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So we're opening a business. Which was scary enough when it was an impressive business plan and investment paperwork. Now we have funding to actually open, and so we're looking at buildings and choosing POS software and OMFG we're going to be shopkeeps.
The US has many gaping chasms of cognitive dissonance about class, and I've stumbled into one: my spouse was raised to be management, and to also be an owner. There is nothing in his upbringing or psyche that stands in his way, beyond the universal trepidation of going through the pre-flight checklist before taking off.
In contrast, there is something in the back of my brain, lodged there when I was small, that keeps screeching "Am I allowed to do this?"
Allowed by whom? I don't know. Allowed by the teacher, the boss, the guy in charge, The Man, The Suit?
Here's where the idea of bootstrapping and entrepreneurship as a magic cure for social ills falls apart; here's why first and second-generation Americans outperform the descendants of earlier immigrants: blue-collar America doesn't raise owners, it raises henchfolk.
Yes, I made up the word henchfolk. People with strong backs and little say, people who take exponentially more pride in their work than is objectively healthy, because they're where the rubber meets the road and that's often their sole source of control and pride in the workplace (and it kills them, and it burns them out, and it only raises the bar for everyone else so the squeeze gets worse). People who punch a clock and effectively lose some of their civil rights for the duration of their shift, and so that's what work looks like to them, that's what business is, an extension of public school where they scramble for seats in class and have to pull at least a C or they starve on the street.
Hell, public school was designed to train a manufacturing workforce, and since it worked so well in producing labor cogs we've only needed to tweak the average white-collar service industry job to fit the cog.
I've had desk jobs where'd I'd've killed for a union-mandated piss break. Where I was working a mouse through Excel like my grandmother worked a drill press and couldn't talk to the person next to me because that would be gossip and bad for morale. Where if I made the mistake of actually caring about the clients' issues all it did was highlight the internal problems I didn't have the authority to fix, only the responsibility to endure.
I found that a college education and a white-collar resume did not make me an owner or in any way likely to ever be in charge--and looking back, at no point did I ever question the rightness of this assessment. Work was a seat on a bus. You don't vote on where the bus is going, and you don't get to drive and you certainly don't own the bus.
This is how you get someone who is smart, not afraid to work hard, understands sales, accounting, customers, vendors, distributors, clients, and process management, yet who still thinks, in the lizard back of her brain, that negotiating a lease on commercial property is a mystery one needs to be initiated into. At best, I've had a window seat on the bus. Now we're buying one and get to drive it wherever we want. This is a major shift in perspective, and one I'm beginning to suspect my background has actively socialized me against.
And yes, I realize that a business owner works for their clients and patrons--this is not the newsflash that some suits believe it is for the rank and file, who are, after all, often hired expressly to deal with customers so that more important employees don't have to. As I said, I've often had the window seat and could see many lovely avenues the bus could go down, but didn't. I know it's the customers who pay for the diesel. But my work history illustrates a struggle between the stated aims of the business and the policies that hinder that aim...and while I have confidence that we will do a better job of being responsive to our clientele, that this is a bedrock of what we're doing with our venture, there's a part of me simply agog to find myself here.
Here, as an owner. Here, with a vested interest equal to any and all emotional investment I'm capable of putting in. Here, with no corporate bullshit or isolated management layers between the goods & services and the patron. Here, with a small handful of (nonhench)folk and all the books open to me and I can understand every decision--and when I throw my strong back into it I'll actually get somewhere.
It's a damned shame for our culture that for a kid who grew up working poor and pushed her way through college, down deep this feels like I'm breaking a taboo.
The US has many gaping chasms of cognitive dissonance about class, and I've stumbled into one: my spouse was raised to be management, and to also be an owner. There is nothing in his upbringing or psyche that stands in his way, beyond the universal trepidation of going through the pre-flight checklist before taking off.
In contrast, there is something in the back of my brain, lodged there when I was small, that keeps screeching "Am I allowed to do this?"
Allowed by whom? I don't know. Allowed by the teacher, the boss, the guy in charge, The Man, The Suit?
Here's where the idea of bootstrapping and entrepreneurship as a magic cure for social ills falls apart; here's why first and second-generation Americans outperform the descendants of earlier immigrants: blue-collar America doesn't raise owners, it raises henchfolk.
Yes, I made up the word henchfolk. People with strong backs and little say, people who take exponentially more pride in their work than is objectively healthy, because they're where the rubber meets the road and that's often their sole source of control and pride in the workplace (and it kills them, and it burns them out, and it only raises the bar for everyone else so the squeeze gets worse). People who punch a clock and effectively lose some of their civil rights for the duration of their shift, and so that's what work looks like to them, that's what business is, an extension of public school where they scramble for seats in class and have to pull at least a C or they starve on the street.
Hell, public school was designed to train a manufacturing workforce, and since it worked so well in producing labor cogs we've only needed to tweak the average white-collar service industry job to fit the cog.
I've had desk jobs where'd I'd've killed for a union-mandated piss break. Where I was working a mouse through Excel like my grandmother worked a drill press and couldn't talk to the person next to me because that would be gossip and bad for morale. Where if I made the mistake of actually caring about the clients' issues all it did was highlight the internal problems I didn't have the authority to fix, only the responsibility to endure.
I found that a college education and a white-collar resume did not make me an owner or in any way likely to ever be in charge--and looking back, at no point did I ever question the rightness of this assessment. Work was a seat on a bus. You don't vote on where the bus is going, and you don't get to drive and you certainly don't own the bus.
This is how you get someone who is smart, not afraid to work hard, understands sales, accounting, customers, vendors, distributors, clients, and process management, yet who still thinks, in the lizard back of her brain, that negotiating a lease on commercial property is a mystery one needs to be initiated into. At best, I've had a window seat on the bus. Now we're buying one and get to drive it wherever we want. This is a major shift in perspective, and one I'm beginning to suspect my background has actively socialized me against.
And yes, I realize that a business owner works for their clients and patrons--this is not the newsflash that some suits believe it is for the rank and file, who are, after all, often hired expressly to deal with customers so that more important employees don't have to. As I said, I've often had the window seat and could see many lovely avenues the bus could go down, but didn't. I know it's the customers who pay for the diesel. But my work history illustrates a struggle between the stated aims of the business and the policies that hinder that aim...and while I have confidence that we will do a better job of being responsive to our clientele, that this is a bedrock of what we're doing with our venture, there's a part of me simply agog to find myself here.
Here, as an owner. Here, with a vested interest equal to any and all emotional investment I'm capable of putting in. Here, with no corporate bullshit or isolated management layers between the goods & services and the patron. Here, with a small handful of (nonhench)folk and all the books open to me and I can understand every decision--and when I throw my strong back into it I'll actually get somewhere.
It's a damned shame for our culture that for a kid who grew up working poor and pushed her way through college, down deep this feels like I'm breaking a taboo.
