At Least You Can't Outsource Massage

When people ask me “How long have you been doing massage?” and find out that, at age 53, I will just be graduating from the massage program at Lourdes this month, they usually ask what I did before, and why I decided in mid-life, to change careers.

I used to be a project manager for a secondary publisher with many research-based databases as well as Web-based search engines to access this database. It was no secret that the company was trying to cut costs…all companies are, and “human” resources are particularly expensive. So we all knew that we were all looked at as being a necessary expense, a drain on the company’s profits. One day, in a meeting, we were trying to determine which of our programming managers would be able to take on a project. Someone said: “John’s area would be the logical place for it, but he doesn’t have the bandwidth.” At first I thought they were talking about computer resources, but as the topic was discussed, it became clear that the word “bandwidth” was the new buzzword for “people.”

How convenient, I thought. I could picture the next company layoff, and the announcement which would refer to a “reallocation” in “bandwidth” to some third-world country where they could pay employees a fifth of what they paid us. It seemed as though the company no longer even pretended to care about its employees. That certainly wasn’t the only reason I decided, after 23 years with that company, to quit, but it does symbolize what I think is the ongoing devaluation of the human factor in today’s competitive business world.

When someone asks me why I ditched a corporate career to do massage, I sometimes go on and on about how satisfying the human contact is, or what a blessing it is to be entering a field where the primary purpose is to make people feel better. Other times, I give the short answer, “Well, at least you can’t outsource massage…”