Some leverage, please.

Time for another war story. It's a short one.

It was about three years ago when I joined a company as an in-house web developer. I was reporting to a younger guy, who was my manager. The CEO invited us out for lunch, and we all engaged in some small talk. The CEO asked if we were married, with kids. My manager was. I wasn't, and informed him as such.

Perhaps I was being oversensitive, but I detected a certain change in the CEO's expression, and sensed that he was displeased with what he heard. This brought to mind some dialogue I had heard once, in the movie Hercules, starring the electrifying one, Dwayne Johnson.

Hercules: I wanted nothing!
King Eurystheus: Precisely! Your sin, Hercules, was that you had no ambition! I can deal with an ambitious man! He can be bought! But a man who wants nothing has no price!

In here, King Eurystheus explains to a chained Hercules why he murdered his family and set him up for those murders.  

A man who wants nothing has no price.

I had no wife, no kids. Accountable to no one but myself. The fact that I was willing to take orders from someone younger and less experienced, showed that I had no ambition to speak of. None that lay in his company, anyway. I could not be bought, not with the currency he had. And since I could not be bought, I could not be controlled. This made me a far more risky prospect than my manager.

Can't be strung along.

My CEO's mental gears were probably busy turning, calculating just how far I could be counted on. Later on, the relationship between the CEO and I deteriorated somewhat. There were other factors involved, but this was probably the first crack.

Many bosses want a certain amount of leverage over their employees. For some, it's friendship. For others, it's money. Or the promise of a promotion. This makes employees easier to motivate, or more cynically, to manipulate. I call this the Chinese Towkay Syndrome. They pay you, and therefore they want to own you.

There was nothing this particular boss could do to make me stay on if I decided I was tired of his crap, nothing he could do to squeeze that last ounce of productivity from my old bones. To some extent, people become bosses because they like being in control. I was that wild card. That one random variable.

The Wild Card.

I understood this principle. And my concession to this was, from then on, whenever questions of this nature were asked, I would take great pains to mention that I am currently in debt servicing a huge thirty-year loan for my apartment's mortgage. That should be leverage enough for the average boss. It changes nothing - if I want to leave, I'm confident enough in my ability to land another job. But perception is everything, and if this gives my employers the impression that I can be controlled, I'm more than willing to play along.

It's been three years. But better late than lever. (hur hur)
T___T