Any Millennials on DU?

[DFW]

62. Your job is a "necessary evil?"

That would have driven me bonkers decades ago.

I’d hate to have a job I thought was an “evil,” necessary or otherwise. When I was recruited for my job, back in 1975, I had a few ideas that built in some travel to see my (then-) girlfriend in Germany. They said, “hey, if you can make that work, go for it.” So, I made my job up as I went along, and they’re still cool with it, as am I. We were about twelve barely twenty-somethings when I started. We are now 600 people with offices worldwide, so I guess we must be part of the “corporate” world by now. We rotate who gets to go on occasional trips from the Dallas HQ to the offices in Hong Kong and Europe to give a max number of employees the chance to make trips they can’t easily afford on their own. If times get lean, which they occasionally do, all the top earners reduce their salaries by 50% for the mid-range people, or $1 a month for the top people, so we don’t have to lay anyone off. It has worked so far. We basically remember what it was like to be a company of 12 twenty-somethings who like to chill out as well as work.

So, where there must be lots of places out there where the work is evil, I’m telling you it’s not universal, and some people actually like what they do. I was 23 when I was recruited. In two years, I’ll have been working for the same CEO for fifty years. I meet family and friends for lunch sometimes while on the job—in Barcelona, Zürich, Washington, Brussels, etc. With California Peggy, last time, it was Paris. If that’s evil, I guess we just define the term differently.