An open letter to my boss

(Name changed for obvious reasons. Everything besides the name is 100% honest.)

Dear Allison,

I am writing you today in an effort to clear up some of the issues we have been during the hours we spend together at the office. While I appreciate your dedication to your job and your desire to hold your employees to a certain standard, I believe there is a disparity between your expectations and the compensation you provide. You pay us next to nothing for the work we do. On top of this, you hired me and my coworkers as independent contractors, ensuring us no overtime, benefits or job security would be made available at any point. I have no issue with this; we're still in a recession and I have bills to pay. But when you "strongly encourage" me to play around on the company's website outside of work, it displays your lack of a fundamental understanding of how this relationship is set up. When you pay people fuck all and offer them no incentive whatsoever to do well at the job you don't have employees, you have worker bees. And as much as I enjoy a good donut, bringing us donuts in the morning once a week does not qualify as boosting office morale. In fact, the sugar rush probably causes us to work slower, and I know how obsessed you are with our speed.

Speed seems to be one of the main focuses of this project. This makes perfect sense. Our workload is theoretically endless, so we want to get as much done as we can every day. However, when the only motivation you provide is by emailing us to say "you guys need to be going 3 times as fast, at least" you not only discourage us by presenting an impossible task, you out yourself as an idiot and lose our respect. Before you sent that email, did it not occur to you that humans are organic beings incapable of suddenly tripling their pace? Ignoring the physical aspect of this, did you ever consider that presenting your workers with such a laughably unreasonable goal would only prove to further weaken your already tenuous relationship with us? Perhaps if you had elaborated even the slightest bit, you might have gotten through to us. But you showed us no sign to suggest you had any comprehension of what working three times as fast might entail. Then you made it worse by casually reminding us that "Quality, in addition to speed, also matters." The only logical conclusion I can come to after looking at that email is that you never even considered whether or not what you were saying made a lick of sense. It has to be that because the alternative is that you are suffering from some kind of undiagnosed mental impairment.

The more I think about it, the more that actually makes sense to me. After all, a normal person of your stature would have figured out by now that "thanks," followed by nothing is not a proper way to end an email. I talk to you every day so I know you speak perfect English. You managed to climb the ladder all the way to a job with "Director" in the title, so you must at least have a rudimentary knowledge of grammar and punctuation. Still, every other email I get from you ends with "thanks," and never gets corrected. I've seen you put your name at the end of emails before. I know you have a basic understanding of how these things work. This only causes me to worry more.

At first, I joked to my friends that you seemed to have no comprehension of human communication. With each passing day I become more concerned that you actually don't know how to communicate. When you told us that we were shifting our focus from speed to quality we all took it to heart. Why then do you only come to me to ask me how my speed is going? You can't have it both ways. When you order a burger, do you ask for it well done and criticize the chef for not making it rare enough? Why do you make it a point to tell me I'm doing good work only to follow it up by saying my speed has decreased? Yes Allison, my speed has decreased because you told me to work slower. I'll tell you what, from now on I'll work 4.28 times faster and do it twice as well as before. I'm only pointing out these failures of yours because I fear I'm the first person to do so. I'm not going to tell you to seek help, but your ineptitude has an effect on my day so I'm asking you to keep these things in mind when you speak to me.


thanks,