Decider

This is no post for false modesty, in my brief working life I have recieved advancements and promotions relatively quickly and frequently.

I have in my time turned down two promotions, one recently and one many years ago. And in both cases I made the right decision.

I'm thinking about these incidents because today I decided to take my dog for a walk and read this:

"You are rich if and only if money you refuse tastes better than money you accept." ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes

I have a feeling NNT wouldn't like me, or my blog. But I do feel rich, there are times when I contemplate seeing a psychologist about money's inability to motivate me. I have read somewhere else that people enjoy being flattered even when they know they are being flattered. In a similar manner, I think many people enjoy taking a promotion without really thinking about whether it would be good firstly A) for them, B) for their career C) for the company.

The first one is distinct for the second because it is holistic, work is but a facet, an important one for life but as it starts to usurp your time outside of it you need to consider that even though my career may advance my life may be deteriorating.

The first time I turned down a promotion it was at hurdle B, and admittedly A, and probably C as well. The company needed somebody to fill the role of shipping clerk, which for an importer was pretty crucial, and the departing employee was highly valued for their expertise and intimate knowledge of a crucial excel document. (That I hope has been replaced). I was in the sales department, sales is not my natural forte (I am an introvert and find social interaction exhausting, though I've gotten better at it), and this may blow your mind, but most companies are organised in a pyramid. Slow down egghead! What's with the geometry, well if you built a highway like a pyramid it would be very ineffecient at getting people to where they want to go.

There is the lane though on this pyramid highway that goes to the top, and that lane ran through the sales department, not shipping and logistics. So while the promotion was genuine, it was a dead-end one. After that there was one more step for (logical) advancement. There were other factors as well, it takes time to build up relationships with customers. After 6 months in sales, I still recieved calls from wholesale customers that weren't aware I had replaced 'Nic' my predecessor. The sales mangers were happy with me, and shifting me after only 6 months and forcing them to have to get used to a new person was possibly not in the best interests of the company.

The point is, companies can make mistakes when offering promotions as well. In this case I think they saw an urgent, but in the long run, unimportant position to fill and felt I was the quickest fix. But really it was a job where you talk to almost nobody and quietly dick around with an excel sheet in a corner and your view is of a wall. It would have been bad for me straight out. I remember helping them for a week and it nearly crushed my soul completely. I was ill suited to the work, and the work was ill suited to me.

More recently, I was offered a promotion that for most people would be an easy decision to take it, and subsequently was difficult for me to turn down. The thing is, that I didn't need extra money, and thankless (actually that's not true, you would be amazed at how many people thank me during the course of a shift, the ratio between thank-yous to 'fuck-offs' is in excess of 100:1, I've never really thought about that before) though my job is it has its advantages. The first is that it rotates me through interactions with amazing people that in perhaps one of life's greater mysteries even a prestigious job would struggle to recreate. I don't know whether I will be sitting next to an actuary or a musician from one shift to the next and sometimes a person can literally be both.

Before I got this job I was in a slump of an existential crisis. I had no direction or structure to my life and was living off the considerable savings of my former career (where I also turned down a promotion). The primary benefit of my job is the social opportunities it provides. In the context of the actual job I do, looking at the base isness of what it is - conducting repetitive surveys it is easy to dislike. The benefits and enrichment the work environment brings my life, more broadly I find hard to ignore and thus it is hard to resent my job.

In a sad irony, working in a call center has brought me more opportunities for happiness than the supposed 'real-job' I had. I am fitter, more social, happier (whatever that means) and more relaxed than I was at 23. I am more productive and achieve more of my won goals. In my particular case I identified my own needs and found the job that suited them. The dream can't last forever, I know, but it would have ended prematurely and foolishly had I accepted a promotion that isolated me from the primary benefit I recieve.

The promotion was real, it was more pay, more responsibility, more job security etc. But I don't have my job because of the pay (I can earn more full time), the responsibilitys make it harder if not impossible to overcome alienation from my peers and the job security is false because security doesn't really exist.

These decisions I have made, and I can never really know the features of the road not taken, but the money I refused tasted delicious.