Pouting Your Way to the Top

I'm going to re-imagine my work-life in the context of professional football player Antonio Brown's career.

Upon graduation, I am offered employment with employer A. I work hard and establish myself as a leader in my field.

By my third year with the company, I begin to exhibit an exaggerated sense of my importance. In a dispute over office supplies, I yell “Don't you know who I am? I don't need office supply requisitions! I am this company!”

Prior to the office Christmas party, I taunt visiting sales reps from another company and am forbidden from attending the year-end gala.

As my status within the company grows, I begin to flaunt my position by regularly showing up late for meetings, seminars, and the like--if I show up at all. I dare my superiors to call me on it.

Near the end of my seventh year with the company, I feel unappreciated. 

I act out. In defiance of established business protocol, I belch loudly at a business dinner where we are in the midst of sensitive negotiations with a new client.

After being reprimanded privately by my boss following the dinner, I post our meeting on You Tube. He is heard complaining about our new client and the deal falls apart. He is then made to apologize by our company's CEO.

One month later, I am made the highest-paid person ever with my job title.

But I still feel unappreciated. Everyone doesn't love me. The company doesn't act on my suggestions. One particular co-worker calls me out on my deficiencies—as if I had any. Did I mention I feel unappreciated?

This mounting disrespect eats away at me until I confront the brazen co-worker. His superiors feel I am out of line and want me punished. I take the next several days off.

When I return, I am told I have been suspended.

I take to my Linkedin account and announce that my time with employer A has clearly come to an end. I wait for competing offers to roll in.

While the industry-leaders I crave are mostly silent, an offer from an older firm in the midst of a rebuild intrigues me. But I need to know they are committed to my success, first.

Everything is going swimmingly until I am told I need to forego my beloved BlackBerry, per company policy. I refuse. I try repeatedly to sneak it into meetings, only to be caught and reprimanded in a series of escalating meetings.

I contact a a tech-wizard who retrofits my BlackBerry's circuitry into a shell made by my new employer's approved manufacturer. It doesn't work. I storm out of the building, outraged. Who were they to say what kind of phone I could—and couldn't—use?

I need to get out of town and think. Employer B is cramping my style. How did they think I would function without my phone? It's like chopping off the hands of a concert pianist and telling him to perform with someone else's.

I take a few months and clear my head in Tahiti.

During a scuba-diving trip, I am bitten on the hand by a gold-crowned Antfish. It doesn't bother me until I return to the elevation at which employer B's headquarters rests. My hand soon begins to throb uncontrollably, causing severe, debilitating pain.

It makes using a phone—Blackberry or not—impossible.

Even after doctors stabilize the hand, the issue of my phone remains. Employer B is increasingly concerned whether I will ever work for them.

Just as I am beginning to reconcile myself to the idea of working for them, my CEO goes all hard ass on me. He issues an emergency performance review that threatens not only my employment with the company, but reveals several financial penalties that would kick-in if I don't begin work immediately.

I post his threatening review on Linkedin for all the world to see. What's more, I also threaten to knock the crap out of him. Who does he think he's screwing with, anyway?

He threatens to fire me. By this point, I couldn't care less. This is clearly a backwards organization that prizes unthinking obedience over enlightened individualism. I certainly don't need them as much as they need me.

I prepare to take my lumps and am in the midst of updating my resume when the phone rings. It is my department manager.

“Listen, bro. Can't we just sweep all this shit aside and just go to work? I don't even know what the fuck's happening, man. I just want to get down to business.”

His naked, heartfelt appeal catches me off-guard. “That's all I ever wanted” I sob into the phone.

A hasty reunion is arranged and I report to work. I issue a tear-stained apology to my co-workers for my disruptive behavior.

But afterwards, I become aware that nothing has really changed. This is still a second-rate outfit that won't let me use my BlackBerry.

I post my letter of resignation on FaceBook. I am done.

Then I get a job offer from Final Solutions, the industry-leader I should have been with from the start.

There's a lesson here somewhere. I'm just not sure it's one anyone should learn.

Ray Guy

Hearty, neon-lit, back-slapping congratulations to newly-minted Hall of Famer Ray Guy. He's the first player admitted to the Football Hall of Fame as a punter, and it's an honor as deserved as it is overdue.

I'm mystified why it took fifty-plus years for the Hall of Fame to recognize a punter. It's ludicrous that the National Football League would establish the position and then ignore those who excelled at it.

If you've ever been a football fan and watched the game, the notion that kickers and the units they perform on (called special teams) are inconsequential is ignorant. I've forgotten how many times I saw momentum shift after a well-placed punt pinned the opposition behind its ten-yard line and saved a stalled offense's bacon.

It's a game-changer in the same sense that an interception, a fumble recovery or even a touchdown is. And Ray Guy changed a lot of games.

Don't think a punter or special teams are important? Ask the coach of the team that struggles in those areas. None other than Hall of Fame coach John Madden said Ray Guy was often their “best defensive player—by far.”

It's no coincidence that the Chicago Bears 2013 defensive woes occurred after losing special teams coach Dave Toub. Under his tutelage, the unit was regularly one of the NFL's best, and masked many weaknesses.

But this is about Ray Guy, not the Chicago Bears.

Knowing the worst outcome of a failed drive was a Ray Guy punt left the Raiders offense free to operate wide-open, in the same sense that a basketball guard can gamble on defense when he knows there's a powerful, shot-blocking center behind him.

On a team as dominant as the nineteen-seventies Oakland Raiders were, that was not insignificant.

Now that the Football Hall of Fame has finally addressed its arrogant and exclusionary history of denying punters (and while I'm at it—place kickers) admittance, here's hoping it can look back and give those who contributed to the game it celebrates their rightful due.