Wednesday, January 07, 2004
Check or Charge?
I guess the first thing I need to make clear is that I am not in charge. Of anything. Okay, sometimes Kel lets me hold the remote when I’m tubing out, but I’m only allowed to use the mute button, and sometimes I’m denied even that degree of autonomy - and for good reason. I get distracted. I dither. I forget my responsibilities. I do try to participate in the decision-making process when I can, but then again, I tend to let myself be swayed by group preferences. I follow a lot more orders than I give - domestically, socially, professionally. I’m a good little worker bee. Tell me what to do - it gets done. Ask me what to do, and we could be here a while.
This is interesting to me because I apparently give rather the opposite impression. More often than not, strangers seeking direction or wanting to know how the group wishes to proceed will look to me for enlightenment. I can be wandering lost and aimless in a space I’ve never visited before, and someone will come up to ask me for directions. When I tell them I’m lost too, they often react as if I’m lying to them, willfully withholding critical information out of selfishness, or the desire to gain some vague advantage over them. “No, really, I’m lost too, just trying to get my bearings,” I assure them. They look on me with equal parts of disgust and anger. I obviously know, I’m just not telling them. Because I’m evil. Anyway, that’s what they seem to think.
Similarly, when my small office (Director, three staffers (including me), clerk and AA) venture out for the occasional luncheon together to celebrate a birthday or something, I find myself seated at a table with three women who all outrank me at work with a minimum of 18 years of seniority over me. The waiter invariably asks me if we are ready to order; the check arrives at my elbow when we’re done. They just assume the bald, stressed-out guy is in charge. Nothing could be further from the truth.
One more quick example: the bachelor party I went to while in law school was a tawdry and distasteful affair that taught me many lessons: money really is filthy; I don’t enjoy paying to watch women lick dollops of whipped cream off of each other; and people think I’m in charge. At the magical moment when the back bedroom door slammed open and two dancers - one of them, pretty - strutted out into the middle of a circle of 20 guys on folding chairs, none of us sober or differing from our peers in any obvious way, they both immediately trotted up to me and “occupied the field”, to evoke Clausewitz. They were all over my Maginot line before one bothered to ask if I was the groom. I was happy to deflect their attentions elsewhere.
It’s true that occasionally I can take a situation in hand and ramrod it to its appropriate conclusion. I can place everybody’s orders with a waiter in a restaurant if they’ve told me what they want; I can select beer or wine; I can reject a movie or tv show for a better option. These superficialities sometimes lend me a false appearance of dominion over my circumstances. But don’t be fooled. I may know full well that people will prefer the feijoada with sangria, but I won’t step in to assert my will unless everyone else defers and the evening teeters at the verge of stalling out. I just want the orders in, correctly, efficiently. I want to stop ordering and start partying. If that means I’m a little assertive, I can handle that. But I try to make sure that I’m ordering what people want. If they have no clue, I can offer guidance. But that’s a lot different than assuming the mantle of the Guy in Charge.
A little while ago I went to a local pub where I saw a table of six or seven guys in their 20s and 30s, dressed for a nice modern office, shiny as buttons and twice as sharp. They sat with workplace smiles stapled to their lips; their eyes and faces were respectively furtive and parboiled. At the head of their round table was a man in his 50s, I’d say. He was the boss. In the hour and twenty minutes or so that I spent there chatting with my friend, the boss never shut up. He expounded and joked and described and regaled, but it was always his story, always his party at his table with his minions (all men) gathered around to sop up his every word. Their silent smiles and subtle seat-shifting did nothing to mask - for my friend and me, at least - their boredom and discomfort at spending valuable pub time with the boss. They were manifestly subordinate; he, superordinate. I have to ask myself, is that what people see when they see me? Is that why I am presumed to be the man in charge so often? Because if it is, I need help, and fast. That guy may have been the biggest weiner in the sausage bag, but he was still indispuably a weiner.
