Seeing Irony Everywhere

I suspect that this won't work for anyone but me, and yet one has to try...

I had an experience earlier this week that struck me as ironic. With it being Performance Review Season, co-workers - and your Humble Blogger, as well - have been getting their year-end appraisals and reacting accordingly. As such, I've had two people tell me that they're now looking for work elsewhere (which could just be talk, for all I know), and another pair who indicated that they're considering it as a result of the review process (again, I've no way to know how serious they are). All of which is, I have to say, about par for the course on how these things normally run. What's intended to be a positive, motivating experience sometimes has the exact opposite effect, and a few become very disenchanted. However, that's not even the ironic situation at the core of this blog post.

As one person was expressing to me his strong displeasure with his review, he recounted to me several ways in which he believed that he'd performed at a level well above what he was being recognized for. Some of what he said I'd agree with, and other parts I'm more skeptical about, but that's all just my opinion. At the end of the conversation, though, he incidentally mentioned that a DVD series that I'd recommended had sounded interesting to him, and so he'd downloaded a copy of it. Anyone who knows me very well will already anticipate that talk of such things makes me very uncomfortable, because I'm not a fan of illegal (or even quasi-legal) downloading. On the contrary, I'm a big believer that creative people - musicians, writers, actors, artists, etc - deserve the right to be paid for whatever they create, and to set the pricing scheme themselves (and we, as consumers, can choose to pay or not.. but "not" here also implies "not getting the fruits of their labours"!) I've blogged about this before, and so there's no point rehashing it here.

What struck me as ironic, though, was that here was a person who routinely downloads whatever he wants to watch - rarely, if ever, putting any money into the pockets of those who produce it - and yet he was indignant that his own professional efforts weren't receiving the extra credit that he felt they deserved! In other words, the "residuals" of his employment, those benefits beyond the guaranteed things like base salary and annual bonuses, weren't being accorded to him, in much the same way that he was treating the professionals whose work he felt he should enjoy without paying for them! I didn't make this observation to him, because I figured it would go over like a lead balloon and accomplish nothing, but it certainly gave me pause.

If nothing else, this experience reinforced my belief that you really do get out of Life what you're willing to put into it. Or, put another way: what goes around, comes around!