#518 Resume

The other day when I was at a job fair a young woman came up and asked what we were hiring for.
I said, although we weren’t hiring right then, we occasionally hire for sales positions.
“Sales?” she questioned skeptically.
I felt like I needed to get defensive but I didn’t. “Yeah,” I said, “you go out to businesses and talk to them about the benefits of advertising and then you sell them ads.”
“Sales?” she asked again, this time with an even deeper look of mystification on her unwrinkled brow.
“Yeah sales,” I said, “you ask people to buy what you are selling.”
“Oh,” she said, comprehension dawning, “you mean account executive.”
“No,” I replied. “I mean sales.”
Because, really, let’s cut to the chase. It’s sales. No one has an “executive” position. And no one has an account until they sell something to them. It’s sales.
I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised, I mean, after all, we’ve spent a lot of time burying our young people alive in the restrictive dirtclods of euphemism.
I heard a story the other day about a company that provides a positive stroke service.
They are professional praisers.
They come in and teach executives how to deal with the hyper-self-esteemed youth of the new generation with hyper praise, hyper strokes, and just plain hyperbole.
These are the kids social scientists warned in the nineties we were praising too much. That we were overindulging in fulsome flattery even when the stuff they did was crap.
So now—guess what?—they have unreal expectations of the real world. And if they don’t get praised for every little piece of paper they turn over they sulk in an ineffective workplace funk.
Nobody appreciates them. They’re not getting what they’re worth, they should be an executive right now, dang it. They have a degree.
When interviewed, people over sixty responded they always thought that paycheck they got every two weeks was praise enough.
Yeah. They kept their job. Seems a little too little.
I’m sure there’s a happy medium.
But if you have too many executives, who’s gonna cook and bottle wash?
America, ya gotta love it