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Antiwork

Psychoanalyzing the “company man.”

I fix airplanes. I work for a company that does maintenance on commercial aircraft for different airlines. BIG company. Several hangars, several planes at a time, a different crew for every plane, 400-odd mechanics in total. A while back, a guy on my crew, another bottom-of-the-ladder mechanic like me, was passing through a different hangar and saw the crew of that plane kinda leaning of their toolboxes, shooting the breeze instead of working. He took a picture of them with his phone and emailed it to their manager. I think about it a lot. I've never been able to understand or sympathize with people like that, who like… take on the perspective of the company as their own. What is the motivation? Competition? Some deep seated evolutionary hatred of the lazy that affects a portion of the population? Lofty philosophical ideas about the “virtues” of constant hard work? With the…


I fix airplanes. I work for a company that does maintenance on commercial aircraft for different airlines. BIG company. Several hangars, several planes at a time, a different crew for every plane, 400-odd mechanics in total.
A while back, a guy on my crew, another bottom-of-the-ladder mechanic like me, was passing through a different hangar and saw the crew of that plane kinda leaning of their toolboxes, shooting the breeze instead of working. He took a picture of them with his phone and emailed it to their manager. I think about it a lot.

I've never been able to understand or sympathize with people like that, who like… take on the perspective of the company as their own. What is the motivation?
Competition? Some deep seated evolutionary hatred of the lazy that affects a portion of the population? Lofty philosophical ideas about the “virtues” of constant hard work? With the way we get paid, I sure doubt the guy has stock in the company.

What makes a person so offended by someone else not killing themselves to satisfy a multimillion dollar corporation that they would potentially cost that person their livelihood over it?

[It has a happy ending. The manager he emailed the picture to didn't do anything about it and basically told him that was a dick move. Now he takes constant shit for it at work. Hell walk in and someone will yell “Aw hell, _______ has his phone out, everybody look busy!”

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