It starts with an anxious scurry of doing.
Front flips marking the first plunge of the summer into a night-lit pool.
Then, days pass ...
Heavy legs and a subdued, fulfilling melancholy.
An inevitable sense of loss .
Strangers are friends.
Remembered, years later, for the part they played in a finite suspension of all that's wrong with life.
It's better that you never asked their name.
'Accelerated voluntary attrition' the best way to make the most of companies' hiring freezes, analysts say
By B.L. O'Harde
Democratic American Motivator Magazine
They can only admit it privately behind closed doors, but the message is clear: Corporate executives across the land would rather their employees just quit.
The economy is spiraling. Shareholders are angry. Horseshoe-haired heads are on the chopping block.
Enter: the demotivational speaker.
With hiring freezes reaching sub-zero temperatures, companies are learning that crushing, corporate-wide employee cynicism is a weapon to be wielded, not a phenomenon to be feared, says Dr. Dan Douner, head of the National Demotivational Alliance, a consulting firm that is considered a pioneer in the field of demotivational speaking.
Key to the alliance's strategy is an initiative known behind closed doors as "AVC."
"We're incredibly honored to help companies downsize through what we call Accelerated Voluntary Attrition," Douner said. "Most executives these days are Baby Boomers who see outright firing or laying off employees as hypocritical to the worldview they held 30 years ago."
The program rests on the notion that employees effectively stripped of motivation will be encouraged to surrender their jobs, allowing salaries to be absorbed, Douner explains.
The process, however, requires a deliberate, concerted effort to target the most-appropriate employees to encourage to quit, he says.
The core of the program rests on training seminars designed to identify those best to keep and those who "would be best served to realize that we appreciate their past service but that we no longer have a place for their favorable performance and, more importantly, their competitive salaries," Douner says.
Among the seminars:
-- "Ask not what you can do for your company. Ask what the company likely believes you should avoid doing."
-- "The change will be painful, but we'll succeed as a team -- even if we fail."
-- "How not to blame the person who screwed it all up and still come out on top."
The cumulative effect of the seminars -- designed with intense sessions constructed to push the normal psyche into a state of survival mode -- provides insight necessary to identifying and classifying current employees, said Fuller Bolschitt, a leading demotivational trainer.
On one hand, Bolschitt said, a number of employees quit because they see the training seminars as metaphors for how the workplace has become a toxic environment.
These people -- labeled "unfortunate relics of constructive institutional insubordination"-- are immediately targeted as the main focus of the demotivational purging effort.
Meanwhile, the training helps retain those employees who have been identified as having superior passive-aggressive skills -- skills that will serve to further foment resentment in the workplace and alleviate pressure on actual decision-makers, Bolschitt says.
"Those employees are the lynch pin of an organization," he says. "Corporations keep them demotivated on the promise that their skills will lead them to the ranks of middle management, where petty power struggles will invariably force more people to quit and reverse-motivate themselves to protect their jobs."
And along the way, Bolschitt said, they will periodically force one another to quit, leaving vacant a frozen middle management position in addition to the lower-level job they had vacated that also is now frozen.
"In the short term, we have to increase management positions, which helps us give the impression that the tenets of our demotivational campaign are virtue" he said. "After a while, however, they end up hating one another and not the company and fail to notice the subsequent cuts in their management field."
That, he said, helps the company maintain the image that only the most-talented are allowed to continue working, giving them the foundation to rationalize carrying more workload and in turn keeping the company's most-basic functions operating.
"In all of this," Douner says, "we have to remember that everybody wins -- except those who lose."
To schedule a seminar, Douner suggests visiting the alliance's website or calling 1-800-INVECT.
Shouldn't the show's title be ... "Are You At Least As Smart As A 5th Grader?"
Because nobody's won the million yet, and even if they had, who's to say the kids couldn't answer questions above their grade level?
Or maybe we can only know if a contestant is smarter than a 5th grader if one or more of the 5th graders fails to answer the right question.
And how many questions would the kids have to get wrong -- and how many would have to get the questions wrong -- for the contestant to quantifiably be smarter than a 5th grader?
It seems like the show's rigged so that the kids' feelings never get hurt.
Even if they get it wrong, they can take solace that you wouldn't do any better. And they wouldn't recognize otherwise if you were.
Unless you win the million.
Let's see how a "Jeopardy" champ would do.
Or maybe the champ would freeze given the chance to lose more than $100,000 if he's wrong about whether the sun is 10,000 or 1 million degrees.
Which I was.
The summer sunsets are descending in a cloudless haze.
Barely clothed like the dry, barren hills they slip behind, a disparate aura surrounds them.
A brown glow of desolation obscures the lines that draw where each little thing is supposed to end and begin.
It radiates a something that almost feels like a nothing.
Almost.
It would set the world on fire.
If only it could.
Until something lasting comes to wash it all clean ...
