Fury...Motivated?

Well, my company has gone and done it. I have been offered the option of not coming into work tomorrow if I go to A MOTIVATIONAL SEMINAR! Don’t they realize that I’m in IT? I’d rather eat sodden pork rinds than attend this anathema to my fury! How dare they provoke me with the thought of a day away from work, then they spoil my delusions of fun with cheesy silver-spooned decriers of pessimism who wouldn’t know hard work from a hard inmate. Basically, I’m reminded of the SNL skit with Chris Farley as a motivational speaker. “I live in a van by the river!” These guys, though, are top-notch cheese-heads, who have success under their belts. Half were born with success handed to them in a big brown paper bag. The rest had it handed to them genetically. How is a quarterback supposed to motivate me, and why should I care what he has to say? You may as well get Mike Tyson up on stage spouting off how hard work pays, and how the little man can become the big man……if he can make a shiv from a cafeteria tray.

So instead of even pondering the thought of a day away from work, I will sit here and be that much more miserable because I was forced to choose to sit here.

Now if they had offered me the day off to go to an IT convention, there would be no contest. A day of talking about new tech, Monty Python, and pilfering worthless trinkets from hapless people whose product I’m not interested in appeals to me on a level far above a day of work, which itself is several spans above a motivational seminar. There’s nothing like taking everything you can lay your hands on, and smiling at the tradeshow folk while you do it. If they try to make you only take one of their pieces of worthless junk, just pretend you don’t hear them and walk away. They’ll never be rude to you, and they’ll never leave their booth. I keep the trinkets I get at IT shows in my office, like trophies of my tradeshow conquests.

Now, assume for a moment that I had decided to brave the motivational seminar. I can see it now, me, a furious IT guy sitting in the midst of Amway salesmen and Mary Kay reps. The parking lot outside is a sea of mini vans and pink Cadillacs. Fists clenched tight, I listen to the applause as Pansy #1 comes onto the stage. Crowds of mindless lemmings nodding at everything he says, urging him to reveal all his success secrets to them, praying that he will take them personally under his wing. One hundred thousand mindless zombies smiling and nodding in unison might cause such an immensely powerful vacuum of intelligence that beside my great density of intelligence the force of diffusion alone would cause my head to explode, thus bringing the average intelligence in the room above that of a retarded chicken and leaving me no better. Needless to say, I fear this scenario.