SEIDENWIRE

Chicago, Illinois—Eyewitnesses report that civility and common courtesy, once the domain of people with brains, are now being governed by administrative policy. The bloodless bureaucratic coup began at a Philadelphia company headquartered in Center City where an employee filed a formal complaint that his boss came in one morning and walked by his cube without saying hello. In a remarkable act of swiftness not expected of corporate America’s army of administrators and paper-pushers, so-called Civility Acts were quickly introduced across the nation almost overnight to combat such rudeness.

The “Civility Act of Philadelphia,” as it is called in the blogosphere, is a one paragraph affirmation of individuals’ rights to work in a friendly, supportive, and civil work environment, and of the company’s continued vigilance in maintaining such an environment. It ensures that workers can expect a “friendly” working environment, and that despite “frequent, high-stress assignments,” that the company expected “employees at all levels to support one another in a spirit of collegiality and teamwork.”

“I don’t like it but I had no choice,” claimed Kate, the Philly HR soldier who sent the “email read ‘round the world.” “Our CEO walked in and was on his cell phone,” she explained. “It was 6:45 in the morning, he didn’t expect anyone else to be in. But the employee threatened to sue because he was just passed over for a promotion and claimed a pattern of discriminatory behavior. I dunno. He didn’t get the promotion because the open position was in accounting and he’s an engineer. Maybe I just should have called our attorney.” Instead, Kate wrote up her boss and issued a company-wide Civility Policy that reads, in part, “All employees will make best efforts to greet one another in the morning.” The news spread like wildfire, activating hundreds of bureaucrat sleeper cells and galvanizing pencil pushers around the country.

Kate disavows the idea that she purposefully mobilized these groups. She says she joined HR for the money and because it was a relatively easy way to get a bunch of letters after her name, nothing more. “I didn’t expect people to get so psycho over this. Whatever,” she says, adding, “As long as I still have my job when this blows over, I really don’t care.”

Not everyone is as ambivalent.

Josh, a self-proclaimed “policy jockey” for a mid-sized accounting firm in St. Louis, proudly shows me his battered, 3-ring bound corporate handbook. Polished and looking like a collectible in a photo taken less than two weeks ago, it now wears obvious signs of heavy use: sticky notes, a back page slightly off-kilter from the binder repeatedly being closed too quickly, and a crumpled cardboard corner from an obvious drop. When pressed about the condition of his equipment, Josh’s eyes well up with pride: “With budgets what they are, I dunno if I’ll be able to get authorized to photocopy a whole other one, but I gotta tell you, I’m not sure I’d want to if I could. This policy book and I have busted a lot of corporate slop in the last two weeks. People’s lack of ethics is finally getting the whip creamed out of them. Thank goodness Kate blazed the trail!”

Martha, a founding member of the Commission to Make People Follow the Rules Like They’re Supposed To (CMPFRLTST), a group of like-mindless foot soldiers in the unofficial war against free thought, says she’s proud of both Kate and Josh, and those like them. CMPFRLTST, the governing body over a confederation of in-house and consulting staff militias, has claimed responsibility for 12,559 Civility Policies in the last 9 work days alone, a 12,559% increase over the previous two weeks. The group defines a Civility Policy as any document that “takes a meaningful step in removing ambiguity from daily life by measuring all behavior, no matter how trivial.”

According to the website for Administrators for Strategic Thinking by the Book, the largest member of the CMPFRLTST confederacy, such groups are out to make the world better by replacing the need for thought with tactical to do lists wherever possible. “We seek to severely curtail opportunities for dangerous and uncontrollable activities, like free thought, while calculating ROI for interpersonal activity at all levels,” the site proclaims without irony. The group’s spokesperson, identified only by his blog name, EmasculatedGuyWithAGrudge, continues: “It’s all about the people, right? And people do best when they are tightly regulated and made to follow the rules. It’s that simple. When someone doesn’t follow the rules it’s called chaos. When everyone speeds on the highways, it’s called anarchy. We have anarchy in the corporate world, where there aren’t even streets, and it’s craziness. Someone has to make, enforce, and adjudicate the rules, and this Philadelphia thing was the perfect catalyst for us to finally move out of the backwater and into the spotlight.”

CMPFRLTST acknowledges that the petty battles ahead will be tough. The group lacks even the merest shred of common sense, has no humor, is devoid of an understanding of its role in the larger picture, and is in desperate need of a copy editor. “As proud administrators and bureaucrats,” explains Martha, “We refuse to let such handicaps deter us from our goals.”

Michael, a senior HR Officer who has enacted 29 customized Civility Policies in his Fortune 500 conglomerate’s operating companies, all this week, echoes Martha’s point: “This is the most important thing to happen here since ‘No Smoking.’ We have policies now governing such behaviors as hand-shaking and hanging up the phone that allow us to measure courtesy. This is good.”

Josh, the St. Louis “policy-jockey,” provides insight into the relevance of policy: “Measurable, formal policies can be maintained to the letter of the law, with no ambiguity and no equivocation. Policies are black and white. If it says that I need to respond to a greeting within two seconds, then we know the moment you cross over into being a jerk. Finally, we can hold people accountable for being nice, and reward it through bonuses and profit sharing.”

All groups surveyed claimed that Civility Policies, and all other HR policies, too, should be upheld to the letter of the law, regardless of the original intention or the impact on the overall business. “It’s better to shut a company down than to allow policy to be ignored. Allowing people to be jag-offs when there is a simple way to measure niceness is clearly unethical and will not be tolerated one iota,” emphasized Michael.

Take the case of management expert Ernie Burtman, who was temporarily blocked entrance into a California company yesterday in a particularly tense stand-off that lasted less than one minute. Ernie claimed “the local Civility Militia admonished me for not giving everyone an equal hello.” Ernie, a training vendor, had been greeting participants to a new program when he recognized one member as a college friend. The two compressed 13 years of updates into the span of 47 seconds before moving on, promising to reconnect later. Sharon, a member of the audience with whom Ernie had spoken about the Olympics and lawn darts (which Ernie had uncovered as Sharon’s favorite hobby), found the college friends’ dialogue to be inequitable and therefore unacceptable. She accosted Ernie in the doorway with her allegations. “It’s just one more example of the good-ol’-boys club and the glass ceiling,” she said.

Ernie was quick to point out that his college friend, Jill, is female. He also reminded Sharon that he had probed and learned about her unique hobby, talking with her for almost two full minutes. After Sharon exasperatedly and melodramatically sighed, Ernie suggested that maybe Sharon wasn’t moving forward in her career on account of her abrasive and unnecessarily bombastic personality. The two locked eyes for for 6 seconds before Sharon blinked and then stormed out, allowing the day to continue without a hitch.

Asked by reporters if Ernie had a point, Sharon exploded. “Who the f— does he think he is! That sort of outrageous behavior is precisely why we need Civility Policies! Can you believe it? Blaming my problems on me?! What an a– h—!” Sharon’s group, Sucks to Be You, is a small band of independent haters who advocate a more iron-fisted approach to policy enforcement than many of their peers. They immediately issued a statement of support in Sharon’s defense.

“Nobody should be allowed to talk unless we call on them. That goes for everyone in America,” Sharon said through the group’s Specialist in Etiquette Quality / Director of Internal and External Marketing Communications. Efforts to get the specialist to elaborate on how such policy could be executed were met with unintelligible, coarse, and profane utterances.

“This couldn’t come at a worse time,” says Dr. Lucy, who belongs to no groups and, according to a recent MRI scan, has the ability to deal effectively with ambiguity. “Americans feel so helpless after the last eight years of corporate, political, and religious scandals that they’ve thrown the towel in. They’re not even trying to fight back.” Lucy works on a Chicago sidewalk in a cardboard box labeled only “The doctor is IN,” said business is up sharply these past two weeks. “Everyone wants the same thing: a strong sedative and a promise that I’ll wake them when this nightmare is over.” Lucy charges a nickel per session, not enough to cover prescription drugs, so in lieu of a sedative she often wallops patients upside the head with a 2×4.

With business as brisk as it is, she is considering raising her per-session rate to a dime.

Posted under How to Self-Destruct, Current Trends, Communications