Gammas at Work

They don't last long when the boss is SSH-savvy

An interesting observation by a Galactician who owns a sizeable business and is well-aware of the Socio-Sexual Hierarchy:

Operator today lasted one day.

Mumbled all day today. Resented the fact that the owner on the first day wasn’t giving him the freedom to do things as he saw fit.

I figured he was a low delta/gamma based on his repeated mumbling.

When your employer tells you to contact him before going into work the next day, if you expect to keep the job, you should expect to just agree, rather than tell him how he shouldn’t be micromanaging you so much.

After I provided him feedback about some of the problems I saw with his defiant behavior - since it could have been my misinterpretation - he states, “Can I give you some feedback?” and makes explicit his resentment of the way he was being managed. Gamma Delusion Bubble maintained.

I was going to fire him without a call, but wanted to provide clear feedback to see if he would change or in case my intuition was off. He responded predictably.

There are some interesting lessons to take away from this.

1. Trust your instincts. If you find yourself wondering if an employee might be a Gamma, he probably is.

2. Trust, but verify. There is no need to act on the basis of your suspicions. If you know the behavioral patterns, it’s very, very easy to confirm an individual’s SSH rank simply by pressing on the appropriate emotional triggers. If your suspicions are correct, they will be confirmed very quickly.

3. The concept of the need to earn respect and responsibility is foreign to Gammas. They believe it should be given to them immediately on the basis of their innate superiorities.

4. Gammas simply cannot keep their mouths shut under any circumstances. Think about how delusional you would need to be to possess the effrontery required to offer, not only your new boss, but the owner of the company, “some feedback” on the way he prefers to do things. If you have ever had trouble understanding the way in which Gammas do not possess due respect for the hierarchal orders to which they belong, this should suffice as an effective illustration of the concept.

At no point, in the entire history of Man, has any foreman ever been interested in receiving immediate “feedback” on the way he is giving orders and instructions.

I was having a conversation with an old friend of mine, who, like most of my friends and family, pay absolutely no attention to anything I write, whether it is this site or one of my books. Which, to be clear, is completely fine with me; the late, great Umberto Eco himself once mentioned the “Olympian indifference” with which his own children regarded his work.

Anyhow, my friend was telling me about an employee who was posing a problem, which I immediately diagnosed as a typical Gamma-in-the-workplace issue. He wasn’t familiar with the term, but burst out laughing when we compared notes, and, of course, they matched up with a nano-level precision that has only ever been achieved by Taiwanese semiconductor engineers.

The most amusing thing? One of the issues concerned his difficulty in convincing the Gamma that perhaps one should not incorporate an easily accessible feature that, if accessed at the wrong time, would quite literally result in the immediate death of the operator, in order to suit the Gamma’s preference for visual design harmony.

This underlines how important it is to eject the Gammas from your organizations wherever possible. Forget your corporate objectives, a Gamma employee will not think even once about sacrificing his own personal preferences in the interest of the actual lives of his coworkers.

NOTE: this is unrelated to SSH, but I did think it was an amusing demonstration of the technical mind at work. When I was briefly overseeing the development of early Windows software applications, one of the programmers programmed a hotkey to bring up the icon menu. The hotkey was Ctrl-Alt-Del-F1. That’s right, a four-key hotkey.

Younger readers who have never used DOS will probably not recognize the significance of this particular selection of keys, but what it meant was that if the user somehow missed the F1 key while trying to hit FOUR keys at the same time, instead of popping up the desired menu, the computer would immediately reboot. Fortunately, the programmer concerned was a Delta, not a Gamma, and he changed the hotkey to a simpler and less problematic one once I pointed out the potential problem.

His reasoning, by the way, was that Ctrl-Alt-Del-F1 was easy to remember…