Why Aren’t You Essential?

If, like me, you’ve been trapped in The Snowstorm That Ate the MidAtlantic this past week, you’ve probably spent most of your time indoors, glued to the non-stop news coverage of this Most Amazing Calamity.  And you’ve noticed that the endless loop of school, church and government office closings is occasionally interrupted by the one message all employees dread seeing during a blizzard:

Essential employees must report.

“Poor bastards,” you think to yourself, shaking your head as you solemnly paw another chocolate-covered donut from the swiftly-dwindling bag.  Sucks to be them.  Sucks to be “essential,” which means the company can’t run without you, so you have to brave the elements and risk your own life and limb in order to keep the operation afloat.  I hope they think it’s worth it.

And then something else occurs to you:

“Why am I not essential?”

I used to work in a company that created multimedia products.  My manager was the guy in charge of programming each month’s new release, and he wisely ensured that only he knew how to do it.  Why?  Because that made him essential.  The company couldn’t produce its product line without him, and if they ever wanted to fire him, they’d need to replace him and the system he’d put in place, which was more hassle than the owners were likely to embrace.

Of course, the downside is that he could never really take a vacation because no one else in the company could solve any of the tech problems that came up when he was away.  But what he lacked in autonomy, he gained in longevity within the company.  Not a bad way to indefinitely ensure your own job security, privacy be damned.

Meanwhile, my friend Joel Mark Witt works in the marketing office at the Maryland Public Zoo.  Having seen numerous news updates that “essential zoo employees” had to report on time all week, I asked Joel if that included him.  He said no, that only applied to the employees who care for the animals, and that the keepers had been “sleeping/living there since Friday to take care of all the creatures.”

In other words, the people without whom the zoo could not actually function were required to leave their own families during a weather crisis and tend to those who can’t fend for themselves: the animals, who depend on the keepers for their daily survival.

Compared to that pressure, most of us would gladly opt for a “non-essential” job elsewhere in the company — even if it came with the subconscious knowledge that, if push came to shove, we’d ultimately be expendable.

No One Ever Says “I Want to Be Expendable When I Grow Up”

Would you want to be essential?  Maybe not.  Maybe you like being able to turn your phone off when you’re on vacation, or staying at home during a blizzard.  And for the vast majority of us, that seems entirely logical.  Not everyone wants to be the linchpin of an organization, asked to bear the ultimate responsibility for that company’s success or failure.

But sometimes a snowstorm has a funny way of reminding us that the jobs we spend 40+ hours a week performing are considered “non-essential” by the very people who pay us to do them.

And sometimes a recession proves it.

So maybe we should put down our donuts and find a way to do something that matters.

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Tags: common sense, inspiration, perception