Put yourself in the shoes of a senior manager that led a project that I was recently on. You’re a high flier in the company, your claim to fame being that you were promoted twice in one year. The partners and directors leading the project are taking a back seat, allowing you to be the face of the project. You lead all-hands meetings, everyone in the 100 man project knows your name, and you are for all intents and purposes, “the man.” What would you do in such a position of power? Actually, forget what you would do, take a page out of this guy’s guide to Maximizing Your Potential.
Step one is to staff the project with as many bug-eyed, drooling, ass-kissing college grads as possible. These kids have spent the past 4 years in rat holes that smell like skunked beer and cigarettes. Having been given a job at a company where the walls are paneled with polished wood and 50″ plasmas, their souls are yours. Better yet, put that new hire email that conveniently contains pictures of all recent employees to use and staff your entire project on vanity alone. You figure that if these turds got an offer from the firm, they can’t be complete retards, so you might as well staff as many hot chicks as possible so you have a tight ass to console you whenever you feel like quitting the firm to do something really worthwhile. Step two in the process is to institute a weekly open bar, which you market as an imperative career advancing opportunity in which inexperienced hires can potentially network themselves to that next pay grade.
Now, let’s take a look at the beast you’ve created here. You’ve got dozens and dozens of hormone raging 20 somethings all living in one hotel. You’ve provided access to unlimited top-shelf booze to kids who are used to funneling piss water, a.k.a. Milwaukee’s Beast. Essentially you’ve built yourself a glorified fraternity/sorority house with the financial backing of a $30 million project! You think back to the days in high school when you were the editor of the school newspaper, or president of the chess club, or star clarinet player in your wind ensemble. The only way you could get a girl to smile at you was to let her cheat off your exam. Suddenly your wildest dreams have come true and you are the star quarterback! You are the homecoming king!! All the cheerleaders want to be your accessory!!! You have the proverbial 10″ cock!!!! Damn son, life is good.
I know, I know, by now you’re probably thinking, ‘Get off this guy’s 10″ piece already,’ but I’m serious about the things I’m saying. This guy even had a drink named after him at the place we had our weekly open bars at. On second thought, he practically owned the damn place. After all, it was a college bar and he’d drop about a grand there every week. He’d walk behind the bar to mix his own drinks, and he’d have the complete attention of this one waitress whom we appropriately named Double D, a.k.a. Dizzigity Damn. She was a piece of work. She was a blonde bombshell who must have stood about 5′10″ with the physique of a Victoria’s Secret model. She was the type of girl where you looked at her legs and you’d be like, ‘Hot damn, where do those things end?’ She was the kind of girl you’d look at and get depressed because you now knew that something so beautiful was out there for the taking, but you probably didn’t stand a snowball’s chance in hell. I’ve seen this senior manager, who I thought looked like the yellow goblin from Sin City, kiss Double D in his drunken stupor! I didn’t know whether to love him or hate him. This married man was even caught lip locking with a girl 4 levels his subordinate at a 7-Eleven of all places after a night of particularly hard drinking.
What is the moral of the story? Next time you feel that your firm has got you by the balls, making you work weekends like a caged animal, realize that there’s a light at the end of the tunnel. Realize that one day, maybe, when you make it to senior manager or above, you too can maximize your potential and become the playa pimp you never thought you’d be.