Mechanical Bull

When I lived in France, I taught English to a French engineer whose company had been taken over by an American company in the last year or two.  Apparently, many of his colleagues had left in droves, and it wasn’t because they disliked Americans, it was because they felt uncomfortable and condescended to by the new company’s American style of doing business.

French business people who work together, may eat lunch together or talk about their lives, but they usually don’t become personal friends, and they’re not (or weren’t when I lived in France) expected to express great happiness at seeing each other or extreme concern about one another’s personal lives and well being. Nor are they required to be extremely cheery and outgoing.  What they perceive as enforced jollity and pretended office friendship is something they find off-putting and insulting.  It’s bad enough that they have to spend from 9 to 6 with people who are not their friends, doing something they may or may not love in order to take care of themselves and their families. Forcing them to pretend, as they see it, that they really are close to all these people and extremely eager to see them and share their private lives with them is at best childish play acting, and at worst adding insult to injury.

Which gets me back to the event this French engineer told me about, which was the straw that broke the camel’s back.  It was a get-together – some kind of conclave to build team spirit-with the new team over the ocean – and they had to ride a bull and, worst of all, pretend to like it.

Well, as far as I know,mechanical bull riding is not a corporate rite of passage that we do too much anymore, and Americans are a lot different culturally from Europeans, so why am I even talking about this now?

Well. I guess I’m talking about it because another rite of passage in companies, organizations and mom-and-pop businesses is just around the corner; the office party.

Well, I guess it’s fun, sometimes, and I guess there’s real cheer, sometimes – and for a lot of folks there’s the satisfaction of a good meal, some alcohol and – if they’re lucky – a bonus at the boss’s expense.  Sometimes there may be appreciation, or at least a sense of being treated as more than a cog in the machine, but sometimes, for some of us, it’s just the mechanical bull and another way of paying our dues – and shouldn’t the holidays be about something else than slavery to our work and subordination to or profiting from, our earthly masters?

Happy Hanukkah, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.  May something outside of the workaday world open up real abundance to you, yours and all of us.