Grats on the promotions bros. I had dinner a couple weeks ago with a friend of mine who's a manager at a printing company. He said a lot of their employees are shockingly inept, as in being just good enough not to get fired but bad enough to weep for humanity. Showing any extra effort, initiative - even knowing how to use computers - are enough to stand out. Crazy.
Most of the people that report to me do the threadbare minimum and sometimes not even that. I can understand it, if you have no real ambition whatsoever and just want a simple 9 to 5, it's the best way to go. Good luck getting anything outside of a cost of living raise or not being on the chopping block if there is ever a wave of layoffs. With the way my company works, doing the bare minimum means that they're fucking themselves out of thousands of dollars of bonus money too each year. Oh well.
Yup. I think a lot of young people settle for mediocrity. Just get by, buy whatever stuff you like (smart phones, kindle, whatever) and live life. Meh. I'm not going to act like I work super hard, but I worked hard enough last year to get a promotion.
Same with when I did the Census. There were tons of people quite content to sit around doing not much of anything and get paid, and the government made it easy for us to waste time by giving some shitty directives; our first assignment was to work on a rather large neighborhood, but when we got there it was a fucking lake lmao. So we went there, saw there were no houses, drove around for a bit, went to Wendy's to eat, then went back to HQ and put in our hours. But when we actually had work to do I did my job, and managed to get promoted there as well.