Monday again, bringing another week of middle managing for the CW. Probably the biggest reason I started this blog was to take my mind off the fact that Monday-Friday from the hours of 10-7 I am a robotic, cold, soul-less middle manager. At least I hope I am.
Allow me to explain. You see, I have all the responsibilities of a middle manager (aka annoying crap), along with a slight power and salary edge over the members of my team, all key indicators pointing to being a middle manager. I however have noticed two things in the past few months that have made me think I may be even lower on the totem poll than I thought. Somewhere lower than middle manager, yet higher than entry level employee. A little slice of
First, and this is definitely the more important of the two, I haven't received a corporate issue Blackberry. As we all know, the corporate Blackberry is the international symbol of the middle manager (some of you might point out that executives also carry Blackberry's and are now wondering how you can tell the difference between a happy, successful exec and a miserable, depressed middle manager. Have no fear, as a general rule of thumb if the Blackberry is a current or very recent model they are presumably an exec, if the Blackberry in question is a few model years old and built like a tank you can presume the person in possession is a middle manager). Middle managers live and breathe their company 24 hours a day with the small hope of some day making the executive level, this is most evident when observing their bionic hand feeding them a constant stream of corporate communications and client e-mails that they are able to delete immediately upon receipt, as opposed to just waiting until 10 am the next day as I currently do.
Secondly, my manager is definitely a middle manager (all the aforementioned responsibilities, power, salary, and he has the blackberry). By default I don't think I can have the same title as the person I directly report to, that would cause the kind of corporate chaos that led to the downfall of Initech. No, my title and status have to be a rung below his if only to keep the actual middle manager's self-esteem high enough that the company can deflect their responsibility to provide depression counseling. I think I'll title myself a "Lower Level Leader." It's alliterative (always a plus when introducing new corporate jargon), and pretty accurately describes my current status level.
