Corporate America is far from being paradise. We do our best to meet the challenges we face in that world. We learn to tolerate the personalities, cultures, even the games that are a fact of corporate life. We have been conditioned to learn to adapt in environments that might be incompatible with our personalities or values. Our world is being overtaken by forces that look to set odd priorities for corporate cultures, this sometimes at the expense of productivity, quality or professionalism. This could add to existing difficulties of interpersonal conflicts, competitive pressures, games, and make the corporate life hostile to real professionals.

In the following trends, some already well established will be described. Ostensibly they are meant to create team spirit. But in reality they are in submission to and in service of dark rulers of the world.

Forced socialization. Employees have a limited number of hours to get through their workload. But socialization is becoming an expected part of their job responsibilities. This could be daily group lunches in the conference room, weekly free Friday lunches, or regular hours-long outings to the nearby restaurant. At one small company the phone would routinely be left ringing when the boss was hosting employees. These lunches are particularly burdensome when you realize that there is no sincerity or substance to them. The real guests, the invisible ones, are present to connect with and claim the staff to follow them in their personal lives. Free lunches are never just that. They should be seen as forced feeding of something we should be free to turn down. Must employees service invisible guests with their personal lives and with their bodies as an added job responsibility in exchange for a paycheck? Not if we were still a free country.

Daily staff meetings. Most of us would rather get work done than sit through meetings. There are places where daily staff meetings are the norm. These could be short fifteen minute meetings or could last almost until lunch. The goal here again is to make minds available to the invisible guests for employees to be given a ‘load’ to carry for the day. Again neither the employee nor the company is the priority. Good management practices are giving way to pressures of the dark rulers of the world.

No assigned seating. There is absolutely no honest advantage for making employees look for an open seat at the start of each work day. Working at a different desk while seated on a different chair each day is obviously a way to share invisible guests between employees. Enough of that happens with the seating in the common areas: conference rooms, reception… Sometimes you would sit down and feel as if someone sneaked into to your body.

Open office space. Small startups often put most employees in an open office plan. Unprofessional staff zealous in the service of the dark forces take advantage of this for petty games such as taking or swapping the chair of colleagues to bring invisible guests to them. They also carry out conversations for this that force something into the minds of those who want to get their work done. Much servicing if the dark rulers of the world is done with conversation, often superficial and not even remotely connected to the work.

After hour check-ins. There are companies that require after-hour check-ins, particularly from sales staff via phone or email. This is a way to keep employees chained to their service and to bring the invisible guests into their personal lives.

Family visits. When employees bring their family to the office, particularly their young children, they might do this to introduce them or reconnect them to the dark forces of the world. Instead of protecting their young from these harmful influences they mistakenly pretend to give them an edge in life by loading them up with invisible creatures.

Loaders and ride-alongs. Nowadays corporations hire who they are told. Candidates that get the job are the ones that show up with the most backing from the dark forces, the vipers, of the world. Some might be reasonable performers. Some are mediocrity that the baal world is bankrolling at the expense of a corporation. They cannot simply print money for their people.

Others might be of the ‘work-exempt’ category. They would have secured just enough credentials to demand a management role, no experience required, where they get to ride the performance of others. There is also the sort that shadow founders to ride their life’s work and get a share of the success.

Loaders and ride-alongs are not born in this world to work hard, neither are they inclined to create or build what would profit mankind. They exist to take and not to give. Hard working professionals must watch them posture and cater to their special status. They typically have a negative influence on the bottom line. But the evil backing they have makes the cost of disposing of them higher than tolerating them.

Relinquished individual rights. Employees no longer seem to be the valuable asset of a company. The trend from the 90s is going in reverse. People’s tolerance for politics and mind games is being tested. There are places where bosses see how far they could take verbal abuse and browbeating. The point is to bring to the corporate world the type of emotional abuse seen on game shows for the enjoyment of invisible forces. This might be an extreme but increasingly people are asked to give up their pride, their self-respect for a paycheck.

Since the 90s the trends in employment litigation have turned well in favor of employers. The odds are for them should an employee take them to court. Some small bosses know it and take advantage of this by violating employee rights to ingratiate the powers that be.

Employers might violate employee right to the job promised at hiring, right to equal pay, right to perform the work unobstructed by interference or sabotage, right to be protected from a hostile work environment, right fair performance evaluation, right to refuse non work related duties with no fear of retaliation. Also, small companies might lure in a candidate and lay them off a month later and leave the employee with no recourse for redress.

Extracurricular activities. There are increasing pressures to service the dark forces of the world. This often involves ‘field trips’ for evil, stalking and hunting minds and souls. Those who seem to have professional lives are in fact demons on the side for their employer. These activities could outpace official duties to lead to a different ‘career’ orientation. Extracurricular activities could also involve tolerating that employers or colleagues follow you home after hours or for the weekend for further servicing of the world. Between these two types of extra duties a job could take over an employee’s life.

No career control. Employees are increasingly at the mercy of their employer and those who are being serviced by that employer’s organization. They must go along with the demands for service to keep their job or their career. They aren’t free to get on to a next job until they are given permission. They are watched if the do job searches. The dark forces that ride them select their next job to follow them or pass them to a different service. The threat of low-paying Craigslist $15 an hour jobs, multi-level marketing schemes, public assistance and the added evils they bring cause employees to give up control.

Deliberate low quality. Professionals might increasingly find that they are being asked to be expedient in their work and compromise on quality. Some might be asked to deliberately plant defects in their work. This is particularly true of software products. Bugs are useful to the vipers of the world to hiss word patterns, to interfere with the work of software users to assert world dominance.

Companies no longer delight clients. Reduced feature sets and reduced quality

make for unimpressive and unfulfilling work for intelligent minds and for real professionals.

Downgraded customer care. A new culture is developing where the goals of the company and the needs of the clients are in opposition. For the company to be profitable it must limit and manage the client demands to which it responds. Clients must be taught to get what the company wants for them and be brainwashed if necessary.

Clients must deprogrammed from the expectation that they should get what they want. Also when interacting with customer service they must expect to be told that the mistake is theirs. The product performs as it should. They just lacked the right instruction for its use. Basically companies are developing a mentality of voodoo marketing to make clients buy and use inferior products with mind control tactics. The products might be missing important features, might have quality issues, or might not deliver the value they promised.

This trend will not be sustainable. Somewhere the disadvantages or the lack of value will be a barrier to product purchase. Companies will be forced to return to sound basic principles.

The trends described not only affect the personal job satisfaction of professionals. They also defy common sense to put profitability at risk. Their popularity proves what happens when right thinking good human beings give in to dark minded rulers of the world.

Unfortunately, not enough people in corporate America protest these trends. The threats for not getting with the program and going along with the above are varied. There is the prospect of searching for $15 an hour employment on Craigslist.com. The campaign to raise the minimum wage to that amount is a way to use the media to publicize that threat and scare the masses into increased zeal. Multi-level marketing is also an area to which professionals could be demoted should they not do enough for their invisible guests.

In spite of the scare tactics, going along with these trends is unwise and short-sighted. There must be enough Americans who want better than what we have now. Each person must avail of the right to their life and bring that into the professional aspect. They must not wait for someone else to adjust the trends. They should exercise their power to lead with their own actions for like-minded individuals to follow.

Photo: Wellcome Trust office via Photopin (creative commons license)