The Internet is outraged by the jury’s verdict of not guilty in the Casey Anthony trial. It is a horrific thought that a mother could murder her child, then get away with it. The lying, conniving little tramp got away with murder, the innumerable comments say in outrage. She gets away with murder and Caylee’s death goes unpunished. Justice isn’t served, and it’s a sad, mad day.
Everyone is outraged, but for the wrong reasons. The investigation into the disappearance and death of the little girl came up empty of hard evidence. What evidence they did have did not point to her mother as the one that caused her death. There was no motive, and there was no story of what transpired that ended with the death of Caylee Anthony. That the state was allowed to go to trial with the scant forensic evidence and circumstantial witness testimony was pure folly.
And, it was sloppy, crappy work. In fact, the entire case was handled so badly by the state’s prosecution that they should all be fired. The case presented could only result in not guilty because reasonable doubt was there every step of the way. But, will they be fired?
I doubt it. I’m sorry to say that this sort of job performance, or lack of it, seems to be pretty acceptable. Put bluntly, job performance sucks. I see it everywhere from hospitals to government offices to Walmart to car service centers to schools. A mistake is made and it’s “oh well, sorry for ya.”
All you need to do is smile at the right time, and your job is secure. So why bother doing a good job? Hell, why bother working at all? You’re covered. Those few too busy busting their asses to make up for the fact that you do nothing for your paycheck means that they don’t have the time to suck up to the bosses. They certainly don’t have the time to go running to the bosses to tattle-tale on you, so yeah, you’re safe. Keep on, slacker. Your job is safe.
When I sign on the dotted line to do a job, I do that job. Period. I am paid to work, and work is what I do. That’s the agreement. When I am on the clock, I work; and when I’m on the clock, work is the only thing I do. I don’t gab. I don’t play on my cell phone for hours on end. I don’t shove my work off onto someone else. I do what I am paid to do, to the best of my ability, all day, every day. I don’t have it in me to do anything but work for my paycheck.
Those prosecutors had the job of proving beyond a reasonable doubt that a mother killed her child. What they produced as evidence was only the things they found that showed the mother was a less-than-model person, a liar, that, considering how terrible a person she was, must have killed her daughter. Is that a good job? No. In a court of law, the only choice the jury had was the one they made: not guilty.
When you take your car in to be repaired, you expect the car to run when you pay the man and go to drive off on your merry way. You expect the tax collector to bill you for taxes you actually owe, nothing more, nothing less. You expect the person in payroll to cut your paycheck for the correct amount of hours you worked. You expect your child’s teacher to actually teach your child. You expect the nurses and doctors to actually treat your illnesses and injuries when you pay them a visit. And, when you strap your kids into your car, you expect that every person that had a hand in making that car did their job – your life is in their hands.
Yes, you should be mad over the Casey Anthony verdict. You should be mad as hell. You should be mad as hell at how much we have allowed sloppy, crappy work to become the accepted norm.
So, what kind of work do you do? If you don’t do your best, if you don’t work for what you are paid to do, then you are choosing the other way, not the right way. It’s that simple.
