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 | California
A decade passed. Then, after working for a year at an organic foods store in Winnipeg, Geoff decided to spend some time at a meditation retreat near San Diego. He figured it would be a relaxing, spiritual place.
Boy was he wrong. He hadn't realized that the main reason that most people become and remain monks, after the first blush of "giving their lives to God" has worn off, is for the power trip, to be able to regard anyone who gets there later than they have as being "less spiritually advanced" than they are, and view anyone who questions their leadership as being a bad person for "resisting the will of God as manifested through them." Geoff stayed there for nine months of psychological abuse, and would have left far earlier if he had not been "paying his dues" for a startup software company, which had promised him full-time employment at $30 U.S. an hour, telecommuting from Canada. The company was being managed by a member of that same organization (SRF), a senior project manager for a major American defense contractor. Who told Geoff that he had a "big head" and was "impatient," simply because he (Geoff) was getting things done efficiently, in spite of the foot-dragging of his other supervisors in that cult-like setting. (Most of the "patience of saints," after all, comes from them either simply not trying to get anything done on schedule, or from them being too dumb to know how inefficiently they're working. In contexts such as those, it would be easy to be "patient," and take that as a virtue.) Of course, his (project manager's) own tangible contribution to the startup of that company consisted—aside from half a dozen meetings—of a Mission Statement. That, and the expectation that he himself would be able to learn to program in Visual Basic at a professional level—having never programmed before in any language—literally ten times as fast as Geoff learned it. Oh, and to begin doing web programming by learning, not HTML or JavaScript, but full-blown Java. "After all, as long as everything's documented, how much could there really be to learn?" After completing that training/abuse period, Geoff returned to Winnipeg, and waited for the promised work to arrive. And waited. For two full months. With not a single hour of work provided.
His entry to that effect on the Dilbert Zone website for March 22, 2001—"Biggest Promises Broken By Your Boss"—placed in the top 5: TRUE: Full-time work, six-figure salary telecommuting. REALITY: No work in first 2 months, ended up $1000 away from living on the street. A fuller disclosure of the severe problems with that religious organization/cult has been preserved in this linked page. After writing a carefully-worded letter to those respect-craving promise-breakers, politely informing them that he no longer wished to have anything to do with them, Geoff waited another two months for his old organic job in Winnipeg to reopen under new ownership. When the new management failed to call him in for an interview, he had finally had enough. He checked the calendar—it showed November of 1999—packed his guitar and computer in the back seat of his '78 Dodge, borrowed another $2000 from his dad, took one last look back, and headed out to.... Copyright © September, 2008 by Geoff All rights reserved  |