Every office has one, some offices have a few, but in my experience this humble little industry of ours has a higher concentration of the “Office Martyr” than any other work sector in Australia.
I define an Office Martyr to be the following:
• A person who consistently works overtime in order to appear ‘hard working’ rather than for their clients benefit;
• A person who subconsciously craves being overworked in order to heighten their own sense of self importance;
• A person who enjoys constantly broadcasting their work dissatisfaction despite never taking any action to change it.
Now I am aware that media has an abundance of hard working individuals, slaving tirelessly for their clients and rarely being renumerated accordingly for their efforts. I’m not talking about these beautiful people. I’m talking about the ones that always seem to have so much more work than the rest of us, despite the size of their client base.
They can be identified using simple mathematics: find the common denominator. If a person continues to be "hard done by" despite changing clients, despite changing groups and despite changing companies, then they are 100% suffering from Office Martyrdom. This is a condition that is now a bigger threat to the Australian way of life than Swine Flu ever was.
It’s a vicious cycle and extremely difficult to break once it has been initiated: Step one – Martyr panders to an unrealistic client request; Step two – As a result workloads increase; Step three – Client then continues to make ridiculous demands because they have previously been allowed to.
But let’s not blame the clients. Why wouldn’t they get as much out of their agency as they believe they can. And let’s not blame Facebook, Twitter or Messenger for providing opportunities of distraction. Instead, let’s blame the Martyrs themselves and their bosses for allowing procrastination and inefficiencies to dictate their day to day work output. And let’s blame each other for nodding politely whenever we are being subjected to another whinging session at the pub, instead of standing up and stating the bleeding obvious – If you aren’t enjoying your job, please do yourself and the company a favour and try something else.
Because the real problem with this disease is not its carriers, rather its infectious nature. When a young, impressionable person has the horrible fortune of starting in media under one of these martyrs, they are unavoidably ingratiated with a similar state of mind. And through no fault of their own, have now entered the cycle and been birthed as a next generation martyr.
Which brings me to my point, this is a warning to all the young people who have just entered this industry, wide eyed and bushy tailed. If you ever feel the urge to change your Facebook status to something along the lines of "Working late AGAIN", don’t do it.
Instead, get off Facebook, start working harder instead of longer and ask yourself, Am I still in the office because I have work that must be done tonight? Or am I still here so I can tell everyone how hard I work?