I'm Too Damn Smart to Be Making So Little Money

haha.

how long has he been working up to that position though? 25 years? 30? Back then those skills weren't as neccesary. You had secretaries and no interweb.

So yesterday I did more envelope-stuffing. I printed up 800 two-page letters, and my boss decided that for each letter she would put a personal message on the first page and sign the second page, which is totally insane but it's her perogative so whatever. She started signing them and I assembled about 200 or so letters as she finished them, and she took the rest of them home to sign today. Then I get an email this morning, saying there's a mistake on the second page, and that I'm going to reprint all 800 second pages (this time with her signature dropped in by the computer, I guess she's wising up), disassemble the 200 letters I stuffed yesterday and replace the second page with the new mistake-free second page. Yay!
-- n/a (nu...), July 29th, 2005 9:49 AM. (Nick A.) (later)

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No, I did not dream of Sting's solo work, thank god.
n/a that envelope stuffing scenario is a HORROR. It makes my former admin temp parts hurt. I shudder with empathy for you.

Do you ever want to grab your boss by her lapels and shake her and scream "DO YOU REALIZE THAT I'M ACTUALLY VERY SMART AND YOU ARE WASTING MY TIME AND YOURS HAVING ME STUFF FUCKING ENVELOPES YOU NINNY????" in her face? Because I kind of felt like that all the time.

xpost: Jeff has two dreams that signal great anxiety. One is tornados. The other is about the cats escaping the house.

-- pullapartgirl (rabbitrabbi...), July 29th, 2005 9:56 AM. (pullapartgirl) (later)

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Do you ever want to grab your boss by her lapels and shake her and scream "DO YOU REALIZE THAT I'M ACTUALLY VERY SMART AND YOU ARE WASTING MY TIME AND YOURS HAVING ME STUFF FUCKING ENVELOPES YOU NINNY????" in her face? Because I kind of felt like that all the time.

Oh god yes. I just think about the thousands and thousands of dollars my parents paid so that I could go to college so I could get a job STUFFING FUCKING ENVELOPES. Seriously, a college degree was a requirement for this job.

-- n/a (nu...), July 29th, 2005 10:10 AM. (Nick A.) (later)

Now it turns out that the mistake is on the first page, the page she is personalizing, which is actually a good thing because it means I just have to reprint them all today and then they'll sit on her desk until Monday. Yeah.
I am ready for the fucking weekend.

-- n/a (nu...), July 29th, 2005 10:18 AM. (Nick A.) (later)

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If the guy was a cobbler, I'd forgive the lack of internet savvy. BUT HE IS AN INTERNATIONAL BANKER.

After he typed in "google" into the MSN search field, I was tempted to just come back behind the desk and grab the keyboard. However, that would have appeared like I was insisting on controlling the situation and might have startled him.

Then again, maybe they would've hired me based solely on chutzpah. "Hey, everybody! Meet our new computer genius!"

How is it that these people get their jobs?

xp

I hope you gave her the wrong answers.

Back in the early days of this board, there was a thread that linked to this test. Unsurprisingly, the ILE demographic seemed to consist of people who bucked the IQ-salary correlation trend quite dramatically.

AAAARRRRGGGH!!! Flashbacks to my last job in "marketting", which was essentially doing huge mailouts (most of them abroad) and the boss constantly wanting to change everything the second I'd edited, printed, stuffed and stamped every A3 envelope.

> Unsurprisingly, the ILE demographic seemed to consist of people who bucked the IQ-salary correlation trend quite dramatically.

in which direction? were we undervalued or overpaid?

So why didn't you call the thread "He's too damn stupid to be making so much money"!

I really doubt that being good at using the internet is a very important skill for branch managers, you know. And do branch managers earn so much anyway? I don't think they do in the UK. I mean "five or six times" what you earn? Really?

in which direction? were we undervalued or overpaid?

Underpaid, koogs, underpaid.

Not that I actually think people have a right to well-paid jobs if they're intelligent - I just mean in the context of this correlation.

Most jobs just require a person who can be on time so that when people come to see them or call them on the phone, they are there, and then they can be responsible for things the person on the phone tells them to do. 95% of people are employed to offset responsibility and prevent their supervisors from having to do shit like stuff 800 envelopes. There are always going to be more intelligent/creative people around than the world economy can fully utilize. Kind of like how you can't ever really have 0% unemployment.

Either way, it's six of one and half a dozen of another.

(See? I can even talk like a branch manager!)

I don't know what bankers make in the United Kingdom, but I'd place this guy's salary at around $85K. That's not five or six times what I make, forgive my oh-so-rare hyperbole, but it's still more than I make now.

Nobody came across stupid, but I saw something a little strange last week when I bought insurance from a new company. Though it had the male agent's name on the sign out front and he had the nice big office inside, it was the female "assistant" who took care of everything. At one point, the agent came in and asked her how to use the fax machine. On Saturday, it was the agent who showed up at my house in yard clothes to take a picture of my fusebox. I'm no expert in how the insurance industry works, but there definitely seemed to be some sort of bottom-heavy Bush/Cheney organizational flow going on there.

Yes, but what did you score on the 'not installing slsk at work' test?

DO YOU SEE?

ALWAYS - BE - CLOSING!

Tombot totally OTM. I've seen this in just about every field I've been in. My favorite being the former English teacher (who is now an administrator) who's PowerPoint presentation was riddled with spelling and grammar errors.

Need guidance in resolving a disagreement with client.
Would appreciate attorney recommendations.
Prefer an attorney with exprience working with ******** ***()(***.
Contact information apprecited.

that should be "whose"

welcome to ilx, where our motto is "talking shit about others is fun but don't ever say anything to indicate you have healthy self-esteem otherwise you are a SNOB and must DIE"

congrats, you know the first three letters of the alphabet!

I think "fucked" is the operative word

-- andy -- (and...) (webmail), July 29th, 2005 12:10 PM. (later)

more like you OWE $30,000. Nevermind, its only AUD.

So why didn't you call the thread "He's too damn stupid to be making so much money"!

I really doubt that being good at using the internet is a very important skill for branch managers, you know. And do branch managers earn so much anyway? I don't think they do in the UK. I mean "five or six times" what you earn? Really?

-- Alba (albab...) (webmail), July 29th, 2005 12:47 PM. (Alba) (later)

you dont think someone working for a financial institution in 2005 requires basic computer skills? thats ridiculous. being PPs wife, I was there at the initial account opening and believe me, this guy had no idea. Ive never worked for a bank and I could have opened that account for us in 1/4 of the time. And, yeah, salaries seem to be all out of whack here.
this is more about being pissed that someone so completely unskilled can stroll into a job that pays really well, rather than being jealous. i mean, good for him, you know? i wish it were me, but most of us were brought up to believe that the more educated and experienced you are, the more you are rewarded, and occasionally we get reminded thats a load of poop and it makes you pretty frustrated. of course, if i were that bank manager id spend my days making up a dance to the 'suck it, sucka!' song i wrote for every client who is pissed they work harder than me and get paid less. so, what you gonna do?

"Computer skills" covers such a wide spectrum of stuff. The evidence from PP's story is that the branch manager wasn't an effective web searcher. That was the skill I was questioning the need of in his job. He might have been fine at using some proprietary banking software that was key to his job. I mean, I'm pretty computer savvy for an amateur, and esp. good with internet searching, but I'm hopeless at using, say, Excel.

(I'm speaking as someone who, yesterday, had to show someone how to save a Word file and attach it to an email, to someone who has to do that at least once a week but refuses to learn how)

-- Alba (albab...) (webmail), July 30th, 2005 5:44 AM. (Alba) (later)

ok, i dont know why you need this guy to have comp skills so badly that youre insisting he does without ever having met him but i can assure you what PP says up there about him not knowing how to use the backspace key (and , yes, it was a banking program he was using) is a fact.

Forest Pines - I had a similiar experience when i first started working at 1BM. They had been using Macs for years and had all just received spanky new PCs under great protest. the right mouse click alone almost caused a mass walk out.

but GiB is Gibibytes.

smartarse 8)

the google thing doesn't surprise me, really - my mother would be the same (last week i had to spell my email address to her, dots and all, just leaving gaps between the words wasn't enough). but you can be damn sure she can spell 'australia'.

ilx IQ vs pay:
> were we undervalued or overpaid?

actually, i think i got that wrong. i think we are generally cleverer than we need to be to do the jobs we do, if you see the difference. plus, laziness.

NB I'm not recommending that anyone actually do that, but pretty much like Tom says, those are the things that are wanted in the vast majority of everyday jobs. Also if ILXors in general are anything like me, they may suffer from ongoing underestimation of their own job prospects, and look over job listings and continually tell themselves that they couldn't possibly be hired for X job, in some field they have no experience in -- whereas really I get the sense there are loads of things you can get hired into doing if you can write good cover letters explaining why you actually do have the required skills, and interview effectively and so on. I am not one to talk here, as I've basically gone back and forth between not-good jobs and then more or less lucking into good ones, but that is nevertheless the sense I get.

The other funny paradox is that I get the feeling a lot of ILXors get annoyed by their not-so-great jobs in part because they are kind of engaged with them, and want things to be done right, and so on -- which is funny, because I was about to say that needing your mid-twenties job to be seriously fulfilling is maybe just a lot to ask in a world where 99.9% of jobs throughout the entirety of human history have been about just doing whatever you're told, horrible as it may be, because you need money to eat and you get paid money if you do it. So I don't know where the line is between being engaged in the good way, the productive and good-worker way, and being engaged in the way that's just going to leave you butting heads with your own job for just not needing to be that engaged.

... so you think.

Just kidding. But, if you were REALLY smart, you'd find a way to make more money. Just kidding again. It's funny because it's true! Just kidding.

Incidentally, I think this is why many business schools these days insist that students take acting classes.

If it's St George, ity probably went to zero over a period of 8 months, and now you actually owe them momney. They're probably sending letters to your last known address asking for ever increasing sums of money.

what happens is i try my darnedest to convince potential employers that i'm hardworking, committed to doing a good job, easy to train, very reliable, broad range of skillz from general office drudgery to more esoteric computer stuff to being a persuasive speaker... i keep thinking this is what employers want to hear, but i wonder if they see too much moxie in me and they think i'll upset the apple cart, or insist on too much money, or something. they don't need someone who'll do the job too well; just well enough (and for a minimum of money) will be fine.

One great failure excuse we had from our satellite supplier recently was "there are severe thunderstorms in Belgium".

All of that so Magnolia can get our sports show at four.

I doubt it - Australian banks are famously, flagrantly thieving bastards - most charge $5 a month just for the privilege of having an account with them. So the $65 left 10 years ago will no doubt now be a substantial unauthorised overdraft, amusingly enough!