[legion]

Yes.

In college, I got a job as a college painter. I was flattered when they hired me as a manager. I was young and naive.

As a manager of a crew, I was assigned to a salesperson (a full-time employee of the painting company), and my job was to paint the houses he sold paint jobs to.

The time we were given to paint a house was determined by the dollar amount of the job. The dollar amount was literally divided by some magic number to determine the number of man-hours allowed to complete a job.

After about the third house--the third house we completed days behind schedule, it became painfully obvious that it would take a super-human effort to complete the jobs on time, or we would have to lie about how much time it took us and not get paid for the overrun.

I later found out that my salesguy had gone from the worst salesguy in the company to the best salesguy in the company that year. He had done that by under-selling his jobs. That meant that I had less time to complete the jobs than I should have.

Of course, being a naive college kid, I didn't figure this out at the time. It wouldn't have mattered anyway. It was a naive college kid against a 10-year employee of the company. I would have lost.

Nope, I was demoted from manager to painter and put on another crew. Most of my crew was fired. None of this was done with any discussion with me ahead of time.