I want to trade places with you. You have it so good. You’re spending the season out in the hot sun, harvesting grapes. Your hands will be sore, your back will ache, your skin will burn and you’ll probably lose 10 pounds just from sweating.
What’s more, if growing grapes is your primary business enterprise, the money you’ll receive for the grapes may well be the only money you’ll get all year. So you have to make it last until harvest next year.
To review: Pain, aches, burning, one payday per year. I’ll take that any day. Why? Because I’m bored.
I’m sitting in an air-conditioned corner office. It’s air-conditioned because it’s hot outside, and my employees will shriek if they’re not comfortable. The office is in the corner, because I’m the boss. I sit here and do performance reviews, account assessments, sales analyses and project assignments. I dress in business casual. I track receivables. Occasionally, I walk around the office and say things to employees like, “Are you finding your job challenging and rewarding?”
They always respond, “Yes, D.F., I am.” I have no idea if they mean it.
You want to do this? Be my guest. I’ll even give you my email password. What do I care? I told you—I’m bored. Try reading my email and you’ll find out why. The safe, sanitized life of a white collar CEO treats you each day to a wide variety of challenges, experiences and life lessons. Every one of them is interminably dull. I want to go outside. I want to go where you are.
I don’t even care what happens to the grapes. I guess they’re going to be turned into wine, which means I won’t be consuming them because I don’t drink. (See? This column just got even harder to explain.) But I don’t need to think about that. I just like the idea that you spend all day working hard, and you can attach a tangible value to what you’re doing.
Often, in the business world, you’re never sure. Especially in professional services. You perform some function for some company, they express how excellent your work was and they pay your bill. This is all to the good, but still, deep down, you wonder: “If I’d never done that for them—if no one had ever done that for them—would it really have mattered? Ten years from now, when they count up their profits and losses, will it really be any different?”
You don’t like to think about that question, because you sort of have to admit you’re not 100 percent sure of the answer.
Picking grapes, now that I understand. Some guy somewhere wants to buy some grapes, so you grow them, pick them and sell them to him. Or maybe you’re going to keep the grapes and make something out of them yourself. It doesn’t really matter. I don’t care whether they end up in a fruit bowl at Aunt Brenda’s pool party or splattered under some guy’s feet.
The point is, you know your hard work is going to produce something that someone can use in a tangible way.
Then there’s the fresh air. Offices don’t have fresh air. They have office air. They may be cooled and ventilated in the most green-friendly, energy-efficient manner. They may use chilled water via a geothermal system to achieve the perfect indoor working environment. It’s brilliantly engineered and eminently comfortable. And I hate it.
Outdoors, any temperature between 38 and 110 is ideal from my perspective (provided, of course, it’s not somewhere that smog masks are advisable). The outdoor temperature is ideal because it’s the real thing. It’s what God decided the temperature was going to be that day, and when you’re outside, you just accept it and get to work. You don’t have some guy with his sleeves rolled up and his tie loosened, standing at the office temperature control endlessly tinkering. “Gosh, D.F., I could have sworn this was set at 71. Does it feel like 71? It doesn’t feel like 71 to me. What do you think? I’d bet my bottom dollar it’s 72.5 at least. Can we call maintenance to fix this thing? Do you see particles floating around the office? What if that’s asbestos? Should we call OSHA?”
Shut. Up. Weenie.
The worst thing about an office where they give you controls for everything is that you obsess over whether you’re wielding control obsessively enough. Outside, you have no control. If it’s 100, you get hot. If it rains, you get wet. Snake? Send in the life insurance payment before you head out.
I’m ready to work the fields. Of course, I have no idea how any of this actually happens. For all I know, machines do all of it, although I don’t quite see how that’s possible. Someone has to separate the good grapes from the bad ones, right? Still, someone has to make sure they don’t smush them all before they get them to the smushing place. I could help with that.
“Hey! You! Be careful over there! It’s not smushing time yet!”
So, if you’re tired working harvest, I have a company for you to run. The work is easy. The decisions are hard, but just flip a coin and you’ll probably do as well as I do. Just walk around every once in a while and ask the employees if they’re satisfied with their career path…or something like that. Don’t bother trying to remember what they say. They don’t mean it anyway.
And enjoy the office air! We keep it at 71. I have no idea what the temperature outside will be, but I’ll take what I can get.
“Hey! I said no smushing!”
