This work week has been particularly vexing and not even remotely fun. It’s never exciting to be in a situation where a customer is annoyed and is asking for a refund. So it’s even more un-exciting to have to rope in executive leadership from both your side and the customer’s side to have a “tete a tete” to talk through this and get this resolved. What does this actually entail? It entails lots of internal meetings where people who like to think they are more important than the other talk over the other, people who think they know more than the other talks over others, and even more frustration ensues. It also requires people who actually are in the weeds and truly do know what is happening (alas, that person is me!) to do the grunt work and fill out documents that explain everything, bit by bit. And then it also requires people constantly messaging me to ask if I have thought about x, y, and z thing to add to said document. As you can see, this is super riveting!

I will say, though, that of all the things that I hate in the working world, few things are worse to me (other than outright toxic people who gossip and spread fake rumors) than brown nosers. I hate people who treat executives and their managers like they are God, like their time is so holy and that they need to be thanked over and over for… doing their job. Yesterday, I was on an internal prep call for this customer call today, and a brown noser on my team said to our exec who joined, “Thank you SO, so much for making time to meet with us today. I know your time is truly precious, and we don’t have much of it. So, we will jump right in!”

I thought all of our time was precious? Or is this person’s time just precious because he happens to be in a VP+ position, and he’s your manager’s manager, and therefore you feel the need to kiss ass to him to be “seen” by this person? This is not the first example of brown nosing I’ve seen from this individual, but I really had to deliberately stare hard into the screen to not roll my eyes or just vomit all over my keyboard when she said this.

As I always play back in my head, in the rat race, even if you win, you are still a rat in the end. It stinks to have to be in an environment where people feel like they need to suck up to get ahead, but apparently it works with a lot of people who like to have their egos stroked. And it’s yet another reminder to me how out of place I feel in the corporate world when these things come up because I’ve never really been able to do this and not feel like I had zero integrity. But I suppose that’s what tends to happen: people lose the meaning of “integrity” in the race to get ahead in Corporate America to the point where “integrity” means virtually nothing.