Like you, I just finished watching the first episode of "Undercover Boss". The President of MY garbage company (Waste Management), spent a week doing menial garbage jobs and learning about what its like to be a poor garbage worker.

It was heart-worming. (side note: this is a funny way to say heart-warming). He really learned a lot about some people with some mental/physical problems and how shitty their jobs are.

End result:

Wait a minute, all of these productivity initiatives I've been enacting makes these people's lives worse.

They decided not to show the part that happened after this when he talked to the board and realized:

Wait a minute, I enacted these productivity initiatives to make MY life better. By making me more money.

So what is a guy supposed to do? Of course, his solution (gotta solve these problems!) was to talk to the people in middle management positions and have them change the things that were making it hard for the entry level folk. I guess we're also to believe that he repealed some of his productivity measures? Or did he put the middle management in the impossible position of having to increase morale and productivity at the same time?

Middle management seems like the absolute shittiest thing in the world. You don't deal with anything tangible, you have people above you who physically cannot see the actual work being done as anything other than money made/lost and people beneath you who you have to deal with, as people, in real world scenarios. You end up looking like the bad guy no matter what happens. And yes, I actually feel bad for Michael Scott sometimes.

So here is my summary of this (and all upcoming) episodes of Undercover Boss:

Boss is a nice guy, not some monster who doesn't care about the "people". Meets some people, is no good at their work and learns not only that the actual "work" of his company sucks, but that adults who work minimum wage jobs generally have a lot of unpleasant shit going on in their lives. Feels bad. Makes middle management look like the bad guys for trying to find ways to cut costs. Makes a big speech, forms some "committees" to look into a few public relations friendly problems and scolds the middle management for whatever they had done.

I'm against it, because it attempts to make people feel better about some real problems with the American work system without actually changing much of anything for the better.

I'm still sticking with my garbage company though.

(Just got back from snowshoeing, friday and saturday's posts will be coming this week)