Thursday, April 30, 2009

Naturally, the best way to follow up our chat about avoiding pandemics is to go to happy hour, right in the heart of uptown among throngs of people, in direct contravention of all the tenets of social distancing. The context was a business mixer. The drink of choice? Rubbing alcohol. When you graduate to the hard stuff, you’re allowed to saunter up to the bar, slam your fist down onto the counter, and say, “Barkeep! A pint of your finest Walgreens, extra dirty.” Or, in all probability, I ordered a standard mojito instead, single glass clutched grimly in my left hand, hours on end, as if it were some kind of magical talisman designed to ward off social disaster.

I was in a contemplative mood during the drive back home. This was my first networking event in a while, and all told it landed to the right of the bell curve. It occurred to me I’ve been out of college for almost six years now, which in the career continuum means I’m no longer green. Off-green would be more appropriate, lightly seasoned, standing on the cusp of my earning prime. I remember scanning the job listings, senior year of college, and wondering why positions required either one to two years of experience or five years and beyond. Five years just seemed like an arbitrary, distant milestone.

And a year or two before that, one summer afternoon, weeks deep into an internship, I was commuting home with my old man on the Long Island Expressway, when out of the blue he began offering career advice. It felt like the Talk. That’s what happens in Asian families, I guess. Never had the talk about the birds and the bees or anything like that. Didn’t really talk much, period. Skipped straight to this. Shop talk. Where do careers come from? Well, they come from employers and employees who care about each other very much, and not from the stork.

Central to the advice was playing your cards close to the vest. After you develop your specialty, he explained, you’ve got to guard it, keep that secret sauce secret, and stonewall others from copying it and supplanting you. It made sense on paper, plus he was pulling in the big bucks. But like any good son, I vowed then and there to do the exact opposite: if I found a more efficient way to do things, I’d share it with everybody. If I constructed a new process, its inner workings would be laid bare. Keeping these things hidden felt flimsy, like a veil vainly stretched to block out obsolescence. I wanted to be Prometheus. Bring down the fire, you know? I believed what made you unique and relevant in the workplace was your cunning and your will to invent, rather than the inventions themselves. Then again, we all know what happened to Prometheus.