As much as I loooove writing essays, how happy can I be when I'm asked to do one for a job interview? So, to be fair to everyone, I've decided to place it here and damn the consequences of my streak of absurdity.

The topic today is how the following qualities fit into the workplace of today:

Knowledge, Respect, Humor, Cooperation & Quality

I chose these from a huge pile of these funky cards that were placed before me at the end of my job interview. Picking five out of 50+ was tough. I probably should've picked them at random, but oh, well...

We'll start off with Respect. I don't mean genuflecting when a higher-up comes in the room; that's subservience and we don't want that. Respect, to me, means that you recognize the other person as a whole, not as an a-hole. In the workplace, that means an employee should recognize what their manager has done to earn the position they have & the authority inherent with that. Keep in mind, though, the old adage that respect is a two-way street. Managers should also recognize what their employees do on a daily basis. This does not necessarily mean awards & certificates. It's recognition on an internal basis, which can breed that intangible sense we call respect. With respect, there is trust, which also leads to Cooperation. (Conveniently, the next chosen term...)

Cooperation is essentially people working together toward a common goal. A good example of this is something I saw at the office the other day. In our office we have a large open area that has of late become massively cluttered with thousands & thousands of documents in dozens of plastic tubs. It was hard to tell what they were there for, but the clutter grew until it was a plastic & paper monstrosity. I was afraid to enter the maze for fear of encountering a minotaur. But, lo and behold, I was coming back from a break on Friday morning & I saw a group of people frantically organizing the area. Some documents were disposed of, others were moved out of the way and the bins were lined up by date & tagged with the various months of the year. In a couple of hours, the area looked like aisles at a Walmart. The fact that they did it, ably & quickly, speaks more to me on cooperation than anything.

Knowledge is another important tool. We all have varying degrees of speed in absorbing this knowledge, whether it be simple facts or knowing by heart the complex processes of the jobs we do. I believe people have an inherent need to know things. Some folks call this curiosity, but I think it's an odd genetic trait inherent in all living concious things. Because it's all about control. Knowing things allows people to have some measure of control. Knowing why one performs a task is just as important, if not more so, than simply knowing how to do it. If I have the knowledge of the how & why of my job, I (& , I would hope, many others) would be more open to creating a solid, quality-based working environment.

Quality. Mmmm... what a wonderful word. A word that simultaneously seduces & strengthens just by the way it rolls off the lips. It's not enough to do the task, but to do it right as often as possible is to strive for that elusive Quality. Too often in today's workplace & economy, there is an over-emphasis on quantity. Get more & more done with less & less, no matter what. Yet there is a failure to see that if they slow down at first to learn the best way to accomplish a goal, the rest will fall into place. People have more of a tendency to take pride in quality work, and that pride will last because it's also quality. For all you business-types out there, I'll sizzle it down for you, New Testament style:

Quality begets Quantity begets Efficiency begets Profit

Neat, huh? Granted it's a little odd to place it that way but, truthfully, that's how I see it. I'm funy that way. Which is an intersting segue to our final area, Humor.

I'll admit, Humor doesn't fit as well as the rest do together (i.e. Knowledge + Cooperation = Quality), but it is central to our core as human beings. Humor should be central to all our lives, not in terms of practical jokes, but the ability to observe the absurd in all we see & do. For example, there's a group of folks at my office whose main is to prrof digital images of papers. Whoo-hoo! What a thrill a minute those folks must be having... they know who they are. There is great humor in that. Society places so much importance on documentation that these people are hired to sit in front of a computer all day & look at old paperwork to see if it was scanned correctly. Don't get me wrong, these folks for the most part enjoy their workday. Personally, I think it's because deep down in them, they recognize how silly this task actually is. And yet, why not do it anyway? I certainly would, because as silly as it may be, it's not silly to those other people. The ones who deem it necessary to their lives to have constant access to digitized images of things they usually have paper copies of in a local file anyway.

Now, I will admit this essay was a bit wordy. Nay, even verbose at times. But sometimes it's hard to really verbalize how you approach these sorts of things. I will always work to include these concepts in my career, whatever it may end up being. And it's my sincere hope that others will too.