Business, Career and a Dress code.

Work is something you do, a career is when your work becomes your identity.

For some people their career has respect built right in: Doctors, Nurses, Police Officers, Military personnel, 'McDonalds' line managers. They all have more respect than what people give a professional bureaucrat.

It could be that all of them get to wear uniforms. By the way, the thin difference between a uniform and a costume is when everyone wears the same costume it's a uniform.

I grudgingly accept that after a decade I am officially in a CAREER. Not because I chose it, but because I failed to chose to avoid it. And now I am a professional order follower and repeater of the popular line 'please reboot'.

I once asked a project manager if they ever dreamed as a child that they would one day grow up to nag other grown ups about their inability to finish their work. Silly question, any child who dreams of that would spend their adult life in a different institution.

I mock bureaucracy a fair amount here and it really does deserve it. No one aspires to build an empire that has no limits to the number of rules it can impose on itself.

A business is an artificial entity without a soul or a mind. This differentiates it from political lobbyists because a business wasn't born normal. A business exists simply as a vehicle to make money.

When the business's business is to NOT make money then you have what amounts to a lobotomized Frankenstein's monster suffering from manic depression. And much like that monster, no matter what food or organs you put into it the result would be the same: A mashup of Pinocchio and Night of the Living Dead. By the way, I don't count charities or not for profits here because they do want to make money for their clients.

I have had the pleasure to work with dozens of motivated, professional people who are good at what they do. And yet somehow we still end up with the maddening situation of waiting for someone to get back to someone for some information that a team of 7 year old sleuths could track down.

In an effort to bring some dignity back to my job I may try wearing my Hawaiian shirts as a uniform. That way people can take me seriously when I say "Don't worry, corporate told me to do this, and as long as I don't think about it, it should work out fine. And if not, just please reboot."