I had no idea how to respond.
At 22, I didn’t have the experience or skills even to know what to think, let alone what to say.
So I just mumbled, “Uh, what?” with a blinking stare on my face.
“I’m not going to teach you how to do what I do. You can tell Charlie that. This is what I do. If I teach you, then what am I going to do? They’ll just lay me off.”
So I walked away.
I didn’t know what to do. I was too afraid to tell Charlie, so later that day, I mentioned it to my friend Jim. He said, “Yeah, I thought that might happen. Don’t worry, you and I will figure it out together.”
So that’s what we did, and it only took about a day of poking around and figuring stuff out.
Sure enough, the company had some layoffs a year later, and Bill was on that list. The very thing he was trying to avoid became a reality, and it had little to do with his skill set or how good he was at his job.
Professional organizations need grease, not roadblocks. True for humans and true for robots.
