Current mood:	contemplative
Current music:	Puny Human - Kill You in the Face

Shooting Stars
The company where I work sends out a monthly email with a bunch of "news" about what's going on at a higher level than where we mere peons work. It's an attempt by our corporate overlords to try to make us cogs feel "included". One of the features of this email is something they call Shooting Stars. These are people at my level who have done things which have been noticed by those higher in the food chain. I've never been a shooting star myself. Frankly, I don't put all that much effort into work most of the time.



One thing that has always annoyed/intrigued me about the term shooting star is that it implies a brief brightness followed by burning out. I'd always thought that something like "rising star" would be a far more positive image. In many ways, though, shooting star is an image probably much closer to reality than rising star. In order to be recognized as a shooting star, hard work at a very high level on important projects is required. Very few people can sustain the type of work required, 70-80 hour weeks, phone calls at all hours, etc. for very long. Most people burn out and leave to work elsewhere. Part of this is because of the current lack of rewards for hard work. The most common "reward" is the beloved promotion without a raise. So you get a new title and usually more responsibility and work, but no commensurate increase in pay. My, that does sound wonderful doesn't it?

But as I was sitting in the bathtub contemplating my navel, for some reason I started thinking about the whole shooting star thing and a slightly more subtle interperetation came to mind. What is a shooting star, really? It's a piece of space debris which has entered the earth's atmosphere and is burning up due to friction. A shooting star is not a star at all and has no internal fire to light up the sky, we only see them because they have come into contact with our little corner of the universe. So on the more metaphorical level, the so-called "Shooting Stars" are not really valuable sources of heat and light but are mere garbage which shine due to contact with the beloved corporation. And only briefly at that. Now that's a pleasant thought.

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