The 'Out' of Virtually Blocking People Glorifies Mediocrity and Weakness

If you are over 45, join me for a generational rant free of politics but full of life knowledge (I think)

Photo by Piotr Cichosz on Unsplash

I have blocked people in the past. Here on Medium, I prefer to engage everyone, even the shitheads and haters; nonetheless, two did end up getting blocked simply because I couldn’t be bothered by their weak intellects and racist arguments.

Recently, and to my utter amazement, I was threatened with a “block” by someone I was working with. It was totally uncalled for from him and truly bizarre behavior. Spoiler alert: He is between 30 and 40, and this is how many in his age cohort deal with the world around them. 

As I sat there and tried to imagine a scenario where I would, in a professional setting, threaten to block someone virtually, I realized that there was little chance my brain could understand his really immature and weak reaction to our discussion. 

The freedom to block me, a much more experienced and confident person, was similar to the “security blanket” without which little kids struggle to sleep. Knowing he could “block” created for him a false sense of confidence — he could be as dictatorial as he wanted (with his “Do as I say or else” approach) — and he also provided for him a “virtual safe room” where he could cower and hide from any sort of conflict (which, at that moment, we really weren’t having). 

Yet another Russian company

I recently unchained myself from a Moscow-based project and wrote an article about how the chaos in the company reminded me of the way the Russian military is run. By then, though, I had gotten myself involved in another Russian project with a former colleague, who I liked — and still do, despite realizing he has gotten a little full of himself as he careens through his 30s. 

I agreed that I would help him draw some attention to his company, which I had seen making awkward efforts on LinkedIn. After nearly three months — and being paid for only two — I decided I had had enough of the dysfunctionality of working with a company that was yet again “100 percent Russian.” 

What does “100 percent Russian” mean? It means that everything changes every week. Grand pronouncements are made, and new strategies are launched on Monday, and by the following Monday, they are all abandoned and declared ineffective. Professionals are accused of having not done their work, and the “boss/CEO/owner/etc.,” who maybe read a smart article over the weekend or spoke to someone running their own company, launches yet another — and MUCH BETTER — strategy: One baby step forward, three leaps backward, folks. 

There is an inherent inability among Russian companies to navigate through the doldrums of long-term strategies. It is called “metaniye” in Russian, and the American expression that best captures its essence is “running around like a chicken with its head cut off.” There is also a never-ending change in how much work is expected to be done. The most important thing is to look like you are doing things. Liking posts and dropping in the occasional comment are good, but actually producing a finished product is subconsciously discouraging.

One Monday, the boss rants “No one is doing anything!” The following Monday, for example, I was accused of creating too much work for the other employees, even though they were supposed to help me make the needed buzz and noise around the project. These employees were also simultaneously putting out messaging almost contradictory to the new approach. 

I will not complain about this guy too much and say he was a jerk. He’s not a jerk. He is who he is, and I forgot about this. 

When we worked together, he was not directly under me but parallel to me. We had some good times as we all chipped in to make our company great, and his data analytics team was proficient as hell. Eventually, however, it was slowed by his desire to micromanage his team. He created barriers to getting things done to appease his need to be a “boss.” The company had decided to exploit more of its big data and gave him too much power for his professional level. He was overcome as a result, and we all suffered. 

The same thing began to happen in his company. A lack of confidence expressed itself in never-ending arguments with the people he hired to do their work for him. The work chats became filled with either arguments or “new plans.” On some occasions, bored by the ever-changing new strategies, I would offer up a “Looks good. I think this will help.” I desired to get him to settle on one strategy and actually do something. The headless chicken was dizzying me. 

“What do you mean it looks good?? What looks good?!” Forty messages later, we would argue over God-knows-what, and I would then spend a few hours trying to figure out how to do my work. During the argument, he would tell me to leave the “marketing team,” the ones I was told I could rely on, alone because they were too busy and I was too fast.

After each one of these issues of asking me to slow down — I was too productive — he would then set up a meeting with his “head of marketing” and explain why he felt he was paying me too much. “I wasn’t doing enough because of ‘our’ bottlenecks.” 

That is what eventually happened. The bottleneck, created by him and his race to the middle, resulted in me becoming unproductive and spending hours discussing small sentences or images that were only about 5 percent of the crux of the content. Suddenly, I saw that he would soon be offering me payment by the word, and I offered to quit. I wanted my full pay for the month, an agreement we had made just a few weeks before for a period of three months, and that is when he threatened to block me. 

He paid me in full and then blocked me. 

I have never met a marketing and communications team in a Russian company that is not the supreme example of mediocrity. It is genuinely a fantastic phenomenon. I am seeing something similar in Portugal, and I believe that it has to do with societies that were once under fascist and communist-socialist regimes like Portugal and Russia both used to be. 

In Russian companies, there is always an understanding of how to do great marketing. Still, the average Russian struggles to overcome their lack of confidence in their decisions, and they get bored almost immediately with the daily grind of unraveling complex creative solutions.

I accomplished nothing of what I promised this guy when I joined his team in early September because of the constant back and forth discussing new strategies and being told to “slow down.” Had we done what I suggested over the past ten weeks, we might have moved from 0 to 1. Instead, his whole messaging program is back to zero.