Have you ever had a boss? I’m an absolutely terrible employee. All I do is ask questions: “What’s our strategy? Why do we do what we do? Why does this company exist? Are we helping people more than we’re hurting them? What is my job, really? When I look at the definition of this word, I’m seeing something other than what I think you mean; can you help clarify?”
This is how I’ve ended up in so many situations where I don’t seem to have that much to do at work. Eventually, the questions get too exhausting for any given boss to respond to, and it’s almost impossible to respond to them by asking me to do anything specific (what outcome are you expecting from this deliverable; wouldn’t another path more closely align with the mission as it’s written down?). I think this is why so many parents give up on their children and send them off to pre-pre-school as soon as they can: answering the question of why with “I don’t know” or “because I said so” or “why don’t you look it up on my phone, you’re always on it anyway” must get to be tiresome; no one wants to pretend to be God when they know they’re not, and no child really believes their parent is God once they see them get frustrated just once.
When one is full of questions, parental gods and bosses are always insufficient to their supposed task. When one wants to get to work or emulate their hierarchical superior, the relationship can get along smoothly. I’ve always been full of questions, and teachers didn’t mind it because I learned to keep my mouth shut unless I had my hand raised to answer one of their questions; one-way questioning relationship (and I knew how to write an essay that didn’t question too much, but examined the definitions of things in ways that apparently appealed to teachers and Advanced Placement test graders, even on the calculus exam that I was decidedly unprepared for).
So I might need to stop volunteering to be underneath people (i.e. applying for jobs, accepting job offers, working for companies or any other type of organization). The questions I have are always going to be the ones that everyone was hoping no one would actually be willing to ask. And that’s threatening, when the person asking them is under your charge (and you make more money than they do, so you have to add more value in a way that is resistant to questioning – the Peter Principle in underlying action).
Therefore, I’m done with the hierarchy worship that’s required by companies (at least until I run out of money and hide this book away from Internet searches so I can convince a boss to pay me a salary to question everything again).
It’s morning in April, the birds are singing (or shouting) and it looks like rain. But it’s not raining. And I just killed a wasp with a leather fly swatter. My apologies, wasp. You were asking the wrong kind of questions.
Roman Ryan 