Closest I been to working at a Corporation was working for an Airport Starbucks once upon a time. I grabbed the second job on the fly when the city threatened to shut our water off. At the time, I was living in the basement unit of a worn-down three family. Ironically, I was close to buying my own 10 family a couple months back but the seller backed out. Currently waiting to hear back on a four family. But I digress.
Here's my story of why corporations suck. After working at the Starbucks for about a month, I developed a method I called it invading the line. Invading the line means you start to make the drinks of people who are waiting in line so by time they get to the cash register their drink is handed to them or already has been handed to them. The “line” versus me. If nobody ever waits then the line has been beat. Within a couple shifts, I had it perfected to the point that I could get ten deep into that line with two other co-workers also employing invade the line tactics. Once you are about eight to ten people deep in that line, the line can never catch up. That line is beat. Its like having the line pinned.
Nobody showed up one shift except for me and a fill in store manager from another starbucks in a different terminal. I was on drinks, the manager was on cash register. I employed the “invading the line” strategy to avoid being buried. For the first five or ten minutes the line was beating the hell out of me, but here and there I managed to get a few easy drink orders and gradually caught step with the line and found daylight. I broke into the line three deep. Once I got three deep, I was able to claw my way to five deep while the other three were still in line. I worked fast, super fast. I was running about three or four drinks at a time. I had that line pinned four or five deep throughout that entire rush. That fill in store manager couldn't believe it. She never saw anything like that. I would have been a store manager in no time had I stayed on there.
Then, sure enough, the idiot upper management came down with a decision that the line could no longer be invaded. They said we had to wait until the customer was up at the cash register before asking them what they wanted to drink. I though that was ridiculous but that's what they do. Then there were other things, like I had to slow down on the cash register. Stupid, stupid things. They have to rigidly structure stuff. Soon after, I got a high-powered job making better money and dropped them like a bad habit but high-powered jobs are still jobs. Jobs that are intensely hierarchical and authority-based are the worst...military, lawyers...you can be doing those jobs for thirty years, and if somebody with a slightly higher rank (in the law it would be a Judge) decides they don't like you (say you don't kiss their ass or speak your mind in a way that offends them), they can make your life hell, sanction you for petty bs... a guy could be in the military for thirty years, if somebody with a higher rank tells them to go pick up every cigarette butt in the park, they have to do it or else face consequences. Its absurd.
Ultimately for me, my version of the American Dream is about making fuck you money....investing and living big. That's why I'm attracted to owning apartment buildings. Its just clean, pure, unadulterated fuck you money. A 30/50/100 unit apartment building (or many smaller unit apartment buildings, even with some vacancy, the rents cover the expenses and annual debt. Apartment buildings are like well-oiled, income-generating machines, makes money on its own, paying itself off, with the landlord sitting at the end of that machine grubbing up the cash flow.
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