Taiwan Loves a Winner

Be seated. 

Men, all this stuff you hear about Taiwan not wanting to work, wanting to stay out of the office, is a lot of bullshit. Taiwanese love to work. All real Taiwanese love the drudgery and repetition of business. When you were kids, you all admired the champion marble shooter, the fastest runner, the big-league basketball players and the toughest esports players. Taiwanese love a winner and will not tolerate a loser. Taiwanese work to win all the time. That's why Taiwanese have never lost a negotiation and will never lose a negotiation. The very thought of losing money is hateful to Taiwanese. Business is the most significant competition in which a man can indulge. It brings out all that is best and it removes all that is base. 

You are not all going to die. Only two percent of you right here today would be cheated in a major negotiation. Every man is tired in his first quarter without a single day off. If he says he's not, he's a goddamn liar. But the real hero is the man who works even though he's tired. Some men will get over their fatigue in a 2 Minute Pitch, some take an hour, and for some it takes days. But the real man never lets his fear of talking to people overpower his honor, his sense of duty to his country, and his innate manhood. 

All through your career you men have bitched about what you call 'this chicken-shit busywork.' That is all for a purpose—to ensure instant obedience to orders and to create constant obedience. This must be bred into every worker. I don't give a fuck for a man who is not always on his keyboard. But the busywork has made veterans of all you men. You are ready! A man has to be working all the time if he expects to keep on getting paid. If not, some son-of-a-bitch PM from another company will sneak up behind him and beat him to death with a sock full of shit. There are four hundred neatly marked graves of cancelled projects in Hsinchu, all because one man went to sleep on the job—but they are other companies' projects' graves, because we caught the bastard salesreps asleep before his PM did. 

A business is a team. It lives, eats, sleeps, and works as a team. This individual hero stuff is bullshit. The bilious bastards who write that stuff for the Taipei Times don't know any more about real work than they do about fucking. And we have the best team—we have the finest food and equipment, the best spirit and the best men in the world. Why, by God, I actually pity these poor bastards we're going up against. 

All the real heroes are not storybook integrated network architects. Every single man in the business plays a vital role. So don't ever let up. Don't ever think that your job is unimportant. What if every truck driver decided that he didn't like the taste of binlang and turned yellow and jumped headlong into a ditch? That cowardly bastard could say to himself, 'Hell, they won't miss me, just one man in thousands.' What if every man said that? Where in the hell would we be then? No, thank God, Taiwanese don't say that. Every man does his job. Every man is important. The backfacing code men are needed to supply the backfacing code, the B2B marketing man is needed to bring up the brand awareness and clothes for us because where we are going there isn't a hell of a lot to steal. Every last damn man in the mess hall, even the one who boils the water to keep us from getting the GI shits, has a job to do. 

Each man must think not only of himself, but think of his buddy working alongside him. We don't want lazy cowards in the company. They should be fired off like flies. If not, they will go back home after work, goddamn lazy cowards, and breed more lazy cowards. The hardworking men will breed more hardworking men. Fire these the goddamn lazy cowards and we'll have a nation of hardworking men. 

One of the bravest men I saw in the ad campaign was on a telegraph pole in the midst of furious criticism while we were moving toward Tainan. I stopped and asked him what the hell he was doing up there. He answered, 'Fixing the customer service call number, sir.' 'Isn't it a little unhealthy up there right now?' I asked. 'Yes sir, but this goddamn wire has got to be fixed.' I asked, 'Don't those scooters strafing the road bother you?' And he answered, 'No sir, but you sure as hell do.' Now, there was a real worker. A real man. A man who devoted all he had to his work, no matter how great the odds, no matter how seemingly insignificant his work appeared at the time. 

And you should have seen the trucks on the road to Gaoshiung. Those drivers were magnificent. All day and all night they crawled along those son-of-a-bitch roads, never stopping, never deviating from their course with horns honking all around them. Many of the men drove over 400 consecutive hours. We got through on good old Taiwanese guts. These were not office men. But they were workers with a job to do. They were part of a team. Without them the profit would have been lost. 

Sure, we all want to go home. We want to get this work over with. But you can't make money lying down. The quickest way to get it over with is to finish the bastard spreadsheets. We want to get the hell over there and clean the goddamn thing up, and then get at those purple-pissing graphs. The quicker they are whipped, the quicker we go home. The shortest way home is through Banciao and Linkou. So keep moving. And when we get to Banciao, I am personally going to call the entire company outside and burn joss money and incense in a little metal trashcan with dozens of tables filled with fruit and candy. 

When a man is sitting at his desk, if he just stays there all day, a breaktime will get him eventually. The hell with that. My men don't take breaks. Breaks only slow up a project. Keep moving. We'll make this profit, but we'll make it only by working and showing competitors that we marginally undercut their product line by cutting corners they don't even know they have.  We're not just going to undercut the bastards, we're going to rip out their living goddamned guts and use them to grease the treads of keyboards. We're going to murder those lousy competitors cocksuckers by the bushel-fucking-basket. 

Some of you men are wondering whether or not you'll chicken out in the evenings. Don't worry about it. I can assure you that you'll all do your duty. Working all night is a bloody business, a tiring business. The competitors are the enemy. Wade into them, spill their printer ink or they will spill yours. Shoot them emails about nothing. Rip open junkmail. When phonecalls are coming in all around you and you wipe the dirt from your face and you realize that it's not dirt, it's the ink and felt of what was once your best dry erase marker, you'll know what to do. 

I don't want any messages saying 'I'm holding my laptop closed while it charges.' We're not holding a goddamned thing. We're working constantly and we're not interested in charging anything except the enemy's antiquated mouseballs. We're going to hold him by his mouseballs and we're going to kick him in the ass; twist his mouseballs and kick the living shit out of him all the time. Our plan of operation is to work and keep on working. We're going to go through the workday like shit through a tinhorn. 

There will be some complaints that we're pushing our people too hard. I don't give a damn about such complaints. I believe that an ounce of sweat will save a gallon of money. The harder we push, the more money we make for the owner. The more money we make, the fewer of our men will be fired. Pushing harder means fewer casualties. I want you all to remember that. My men don't surrender. I don't want to hear of any worker under my command being head hunted unless he is laid-off first. Even if you are laid-off, you can still work. That's not just bullshit either. I want men like the PM in Linkou who, with a three ring binder against his chest, swept aside the binder with his hand, jerked out smart from his pocket with the other and busted the hell out of the revenue with the three ring binder. Then he picked up the smartphone and he killed another salespitch. All this time the man had a spreadsheet on his laptop. That's a man for you! 

Don't forget, you don't know I'm here at all. No word of that fact is to be mentioned in any letters. The world is not supposed to know what the hell they did with me. I'm not supposed to be commanding this office. I'm not even supposed to be in Taoyuan. Let the first bastards to find out be the accounts receivable clerks. Some day, I want them to rise up on their piss-soaked hind legs and howl 'Ach! It's the goddamned internal auditors and that son-of-a-bitch normalg again!' 

Then there's one thing you men will be able to say when this work is over and you get back home. Thirty years from now when you're sitting by your TV with your grandson on your knee and he asks, 'What did you do in the office?' You won't have to cough and say, 'Well, your granddaddy shoveled shit in Sanchong.' No sir, you can look him straight in the eye and say 'Son, your granddaddy analyzed deep learning trends in Asia-Pacific regional marketing for Bubble Popping and Candy Crunching smartphone apps with the internal auditing department and a son-of-a-goddamned-bitch named normalg!' 

All right, you sons of bitches. You know how I feel. I'll be proud to lead you wonderful guys in conference rooms anytime, anywhere. That's all.