Every day is a holiday, another motherfucking holiday. 1
Today is apparently National Boss’ Day, which I had never heard of before but is so dumb that it made me laugh.
I think telling your boss that they’re a good boss if they are, in fact, a good boss is a totally normal and nice thing to do, but you can just say it to them sometime. They don’t need a special day!
I looked up the day on Wikipedia to see how real this unnecessary holiday is and thought this was very funny as well.
Patricia Bays Haroski registered “National Boss’ Day” with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in 1958. She was working as a secretary for State Farm Insurance Company in Deerfield, Illinois for her father at the time and chose October 16, which was her father’s birthday.
Her father!?! This is a holiday of nepo origins!
The purpose was to show the appreciation for her bosses she thought they deserved.
What is Patricia thinking? She already owes her father one day of appreciation. It’s called Father’s Day. Now she is on the hook to him for two days! Where does it end?
And the rest of the team at State Farm’s Deerfield office might not have been so fond of the boss since he wasn’t their father. Maybe he was a jackass and now they were expected to kiss up to The Man?
Although that’s a bit of a 1968 reading, and this happened in 1958, which made me feel a little bad for her, honestly, because they must have talked so much shit about her behind her back. “This is what happens! You let women in the workforce and next thing you know it’s ‘i love you, boss’ and ice cream parties at lunch.”
But it’s also possible that when this dickhead was talking shit about Patty for this humorously silly holiday, someone said to him, “so what are you like a fucking communist?” and reported his red ass to McCarthy!
…which reminded me of this post I originally published a few years ago.
Happy Friday to all regardless of station in life!
I imagine if you are the CEO of a massive conglomerate like General Electric, you probably don’t have perfect, complete information committed to memory about the manufacturing processes of every single item your company produces.
A really huge company makes thousands of products. Their supply chains will span the globe, and some of the products are not significant drivers of revenue. You probably have a lot of details about the most important products and then cursory knowledge about the less important ones. If you are going to be asked about fidget spinners, someone who works for you will give you a one-sheet piece of paper with the details that you will review before the meeting.
This is totally reasonable for huge companies with zillions of employees spread out across the world, making hundreds of different things for thousands of different markets.
And then there are companies like Dippin’ Dots. Dippin’ Dots makes one thing: Dippin’ Dots. It makes them at a handful of facilities and then ships them around the country and into select foreign markets.
If you are the long-tenured CEO of Dippin’ Dots, there is no good reason for you to be anything but an expert on every aspect of the Dippin’ Dot production process. You should know where the ingredients are sourced; you should know how they are combined and turned into Dippin’ Dots; and you should know how they are packed and delivered to vendors.
Especially since the entire thing about Dippin’ Dots is that they are novelty ice cream made with an elaborate, trademarked method. The process of making them is more important than a company that makes normal ice cream.
To the extent that there are complicated logistics that a CEO of Dippin’ Dots could be forgiven for not knowing every detail about, they probably have to do with the last leg of Dippin’ Dots’ distribution and sale in all these different locations. You presumably know the basic gist of all of it—how theme parks handle their bulk orders and individual pricing decisions, for example—but you probably are not deeply familiar with every aspect that goes into getting the Dippin’ Dots in the customers’ hands—every particular theme park’s placement of every particular Dippin’ Dots cart.
These are reasonable assumptions to make about the chief executive officer of Dippin’ Dots. They are also totally wrong, at least if the show Undercover Boss is to be believed.
Undercover Boss
Every episode of this show has the same format: some high-ranking executive at a company goes undercover to see how the entry-level employees do their jobs. They visit three locations and shadow three different employees. The employees are almost all hard-working, wonderful, passionate people who love the company but tell the undercover boss about one or two easily rectified problems (like the drive-thru intercom needing to be upgraded or something). These employees are selected by the show’s producers and always have some compelling personal story that often involves heartbreak and loss. They tell the CEO about how hard it is to juggle their responsibilities to their family, pay their rent, get dental work for their kids, etc… The CEO is shaken by this realization and, at the end, tells the employee that the company will pay for their night school tuition or something. So important is this bit to the show that the money for these nice acts of kindness actually mostly comes from the show’s budget.
The companies and CEOs are not paid to appear because the show is just an hour-long infomercial for the brand. The takeaway from every episode is supposed to be: “wow, the employees at this company are great, and the CEO is a wonderful, nice person, and any problems with this company are a forgivable oversight, or, at worst, something that can be blamed on evil, unnamed middle management.”
This obvious propaganda—the producers guarantee that it won’t harm the company’s reputation—has earned lots of criticism over the years, mainly around the fact that the undercover boss almost never extends the newfound empathy they have for these particular employees to the rest of their employees, who presumably also have problems in their personal lives that money could help alleviate.
If you are not one of the lucky three employees tapped to be on the show, then all you get out of your boss’s boss’s boss’s boss’s boss putting on a wig and going undercover is some bullshit like “we have fixed the drive-thru intercoms so it is now easier to hear.”
But if you look at the show as just an ad for the company and not some meaningful statement about the character of the CEO (or virtue of the business), then, you know, there are lots of worse ads! Most ads don’t benefit employees at all. At least, in this case, three of them are getting help with their credit card debt.
The show is clearly an effective ad. Undercover Boss recently finished its 11th season. But even if it weren’t effective at driving sales, corporate executives aren’t immune to the desire for attention that everyone else feels. Presumably, a lot of these CEOs agree to this because they want to be in a slickly produced television show that makes them look like Scrooge at the end of A Christmas Carol.
But like every other reality show, you never actually come off looking as good as you hope. And these CEOs come off terribly!
Which brings us back to Dippin’ Dots.