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09:11 PM
Bikram Vohra
JournalismPakistan.com
November 19, 2014
Okay so you work in an office and you have a good job and you command a few people and isn’t that just great. You have good guys and bad staff and you wish you could get rid of some of them but you cannot and the lazy sods seem to survive all the cuts. You watch some of the best being dumped and the average like clotted cream stick to the sides and get away with it.
But they are nothing when compared to the terrifying combination of the sincere and the second rate. They are obedient, loyal, come to work on time and are the first to volunteer for any task and they stay after hours and never say no and they produce nothing worthwhile. It is like they don’t have it in them and all the trying in the world is not going to make up for the fact that the magic is not there.
But because of that sincerity factor they survive and how. Even the worst of bosses is guilted into submission. No, let him be, the guy gets an A for effort.
We find convenient names for people like this. The spine, the backbone (same thing) the worker bees, people who are needed to do the scut work and skin the fish.
Nonsense, it is just that we do not have the heart to sack them even though their mediocrity is in our faces. We never trust them with the real tasks so they never make colossal errors, we never send them to the frontline, we just let them slide from month to month until they have completed their 30 lacklustre years and they are the ones who make a house because they don’t make waves, they are the ones who collect a pension and live happily ever after while their bouncy, brilliant counterparts are leaping from one crisis to another.
Sincere and second rate is a deadly duo… and you cannot beat it.
(The writer is a Senior Editorial Advisor of Khaleej Times and the paper’s former Editor. He has also been the Editor of Gulf News, Gulf Today, Emirates Today andBahrain Tribune)
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