Inconsistent statements interpreted as dishonesty/hostility?

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Now I remember. All the stress, anxiety, utterly-down-in-the-dump feeling of weight upon your mind that is known as Going To Work®

I found that quite apart from the utter tedium of doing a mind-numbing job that pays the minimum wage, in spite of my college Ed., I had all the tedium and grief of dealing with the internecine politicking, point-scoring, backstabbing, self-serving, poisonous venemous 'colleagues' and management.

One thing that never failed to amaze me was the way management manipulated people's behaviours and sentiments in such a manner as to secure gruding loyalty and the promise of reward for recreating 'the lord of the flies' in the workpalce. It suited management very well, since while everyone was busy jockeying for favour, for staying out of the baleful glare of the manager's eye, they weren't getting their heads together to overthrow their mutual nemesis.

After all that, there is the slight matter of the Customers (pipe that last word through sed with a RegExp of 's/u/un/ig' for a more apposite meanining), who seemed genuinely put out because you weren't wearing a mind-numb robotic grin on your face all day.

It was surprisng the sheer numbers of customers who came to the cheapest pub (retail outlet for the sale of liquor consumed on the premises, for the benefit of overseas readers), for miles around, expecting to be treated like Royalty.

I have been lucky to have direct managers that are straight shooters and tell me exactly how it is, at least by what they've been told. The problems I have are with upper management of the corporation, that seem to routinely pretend like they have an "open door" policy. They send out poorly-written memos (that they do not even write), full of junk words (I call it "corpspeak") and jargon, all designed for the lemmings to lap up. I see contradictions and inconsistencies in virtually everything they ever send out. They absolutely HATE being called on it, especially if it is not done privately. They even refuse to explain it. They tell me I am being unreasonable when I expect them to tell the whole truth to the employees.

There are numerous instances of this, but one in particular was when rumors were going around that we were going to close our Phoenix office. Someone asked in an open forum about it and was told that there was no truth to it and that the rumor was absurd. Turns out, they WERE negotiating to get out of the lease at that time and announced two weeks later that it would be closed within a month. When I called them on it, they informed me that they were doing the right thing by keeping that secret. I told them I didn't have a problem with them keeping a secret, which would have been easily accomplished with a "No comment" or "We cannot answer that question at this time" rather than just outright lying about it.

One other time that still irks me, a memo was sent out "by" the CEO announcing some new EVP. I did some digging and found out this guy is renowned for offshoring jobs. At the end of the memo, the CEO "said" we could ask him any questions about it. I then proceeded to ask several questions about whether this meant the company would be offshoring jobs in the near future. I was met with silence and non-answers. 3 years later, we have offshored over 5,000 jobs all announced internally by memos from this new EVP.

These management types seem to totally operate in the dark, trying to pull covert ops and run disinformation campagins against the employees below them. They hide behind the "we are doing everything we are legally required to do" cover, as if merely being "legal" means it is the ethical thing to do. I don't define my ethics merely by what is legal and illegal. To me, that is resorting to the lowest standard available and not something I wold proudly champion.

As you can probably tell from my rant, I think of all this as completely intentional. It seems like harder work to lie and distort the truth than to simply be honest and open. I wish I knew if they were all lacking these values when they were hired, or if they were trained to lose these values. I truly despise the "It's not personal, it's just business" sort of excuse for things as well. You may not think it is personal for you to send out memos and layoff a few thousand employees, but I guarantee you that it is very personal for the folks who don't know if they will be able to pay their bills next month while you rake in a higher bonus for sending jobs to India...which oddly makes it personal for you, as well...just a bit more positive going from $450k/year to $550k/year, while you knocked people from $30k/year to $0k/year.