If you are a company executive, sometimes, life is really good.  Obviously there is such a broad range of what constitutes being an executive, but when I’m using the term, I’m using it as a company person who is living and leeching off the company.  Someone who is more concerned about what they are getting out of any deal than anything else.  Someone who negotiates their employment to their sole advantage, because if the company can’t afford them, they’ll just move on to the next one.  You get the idea.

So, if you are one of these persons, you want to make sure you are being taken care of and you want to be sure you are extracting the most from any business trip.  I recently booked a couple-night stay at what I would consider an expensive resort.  But if you’re an executive, that’s not a concern.  It’s a business expense, so you want to make sure you are getting the best for the company’s money. 

Naturally, you are a member of the hotel’s rewards program, so you can get extra personal benefits from the company’s money.  Now here’s where it gets a little perverse.

This particular resort has add-ons that you can make to your stay, like included breakfast, or bike rentals.  But they also have some other interesting add-ons.  You can purchase, for a per-night cost, extra rewards points.  Now, why would a normal person willingly pay more (and we’re not talking a little more, try $144/night) for the same stay, just to get reward points, which are literally a fraction of a normal dollar for redemption.  $144 per night for three nights gets you 5000 extra points.

It’s crazy.  But… what if it’s not your money you’re spending?  Hmmmm. What if it’s just another business expense listed under Travel-Lodging?  How nice would life get then?  And what if you’re an executive – pretty much anyone who has seniority over the expense person in Accounting.  Who is he or she going to complain to?  Your boss?  Your boss would pat you on the back for such an awesome idea!

The last couple weeks have been difficult for me and have resulted in me performing a reassessment of society.

First, I have learned that intolerance, prejudice, and hypocrisy make up a holy trinity.  When someone publicly attacks you for something that they find offensive, and then pins a label on you that can’t be proven, you have little defense.  You can try to be rational with them, you can try to argue with them, you can try to dismiss them, but you cannot win.

Second, I learned that everything in life must be treated like open-heart surgery.  You get one chance to do anything and if you don’t do it the correct way and do it perfectly, you are an utter failure.  This is especially true when you are doing the work you have done all your life.

Now, I will say that these are not things I believe, only things that I perceive right now.  It’s going to be a while to recover from these latest blows to my faith in civilization.

…be any more of a victim? – Chandler Bing

I get a call yesterday from a number I don’t know.  I don’t answer it and the person leaves a voicemail.  It’s a relative of a neighbor – I guess I’ve met him a few times.  He needs help with his computer.

Still in voicemail, he relays the whole situation to me.  He thinks his email was hacked.  Yahoo Mail, maybe?  So he “called Yahoo” and these guys “went in a did a bunch of stuff.”  They charged him like $190 for this work.  Unsurprisingly, it didn’t fix his problem.  But, surprisingly, they called back and said they wanted to refund his money, but first he would have to wire $300 to a place overseas.  Luckily at this point, he cut his losses and gave up.  But that wasn’t the end.  He shut down his computer and when he started it back up, he was prompted to log in and they had changed the password on him. 

I call him back and offer to copy his files off the hard drive and reinstall the OS.  He asks how much that’s going to cost because he’s not working and he’s on disability and he’s currently at an AA meeting (and I guess he’s already paid almost $200 so far).  Oh boy.  I told him not to worry about it.  I know that I can fix this, but there’s a lot more wrong here and this certainly isn’t the end of the problems.

As I’m mulling over how much seems to be wrong: AA, disability, jobless, hacked, taken for a scam, it made me think about my persistent thought about how the PC revolution almost had something; how it almost brought enlightenment to humanity.  This case was a stark reminder that some people just can’t handle a PC.  These people need simpler devices like tablets.  And yet, among the downloaded files on the laptop, were utilities for rooting Android phones.  Just enough to be dangerous, indeed.

“Everybody wants to elevate from the norm. / Everybody wants to deviate from the norm.” – Rush, Vital Signs

Recently, a now-former colleague of mine, went off the deep end.  The thing I find saddening is that the arguments in support of his changes would be self-fulfilling from his viewpoint.  I guess that’s how all conspiracy theorists are, they believe everyone is wrong and they are the only sane person left. At the time I drafted this post, it wasn’t about alien or illuminati conspiracies, but what I would term fringe capitalism.  By the time he was dismissed – about a month later – it had escalated into “truther” conspiracy.

When I first met this person less than a year ago, I picked up quickly that he was a capitalist.  I learned this when he relayed a story about how he took a contract job and paid someone else to do it for him, pocketing the difference.  To me, this is sociopathic (sociopath: a person with a psychopathic personality whose behavior is antisocial, often criminal, and who lacks a sense of moral responsibility or social conscience).  Now the term “antisocial” conjures up an image of a certain quiet personality, but the one I really want to express is “anti-society”.  This behavior is selfish and manipulative and usually anything but quiet.  Instead of being a good member of society and letting the person who could do the work accept the job, this person jumped in between and caused either the employer to pay more than they needed or the worker to be paid less than they could have.  In either case, the action is parasitic.

There was no mistaking his goal was money.  And I intentionally say money and not wealth.  He practiced visualization techniques: keeping an image of what you desire in view at all times.  The picture on his wall was a stack of money.   As the desire for money grew, he cared less about the means he used to get it.  He started surrounding himself with people who thought like him, attending real estate seminars, then wealth seminars and self-improvement seminars.

As he dwelt on the possibilities of making so much money, his personality became more extreme.  He made derogatory statements that the average American was stupid, lazy, blind, “sheeple”.  He started questioning written law and learning as much as he could about getting around it, stating “the law only says what you can’t do.”  In other words, he was becoming morally bankrupt and still viewing himself as superior to everyone else.  He started speaking authoritatively about topics that normal people don’t, like refusing to pay income tax.  He made a comment about how he discovered some internal barriers keeping him from his goal.  I must assume he means his conscience. 

Everyone has a small fringe belief and if you get around around a bunch of people who have ideas like income tax being illegal, you’re going to hear more and more strange things. Eventually, for this person, this culminated in government conspiracy and radical gun law rantings.  When I met him, he never considered a gun, now he makes posts about bloody revolution.

So, I feel I’ve now seen first-hand the transformation of a normal person into an anti-societal, psychopathic  elite.  Fortunately, I don’t think this is part of an epidemic, like my observations about the middle class being pulled to the extremes.  I think this is a case where a person is finding himself, and that “himself” is just a very bad person (and unfortunately his fiancée was taken along for the ride).  Within his new circle of friends, his view is depressing, indeed.

I somewhat pride myself in judging him correctly when I first met him.  First, that I identified him as a capitalist.  Second, that I determined him to be a person that when put in a information-rich environment, like our workplace, he would soak it all in and explode with potential.  Well, that certainly happened, but in an environment apart from our workplace.