I’ll be there with you / Don’t worry / I’m sorry / Goodbye
When I joined my current company I very much came on in a junior role. I got a junior salary and did menial tasks to keep the other two members of our fledgling team on focus with the other more important jobs. Through perseverance and patience I gradually moved into a developer role working on content management systems, database design and the like. Throughout all of this I moved to a standards based markup process and even now, I derive much pleasure from elegantly marking up a design; the current designer is astoundingly skilled and I believe challenges me with every new design. Needless to say I was peerless in the most literal sense of the word and was able to set my own boundaries, unfortunately this utopia of job satisfaction was never going to last.
The company as a whole was stagnating with the type of work we were getting and the digital side was working off word-of-mouth which in one respect was beneficial to us, however it locked us into developing a very specific subset of sites which, despite my efforts to the contrary, were stunningly uncreative. This is an aside though as the business as a whole needed to move somewhere where profit (the great motivator) could be made and it was at a specific meeting that the first portents of my current predicament were uttered.
“We need you think like marketeers.”
The usual managerial doublespeak had already been uttered, and then came that bombshell. Stealthy as a cat in the night it held no weight in context and seemed to be forgotten as swiftly as it had been said.
I would be overstating my resentment to say that I wanted to walk out then and there, in retrospect it would have made a point but only the most melodramatic of persons would do that. Lamentably it was as bad as it sounds and the company that I worked for changed its remit from a simple design agency to some kind of amorphous hybrid commonly termed a “Branding and marketing agency”. I could feel the bile in me rumble at the thought of “marketing”, a bastard term for my most despised of job titles; images of slimy yes-men and protracted babble filled my head at the very utterance of the word.
Unfortunately I was to find out that this kind of job comes naturally for some people and even more worrying, a necessary evil for a business. The blue-sky ideal of a company bereft of marketing and still successful by virtue of its name and track-record is the stuff of myth and fable. It seems as of late I have heard and even find myself saying things which I would have thought would have raised alarm bells in me by now, it’s this ambiguous grey area that sits between scruples and livelihood where things people say or do make you wonder whether you should speak out against it or quietly take it as part of surviving in your current job.
Case in point: for the past few days a colleague of mine has been phoning companies to inquire as to whether they sell their customer data for marketing purposes; the end point of this investigation being the ability to provide this avenue of information to our clients (whether future or existing). This kind of action speaks to me on a primal level as something that I don’t want happening around me, a disgusting practice of selling a persons’ identifying information like a commodity; but what does one do in this situation? I can’t mount my tall pony and start preaching the evils of her ways simply because it irks me, the practice may be unsavoury but ultimately one has to have faith in the systems surrounding it (Data Protection et. al.) to control it. Standing on my soap box would only alienate me from her as a person and ultimately do nothing for the business or the client who evidently see some worth in pursuing it.
It’s these sort of dilemmas that make me question whether where I am currently working is right for me whether, even if the majority of people are fantastic, where the business is heading is somewhere I don’t want to be. It’s hard to think long-term when current work is so uninspiring and that the promise of future, interesting work becomes more and more distant. I want to somehow link this all in with being an adult, how simplicity of life is eroded by age, but fundamentally it’s nothing to do with age, only the perception of the world and how one chooses to interact with it. I only hope that I have the hindsight to notice if my scruples wane in favour of greed or survival or that I have the strength of character to never let them fade.
