Work ethics

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You may click here for a discussion of work ethics.

There was a time in this country when work ethics really meant something... I was taught all the right things by my own father as I grew up. My dad made sure that I knew and understood what good work ethics were... Because of my dad I knew that working hard, doing your very best, having loyalty were all very important things. Suffice it to say that somehow my dad instilled in me the 'desire' to work hard and succeed. That to be successful in your occupation was indeed a very important part of life.

When I was young I had some menial jobs. I had a job when I was 15 years old at Dogpatch USA. It was a rustic themed amusement park that opened in the late 1960s based on the fictional town of Dog patch from the Al Capp comic strip "Lil Abner". My 'job' was at/on a small 'trout farm' area. I baited hooks for customers and when they 'caught' one of the fish I took it off the hook for them and carried it to the processing window for the customer where it was cleaned, dressed and packaged. That was my 'first' job...

Eventually I got married and had need for a regular income. I was 19 years old by then. I had no 'skill' to speak of at all and no clue really as to what I might want to do. I ended up working in the office equipment field just as my dad had for many years. I repaired old school 'typewriters' for like 20 years with a small number of companies. I was good... I was a damn good repairman. I took great pride in my work and I wanted to be the 'best' repairman out there.

That's what my dad taught me above all else. That whatever you choose to do it should be your goal to do it better than anyone else. It should be your goal to be the best at whatever you do. And this always seemed to make a lot of sense to me. It always seemed a logical thing. I still live by that rule today...

Eventually personal computers came along. A guy I worked with at the time gave me a TIMEX sinclair 1000 computer. It had 1k of on-board memory and I was fortunate enough to have a 16k expansion pack that plugged into the back. Sometimes it wriggled on it's rubber feet a bit and would bump the expansion pack and wipe out hours of work. I learned to save often lol

I fell absolutely in love with the whole idea of being able to tell a machine what to do and have it follow my directions to the letter. I used to hook that darned thing up to our only TV set in the living-room and work for hours writing code in BASIC. I gambled at the time... Football, basketball and baseball. I ended up writing a good program that gave me a 60% winning percentage in college basketball (no easy feat ;) I just compared the outcome of every game played to the Vegas 'line' to discover exactly where the linesmakers had the most difficult time predicting the outcome of the game. My poor wife rarely got to watch TV lol

Of course as time moved on so did I. I entered the never ending upgrade cycle that computers were and still are to this day. And I continued to love and learn programming. In the early 1990's I wrote 'shareware' software for BBS' (Bulletin Board Systems), mostly BBS games which users played on-line. It was a fantastic experience. We had the equivalent of blogs or forums where I could meet and communicate with other active programmers. After many years of coding, strictly as a hobby, I eventually landed a real job as a programmer. My wages went up by about 8,000.00 a year even though I was actually under-paid, looking back lol I worked for NPC International (used to be $NPCI but went private). I was on fire at NPC. So thrilled to be a professional programmer! I worked at NPC from about 1997 till about 2000. By the time I left my wages had gone up another 8,000.00 per year. Remarkably my income had risen by about 16,000.00 a year in just 3 short years. (And now I see that NPC was sold to Merrill-Lynch Global Private Equity Group in 2006...) I made a poor decision in changing jobs for a couple grand more writing educational software for a small company that went bankrupt in 2003.

Like so many other people then and now we lived on two incomes. That's just the way it was, the way it worked. My income represented about 60% of our total income. When I lost that job it hurt, bad. I had no idea how much debt we had at the time... I was involved in other things and didn't pay attention to that sort of stuff at all. I assumed everything was fine... Boy was I wrong! lol We filed for bankruptcy in 2003. Eventually I did land a good job with Kansas City Southern ($KSU) in downtown Kansas City, MO. It was another 31% boost in income... But it required me, at least at first, to live away from my family in a hotel, in a strange town where I knew no one, with the privilege of driving Interstate 35 twice a day (not fun)... So I quit. I walked out on a 60,000.00 a year job after about a month. They were great at $KSU, it was a wonderful place to work really. it was my dream job come true. It was the job that I thought had been my final goal all along.

I stress out easily (as many of you know lol). And though I loved my work as a programmer it was the corporate politics that I detested... always. (Here's a pretty good article on 'corporate politics' for those who might be interested...). While working in Kansas city for that one short month I made 4 times the pay trading. I researched my 'watch list' at night, gave my wife the orders to put in the next day and did very well...

That's when and why I made the decision to trade full time. to work for myself. To be my own boss. That was 2004.

I live in the real world. I see people people. I know people. I have family. I'm an 'on the street' sort of guy. I try to pay attention to what's going on around me.

To me 'work ethics' have changed dramatically in this country over the last couple of decades. I, personally, don't think it is the people who have changed near as much as corporate America. It used to be accepted as fact that in this country if you worked hard and did your best then you would be rewarded for your efforts. It no longer 'seems' to be that way...

I think many younger workers who have tried to participate in capitalism over the last couple of decades have become quite 'disenchanted'.

dis·en·chant (dsn-chnt)

To free from illusion or false belief; undeceive.

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[Obsolete French desenchanter, from Old French, to break a spell

I think 'disenchanted' is the perfect word in this case... Because, all around me, I see people waking up, I see people breaking free from illusion and/or false belief. I love the old French 'to break a spell'. A spell has been broken. A yoke has been and is being thrown off. The culture of greed and corruption that runs through our society and culture like a spreading cancer has destroyed much of what used to be a sound foundation. It is the 'slipping away' of many of the beliefs that many Americans hold dear that is so frightening to many people.

You see, I feel that society has taken a turn for the worse now... generally, overall. That everyday people in many cases no longer feel that they are a part of a larger 'plan'. An honorable plan to make our lives and our country ever better, ever stronger, ever more fulfilling. That somewhere along the way we have 'lost our way'.

I don't think 'they' realize or understand, yet, what is happening in America and with/to the American people. I don't feel like 'they' understand that 'things' have changed dramatically. I don't think 'they' undersand, yet, that 'things' will never be the same.

In this country pride in a job well done has been replaced with the 9 to 5 grind that pays the bills and nothing more. Money/labor has definitely become a 'necessary evil' (unpleasant necessity: something that is unpleasant or undesirable but is needed to achieve a result).

We went through a period of unbridled envy and self gratification. For a time the 'goal' seemed to be nothing more than spending ridiculous amounts of money to obtain as much Chinese slave labor 'junk' as one possibly could. Obviously this could not last long.

It was 'they', the financial elites and our government, who pushed for this. To drive corporate earnings. This was the plan all along. To enslave the American people to the financial sector and to government itself. This was the true reason for keeping interest rates artificially low and offering ridiculously easy credit terms to the under-educated, naive masses.

That offering of easy credit and the 'promotion' of envy and greed as valid lifestyles has all but destroyed our country from within.

The American people have been taken advantage of for the past few decades as they never have been in the history of this country.

Stop and think for a few minutes about how many advertisements you see and/or hear each and every day. Hundreds? Thousands? From insurance to cereal to toys to cars... on and on obviously for what would seem to be eternity. Every single day the American people are bombarded with advertising. Everyone in this country has their hand out for money. Starbucks, Pizza Hut, Target, used car dealers... again it would go on forever... lumped together as 'retailers'.

Think, for a minute, about the bills that almost every American is required to pay. Mortgage/rent, home insurance, home maintenance, car payments, car insurance, car maintenance, gas for the car, gas to heat their home, water, electric, food, clothing.

Now add to that many things that the American people do pay as a normal course of living in 2009. Cable TV, phone service, internet service, vacations, random repairs, pets and pet supplies, appliances, furniture.

And then add to that the many ways Americans waste money each day. Starbucks, toys for the kids, toys for the pets, meals outside the home, music, movies, tattoos, parties...

Easy credit made it easy for even the poorest of Americans to have everything they wanted... Now those poorest Americans are feeling the brunt of this economic downturn the most. They never bothered to read the fine print on anything they signed. Turns out they signed their life away for a fancy car and a big flat panel TV. Now their interest rate is 30% to 40% on huge loan amounts that they never should have had access to in the first place. Now their gas, electric and water is being shut off as they fight to keep their cell phones and internet access secured...

Throw in a job loss for a middle class American family who has been lured into depending on two paychecks plus credit cards to pay the bills...

And what our government is proposing these days astounds me! It seems the ONLY answer that our government and financial elites have to our 'problems' is to 'grow the economy', 'banks need to loan more money', 'we should relax lending standards', 'we need the consumer to spend money'. 'They' expect things to be the same as they were before. The way they were in 2004 or 2005... Are 'they' really completely blind to the realities of the day? Do they really not see the drastic changes that have occurred at the very core of our society and culture? Can 'they' really not see that the American people, as a whole, are sick and tired of playing the same old game of making politicians and corporations ever wealthier at their own expense?

The PROBLEM is debt! MASSIVE debt. On the backs of the American people, on the back of our government, on the back of our corporations, on the back of our small businesses. And our government's answer to the debt problem is astonishingly MORE DEBT!

What we need in America is a return to the moral values of our past. A return to the time when people knew and understood the meaning of right and wrong. When people knew and understood the meaning of fairness and honor. A time when America was one for all and all for one.

I, personally, think we are past the point of no return on those issues. It took us decades to destroy what was once great about America and the American people. It will, by necessity, take us decades to restore it.

But for it to ever be restored will require that we take the government apart, completely. And that we completely rethink corporate America. That we rethink what our corporation's 'interpretation' of capitalism is and correct it to what it was meant to be. Capitalism was never intended to destroy the very fabric of American life. Of that I am pretty sure...

So alas I end up where I always tend to end up...

Until we completely rid ourselves of greed and corruption by ending the tyrannical regimes of our current governmental and financial systems we will never be free.

Greg