey, ya gotta do what works. At least we didn't end up in jail. This often happened to the last person who fixed the aircraft. I saw how to make the organization work (define your goals), how to make it fail (reward the wrong goals) and how to thrive in either mode. Not bad... Of course, it really doesn't matter now since this knowledge has made me pretty much unemployable!
Back in 2005, I was planning out my future career, and was reminded how seldom we get a chance in our lives to actually do that. Usually, people do what they gotta do from day to day, to make other people happy. There is usually a payoff in the long run, same as there is a payoff in taking the wife to the Ice Dance finals. (something which I detest so much that I have been known to pay people to stand in for me....)
Back when I was in the military, we would always be working at cross purposes. They said they wanted one thing, but always rewarded another. For instance, even back in basic training, they "said" they wanted super shiny shoes, super shiny floors and so forth, but they always rewarded conformity. If they really wanted the shiny floors, they would not have objected to the self shining floor waxes, and if they really wanted shiny shoes, they would not have objected to the lacquer. After a while, it became a bit of a game...."sure you SAY you want such and such, but you really want...what?" After I graduated, right on the grade point average....where I expected to be because of course I was too good too flunk out, but too independent to get top dog...my career followed much the same path.
I was on Bill's blog, and he posted a thing about office politics...some academic who had a theory that not all politics is bad...an excessive amount of verbiage to state the obvious that if it works FOR you, it is good, if it works AGAINST you, it is bad. So you should learn to make it work for you. Fine...in theory. I would like to meet an organization that didn't know that from the get go!Office politics is okay when it works for you, but not okay when you don't get what you want. It is there regardless, so it pays to learn how to play the game.It helps to write down your goals, put it on a paper under your blotter on your desk. The first question you ask whenever somebody comes up with an idea is "how will this aid the achievement of my goals". Second question..."If I support that fellow on his tangent, will it affect me and my goals in any way?"
Unfortunately, if they are brutally honest, most goals people would write down on that paper they slide under their blotter is "I want to get paid, get promoted, and look good to the boss, my wife, her brother and my employees." Fair enough...of course, nothing other than those goals will be achieved as long as management rewards that goal. As a boss myself, I recognized this phenomon, and roughshod over the office politics, making myself thoroughly unpopular with most people, getting the job done better than anybody had ever done it, but getting no loyalty from the organization when something goes wrong. And it did...eventually something blew up in my face, and I was disiplined not for messing up, but for not picking up a problem my idiot underling did. But a lot of airplanes got fixed right.
When did I become cynical? Well, maybe it was when a person I trained got promoted over me who had never done anything but organize office parties and file log books. He never fixed a problem, just worked in the front office handling the reports from the workers, filing them, collating them, being in front of the bosses all the time. We were aircraft technicians, and this joker got promoted without ever setting foot on an aircraft in his entire career. All cynicism aside, it was very instructive for me and my group to observe this, and re-define our goals based on solid observation....sucking up to the bosses works....so if you want to get promoted, buy the knee pads, and start organizing parties. We did that, the aircrafts languished, eventually being retired because they were "too difficult to keep repaired", and we partied and played office politics because you could get into less trouble by doing nothing than by possibly doing something wrong.
In retrospect, with the loss of the aircraft, we all lost our jobs as well, but hey, ya gotta do what works. At least we didn't end up in jail. This often happened to the last person who fixed the aircraft. I saw how to make the organization work (define your goals), how to make it fail (reward the wrong goals) and how to thrive in either mode. Not bad... Of course, it really doesn't matter now since this knowledge has made me pretty much unemployable!
Monday, March 03, 2008
Saturday, January 26, 2008
The Darwin Awards
For years, the Darwin Awards have been given to people whom we are most glad that they have successfully taken themselves out of the gene pool. The 2007 awards are being voted on now!
A sample of this year's entries...
An unnamed patient at the local clinic told my neighbor that he had serious internal injuries, including a ruptured eyeball, total hearing loss in one ear, and both legs amputated mid-thigh, as the result of a fishing accident. Also the man damaged both gonads, qualifying him for the Darwin Award.
He had been standing at the end of a dock with a bucket of dynamite, 2-inch chunks each fused and capped. He lit the fuse, cocked his arm for the throw, and dropped that chunk of dynamite into the bucket of dynamite.
Instantly recognizing the serious situation he was in, the man dove off the dock. But water is incompressible. It transferred the force of the explosion, in line with the blast, against his body.
One doctor was heard to remark that it was good that this patient had lost his balls, as it removed him from the gene pool.
http://www.darwinawards.com/personal/personal2007-02.html
And then there is the remarkable case of the Iraqi insurgents who stole the brass from the anti-tank shells. With hammer and chisel. While smoking.
Ya just gotta read 'em and weep!
A sample of this year's entries...
An unnamed patient at the local clinic told my neighbor that he had serious internal injuries, including a ruptured eyeball, total hearing loss in one ear, and both legs amputated mid-thigh, as the result of a fishing accident. Also the man damaged both gonads, qualifying him for the Darwin Award.
He had been standing at the end of a dock with a bucket of dynamite, 2-inch chunks each fused and capped. He lit the fuse, cocked his arm for the throw, and dropped that chunk of dynamite into the bucket of dynamite.
Instantly recognizing the serious situation he was in, the man dove off the dock. But water is incompressible. It transferred the force of the explosion, in line with the blast, against his body.
One doctor was heard to remark that it was good that this patient had lost his balls, as it removed him from the gene pool.
http://www.darwinawards.com/personal/personal2007-02.html
And then there is the remarkable case of the Iraqi insurgents who stole the brass from the anti-tank shells. With hammer and chisel. While smoking.
Ya just gotta read 'em and weep!
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