Nyah Nyah You Can't Make Me

I have to laugh at some people's definition of "professional staff." My definition includes: maturity, intelligence, education, and experience needed to handle a variety of situations in a reasonably high level job with a fair degree of autonomy, doing your level best to advance the company's business goals. Every once in a while I see someone who seems to have the intelligence, education, and experience, but lacks the maturity even though s/he is plenty old enough to have grown it. Granted, a "professional" position means you probably don't punch a clock or account to management for your rest room breaks, but it also means that you have those freedoms because you're expected to exercise good judgment and are expected to cooperate with management's requests without suffering daily threats of being bounced if you step out of line.

That being said, I find it really annoying -- particularly in today's economic situation -- that so-called business professionals pick and choose from the list of management directives in passive-aggressive fashion, deciding which ones they will flat out refuse to do -- AND they actually get away with this nonsense. I have even heard some of them bragging about their refusal to accept direction, in meetings and at the coffee maker. Management's response should be something along the lines of "Are you kidding me? You're collecting a paycheck for this. Now would be an excellent time to wake up, grow up, or both!"

Maybe we wouldn't have so much trouble running our businesses, and, for that matter, our government, if so-called grownups weren't so busy drawing lines in the sand, and spent most of their time trying to figure out how to expand common ground instead. Leave the "nyah nyah" at the nursery school where it belongs.