What Matters is the Numbers

I’m really a positive sort of guy – even if the letters people write to my editor say they think I’m a grouch and a constant complainer. Hogwash! These people are simply in no position to understand the life-affirming messages between the lines of my writings. But I couldn’t possibly make them more understandable.

What they fail to understand is that I’m not a pessimist, I’m a realist. That’s why I enjoy nearly everything I encounter in daily life. Because I know it could have been a lot worse. If the Inter City Express is 30 minutes late, I’m jubilant because it could very well have been an hour late.

Or let’s look at the latest scandals like the one concerning Amazon. I mean, come on people! What do you expect from an American corporation? Do you really think their managers get up every morning with a song on their lips because they’re just overjoyed to have the chance to make people happy with the neat stuff they’re peddling? And then show their 33,000 employees worldwide how lucky they are to be safe and secure in Mother Amazon’s lap?

Dollar Signs in Their Eyes

No way! If they have a song on their lips, it was put there by the dollar signs twinkling in their eyes! Then why should I get worked up if someone tells me they treat their employees like dirt?

Or take this thing with horsemeat, for example. And the supposedly organic eggs. The people producing them aren’t rosy-cheeked butchers or farmers with weather-beaten faces. If they have those at all, they got them when they were on vacation in Florida or at the local tanning salon. These are money-grubbing businessmen who couldn’t care less who they do business with as long as the bottom line looks good!

There are folks sitting in these corporations called “key account managers.” These are the people who cultivate major customers and have to keep them happy. These people are working with fullest devotion in the tire industry today and the chocolate industry tomorrow before they go off to the textile branch. Next year, they’ll be selling beef, the year after that casket ornamentation and then they’ll become passionately dedicated to the raw milk cheese industry. They hire on wherever the pay is best. And from their first day in the new job, they talk in terms of “we” as if their great-grandfathers had founded the business.

The truth is, they couldn’t care less about the product. They’re not bakers or butchers, nor are they tailors, carpenters or weavers. They are business managers. The bottom line means everything and there’s no room for sentimentalities. That, by the way, was a subject also touched upon by Karl Marx when he talked about the “alienation of labor.” But you can’t mention that today without being labeled a social romantic.

Every couple of weeks we come back down to earth and wonder how these things could happen. How can they make such shoddy goods!? Unbelievable! I’m here to tell you, it’s not unbelievable. It’s built into the system. Meaning it’s normal.

Because I know that, nothing shocks me anymore. Under the motto “I’d just like to be wrong for once” I take in each new scandal with a gentle smile and am just happy that it wasn’t any worse because I know these guys . . .