Monday, April 14, 2008

Week of 04/14/2008

Are You In A Bitchocracy?
– by David Matthews 2

“Getting ahead in a difficult profession requires avid faith in yourself. That is why some people with mediocre talent, but with great inner drive, go much further than people with vastly superior talent.” – Sophia Loren

Here’s a really good word for you learn…

Bitchocracy: a group or organization run by one or more people who are self-centered, self-absorbed, and generally complain a lot about even the tiniest detail until they get their way.

A bitchocracy is a miserable form of organization. It is corrupt to the core, heavily narcissistic, and it literally sucks the life and the joy out of anything it infests. There is nothing idealistic about a bitchocracy, and the only goal of a bitchocracy is the satisfaction of the person or persons who complain the most.

In fact, complaining is the coin of trade in a bitchocracy. You are nobody in a bitchocracy until you bitch about something! That is your only means of identity in a bitchocracy. You’re either the bitch or you’re the one being bitched-at, and it is FAR better to always be the bitch!

Most bitchocrats are women, and there is a very simple reason behind it: male bitchocrats tend to get their asses kicked if they bitch too much. Men bitch too much and they’re asked to either “step outside” or told to “grow a pair”.

Women, on the other hand, are considered protected. Men cannot beat up a female bitchocrat no matter how many times they are so provoked. It’s considered wrong both socially and legally. Female bitchocrats know this and they actually count on this to protect them. The only thing that they have to worry about, then, is another female bitchocrat, and any good bitchocrat knows how to keep another one of them in line if they have to.

Besides, men in general don’t make good bitchocrats. They always want to find ways to fix the problem, which is something that bitchocrats don’t like to do. Bitchocrats are lazy. They expect OTHER people to do all their work for them.

Unfortunately, civilized society has served as the great equalizer when it comes to balancing the male and female bitchocrats. Where once satisfaction was achieved through dueling pistols or rapiers or at the very least three rounds in a rented boxing ring, our demand for “non-violent” resolutions have eliminated the only means to corral male bitchocrats. Now the only way to corral them is to provoke them to be violent, which is something that they are far more skilled at inflicting.

At the heart of a bitchocracy is POWER. When a bitchocrat asserts himself or herself in a situation, it is done so on the perceived notion of POWER. “I am more important than YOU!” THAT is the statement that a bitchocrat makes through his or her actions. It is the persistent insistence that YOU are there to serve THEM. And not just in general, as in customer service has to serve the needs of the customers; no, it means that YOU are there to serve THEM, the bitchocrat, specifically and above anyone else.

Bitchocrats thrive on personal satisfaction, especially when something is wrong. If their world is upended, then it is treated as a crime against HUMANITY itself! Worse if this is something that happens more than once.

Bitchocrats love to exaggerate and exasperate the problem. If something fails once in every a blue moon, the bitchocrat will falsely claim that it fails EACH AND EVERY TIME. Or they’ll claim that it fails every other day, or every other week, or they’ll say that it never really ever worked at all. And don’t bother trying to prove them wrong, because they’ll never admit to it, even when the facts are on your side and you can present those facts at a moment’s notice. FACTS don’t matter in a bitchocracy. SATISFACTION matters; and specifically the SATISFACTION of the bitchocrat.

Bitchocrats LOVE to assess blame on others. It is always someone else’s fault, even if they themselves had something to do with it. In fact, they will easily CAUSE problems simply to assess blame on those people.

Bitchocrats love to bring as many people as possible into a problem. Things aren’t working so they want to set up a meeting or a conference call with fourteen people, including your boss, their boss, five other departments, and anyone else who might possibly be involved so that you can go over the problem with them and set up multi-level procedures to supposedly “prevent” the problem from ever happening again with no less than five follow-up meetings about it. And it doesn’t matter what the problem is in the first place. It could by a typo on a memo and it will invoke the same kind of response.

The movie “Office Space” has the best example of this when the central character forgets to use the new cover sheet for his TPS report, which results in everyone in some kind of managerial position talking to him about it and everyone sending him “the memo”.

Bitchocrats love the word “escalate”… as in their insistence that you need to “escalate” the problem if it cannot be resolved immediately. Bitchocrats wait for NOBODY as far as they are concerned. If you can’t deal with their problem immediately, then they insist that you find someone that can. Preferably that “someone” is your supervisor so they can be told just how inept you are because YOU aren’t resolving THEIR problem in a timely manner. In fact, it can be said that the greatest triumph of a bitchocrat is to destroy another person’s career.

But perhaps the worst thing about bitchocrats is that they inspire others to be like them, even if they don’t want to.

Bitchocrats set a precedent that says that if you BITCH loud enough and persistently enough, that you will get whatever you want. It is a precedence that tosses out courtesy and politeness and encourages outright rude behavior. And no matter how many times people will deny doing it themselves, if they are in a bitchocracy, then they have no choice but to follow the lead of the bitchocrats, because that is the only way that things get done in that environment.

THIS, my friends, is what happened to customer service in the business world! When people complain about shoddy customer service or non-responsive customer service, then you need to understand that these are the FIRST victims of bitchocrats. They have to deal with lazy, inept, self-centered, ignorant, narcissistic bitches and bastards that REFUSE to read instructions, that REFUSE to follow directions, and expect to have everything handed to them and have everything work out right out of the box, and they have to deal with these people CONSTANTLY for even the smallest of details.

Here’s a good hypothetical example… You buy a DVD player and it comes with a book of instructions. Page 5 will walk you through the extensive process of setting up and programming your new toy. But most folks ignore that and will toss out those instructions and harass the customer service people WHEN – not if – they have a problem with setting it up. So the manufacturer of that DVD Player adds on a smaller set of instructions and calls it a “Quick Start Guide”. Usually this will be a one-page publication, filled with pictures that even a two-year old could understand. Same problem; it gets tossed along with the other instructions. People don’t want to READ, they want to WATCH. So they will continue to harass customer service. The manufacturer then sets up a website with the same information and sets up a recording that tells callers to view the website first. Doesn’t work, because it will get ignored and they will STILL call customer service. So now they have to set up a long, extensive, automated phone referral service that tries to capture the real source of the problem and to weed out the bitchocrats, but that also falls flat because bitchocrats figure out ways to subvert the system. And all because the bitchocrats REFUSE to follow directions or instructions and would rather be hand-held through a simple process.

After explaining all of that, NOW do you understand why customer service people are they way that they are? And do you also now understand why companies try to outsource their customer service calls to third-world nations?

This is precisely how extensive bitchocracy gets. It literally affects whole sections of a business environment, causing micromanagement and bureaucracy at a level that is nothing less than inhumane.

And you can’t turn off being a bitchocrat. That’s the worst part about it. You can’t just turn it on and off automatically when you go from work to home. You take it with you. You go home from a long day of being a bitchocrat and you take it out in the car during your commute when faced with bad drivers. You become more aggressive and more arrogant while driving. You take it out with the kids and with your spouse. You go to the grocery store or to a restaurant and you expect everything to be perfect to YOUR satisfaction. If it works at the workplace, then it can work on the deli worker who seems unable to measure a pound of sliced turkey… or the auto mechanic who may or may not have done ALL forty-two points of inspection… or the restaurant chef who doesn’t seem to know how to cook steak to YOUR specifications. You apply it to your child’s teachers when his grades start to slide, and then to your children when they forget to do the chores you set out for them. And then, eventually, to your spouse, who simply has to sit there and take it.

All the while, of course, you complain about the bitchocrats you work for and work with and you tell yourself that you don’t know how manage to get through the day with them around, and that YOU would NEVER be like them! No, you would be different, wouldn’t you? You just can’t understand why people seem to get snippier with you and why there seems to be way too many inept and incompetent people all around you.

Let’s get brutally honest here… bitchocrats are a CANCER on society! They prey on our good nature, they capitalize on our passive demands of a “civilized society”, and they encourage others to be just as demanding to an absolute fault as they are, and worse yet to do so as the only means of success.

Even more dangerous is that so-called “polite society” really has no means to address the damage caused by bitchocrats. As mentioned previously, duels and outright fights are prohibited. We’d like to think that karma, the fates, God, or some other mystical force in the universe, will somehow mete out justice and that these people will get precisely what is owed to them in ways that they do not expect. They serve as poor substitutes for true justice. Unfortunately, bitchocrats are rather skilled at deflecting any kind of subtle forms of cosmic justice and in fact turn it into more fuel for their fire. With no real means for satisfaction, people who feel victimized by bitchocrats believe that they are compelled to take drastic, more socially destructive personal measures.

I want you to ponder this for a moment: a good decade before school shootings were the media’s favorite “epidemic”, there were workplace shootings. The term “going postal” originally came from the rise of mass-shootings related to postal workers, but it wasn’t long before it spread to other places of employment. The stress of the workplace was seen as the source of many of these attacks; stress caused by unrealistic demands, unrealistic expectations placed on workers, and by a poisonous workplace environment. Many of these people who went “postal” weren’t powderkegs just waiting to go off, or at the very least they didn’t START out that way. How many of these socially caustic workplace environments were brought out by a bitchocracy? I don’t think that too many people would want that kind of study to be done. It would be much easier for the “fragile psyches” of the bitchocrats if they just simply said that the late Peter Guncrazy simply “snapped”.

It is one thing to be assertive in a competitive world, to know what you want and to try to get what you want, but living in a society means that you don’t necessarily GET what you want simply by bitching enough times to get it. The only reason why it seems to work is that “polite society” does not allow for that kind of rude, self-serving, egotistical behavior to be corrected. It presupposes that people will RESPECT each other, and bitchocrats respect NOTHING that is not done to their satisfaction. That has to change, one way or another, or else that “polite society” will implode in a mass of bitterness and anarchy.

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