Merits versus the Good Boys Club

"When was the last time, you ever saw the sunrise?" Today, it's an orange glow type, filled with warmth of color, thank whom ever the creator was for color, thanks to Ma & Dad for eyes to see it with, and a mind filled with appreciation of all the ups that more than balance the downs.

When I was hired at my prior company it was simply to do one function return authorizations, it turned into so many multiple functions within six months, if I hadn't lived through it previously I would have escaped, but sometime a person thrives on a chaotic work environment, and chaos could have been their logo.
They had attempted and failed at getting one customer up and running via EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) it was 1998, and they'd been at this for 6 months with  one of my friends who had actually landed me my interview there, hired for the RGA's and some inside sales, they thrust this new problem at me and said they'd decided I should try a whack at it, so I sat down to read and be shown where they'd gotten to so far.
What a journey, first I got Ace Hardware up and running, then the Do It Best Stores, piloting this EDI = receiving orders electronically, sending advance shipping notices, and shipping acknowledgements when the product had left our facilities, and invoicing them on this system simply to appease the customer, we had our own antique invoicing system in place internally that tied into all of our other accounting aspects and books, so always running dual systems a company decision that created twice as much work and manpower needed always doing everything twice, the sales side handle the EDI, the Accounting side handle the internal world that would get all of their profit and loss reports compiled eventually.
I also became more responsible for making sure customers with a priority of rank in dollar amount shipped sooner and complete, whereby others went as partial shipments and to juggle the chaos that might come out of product availability.
I became involved in shipping more due to Home Depot Stores and massive quantities of bills of lading that needed to be written with each new batch of EDI orders received, these bills of lading needed to be manually written as no computer program purchased by the company to date could comply with it, so eventually I ate, slept, and whatever....my company.
Massive Excel reports were needed on all of these shipments I did them from home at 4am in the morning, and emailed them back to any parties wanting to review them.
The machines came in from Italy in large vessel quantities, as did our pumps which were used on generators built by different companies, I took over the reports for Italy as well, and controlled conference calls there weekly to establish what was shipping, what wasn't due to parts missing or lack of production capacities, and so the job just grew and grew, to the point of running out back bills of lading in hand, and helping with the paperwork as pallet by pallet of materials were loaded.
After 5 years they brought in a new CEO, and he brought in one of his ex-laid off co-workers surprise style to become my new manager, he brought in another man to analyze all segments of the company...a problem solver also from his old laid off company, "a good boys club" is how Sunshine would peg it.
I was laid off 2 months later " the company had chosen to go in a different direction". Previous to that I had reported to ONLY The President of the corporation.

And so I see other companies play their good boys club, the favor some and it is usually someone who doesn't try to do a good job, it is usually a yes man that gets favored over a hard working ethical man, which has always amazed me, it can be the rehiring of old buddies, the guys that always said "yes" to protect their own butts, but it usually won't be the straight shooter, the ethical one who always does a good job, who always anticipate and corrects the situations, for some reason those truly qualified and caring people will be replaced by the "Good Boys Club".