A GENERATION OF TWEEDS

By Greg Evans

The first time I learned we were in trouble as a people, was when I was judged on the merit of the education for which I long ago forgot.

I am sick and tired of elitism and the beast it stands for, like the throbbing itch of a fat mosquito bite under the thigh and every time you put original strength Benadryl itch stopping cream on it to sooth the agony the shorts wipe it away before it has a chance to work. At every turn, in every facet of life it seems I have come in contact with the toffee-nosed personality that makes me want to reach for the hard object for which to bludgeon the louse. Early on in my post collegiate years of struggling in the throngs of minimum wage misery in a coffee shop with a fixed customer friendly smile and quivering eyes, I would regularly receive customers in my mid-town manhattan location who acted as if they just got out of the premier of the latest Hollywood blockbuster film. Dressed to the nines with the sunglasses on even though it was getting dark out, ten pounds of makeup on both the guys and girls, reeking of cologne and perfume they would put on their elitist attitude as if the world owed them recognition without having to earn it. They were stars in their own heads, walking around as if everyone in the place was staring at them, wondering which celebrity they were when they were nothing but two-bit schmucks probably living in some studio flat in Astoria. Everyday after their job in some deadbeat salon or street marketing $9.00/hr job they'd get all dolled up and head into the glitz of Manhattan and wait to be discovered. It was a sad show and we all could see right through the act.'

Then you have to deal with the human resource associates who take themselves ultra serious, getting off on the rejection of candidates who could run circles around them in the real world. The GPA phenomena of the 21st century is the pit in the owl's stomach. The facade that some people out there are somehow exclusive because they were able to memorize more journal entries than another person and therefore are the only ones worthy of the hallowed halls of Ernst & Young or Deloitte. It is a manic practice that has left many companies having to deal with lazy halfwits with the work ethic of a clam and regular instances of fraud and scandalous behavior because they cared solely about the GPA and didn't bother to check up on the person's actual working habits and behaviors. Is it any wonder the world is run by B and C students. Do you think I just made that up, then you are sorely mistaken. The way the world works people, is that A students teach the B student who work for the C students. That is an actual quote by I believe a psychologist from somewhere in the past. The problems we have today in the world stem from the fact that too much weight is given to academics and not enough weight is judged on who the person actually is. In the late 1960's PricewaterhouseCoopers in New York City realized that the ivy league students were performing as well as they had hoped. They were regularly disappointed by the ivy leaguers and the upper 5% of the class who they were hiring. In an experiment they began hiring non-ivy league students who were average students and they were amazed to learn that they did the better work, stayed with the company and worked their way up and were more productive. The other A students and Ivy league kids had poor work habits and elitist attitudes and didn't feel like some of the work assigned to them was worthy of their high-level degree. That my friends is not fiction but cold hard facts. Whether or not PwC still follows that practice I don't know, but for a while it worked and while it did there is no record of unethical behavior going on. Arthur Andersen, known to hire only the top of the class from the top schools ran into terrible ethical problems primarily, I believe, out of the Atlanta office and that company was forced to close its doors after the Enron scandal. Though you may accuse me of speaking shallowly toward academia don't forget that I have two degrees from great institutions one ranked in the top five in the world and I work 40 hours a week with a great company, but it is the principle that bothers me and I think it is wrecking the country which each year these unfaithful practices continue. The whole thing in my opinion stems from laziness in the corporate structure and an elitist aura that needs to be eliminated from society because it has no place. I have used the accounting field to talk about because I spoke recently to a friend who traveled up to Chicago in the hopes of landing an accounting job with a CPA firm. He holds a bachlor's degree with a 3.9 GPA and a Master's in Accounting with a 3.4 GPA. During the interview he was asked, "of course" what his graduate school GPA was and he said 3.4. The hiring manager said, "Sorry we only hire candidates with 3.5 or higher." And there my fellow cynics you have the answer to much of the problems with contemporary America and the reasons why the future of corporate America is doomed. They didn't care about his past work ethic and the fact that he went through school while raising two children while his wife was working. That hiring manager should be taken to a local park and put into stocks for 8 hours. It all has become a butchering like I've never seen before. Chicago needs George S. Patton to whip it into shape. Had Albert Einstein and Isaac Newton, two notoriously poor academic students ever applied to entry-level accounting work at that sham of a CPA firm they too would have been rejected. The list of great minds who had fretted and fought their way to the top of their fields despite waves of mediocrity desperatly trying to stymie their production and progress throughout the entire journey. It is an inevitability that anyone must face when recognizing that for which they are intensely passionate and working toward a career in that endeavor.

The answer to the problem is to stay focused and disciplined and never, never give in to the hacks and deny the world the gifts you have to offer. It is documented by one of his ex-wives that Ernest Hemingway, early on in his desire to become an established novelist used to sit before his typewriter sobbing with a stack of rejection letters in his lap wondering if he was ever going to make it as a writer. The hacks just didn't think he was good enough and today his work is Canonized. The mediocre minds, the elitists will never stop attempting to belittle the great minds. It is a peculiar conundrum. Walt Disney was told once by an editor of a newspaper where he worked that he was "not creative enough to ever make it in the newspaper industry." Want more...? I can go all night.