Unwelcome Distractions Bound To Happen If We Give You A Raise

Dear employees, management here. It seems there’s been some chatter about how wages are stagnating, blah, blah. We’re nothing if not fully transparent. Hence, we’re sharing the reasons why we’ve decided, yet again, to not increase your salary. You are welcome.

• You will not stop thanking us. 
• You will forget to thank us because ‘it was about time,’ and we’ll be forced to remind you. 
• You’ll say no because you think you don’t deserve it.
• You will be happy and lose the sense of desperation that keeps you motivated.
• You’ll expect another raise next year. It’ll get awkward. 
• The money will go to your head. You’ll become rude and imperious to those around you. Most annoyingly, you’ll start using the royal we.
• You’ll start wearing better clothes than us – Armani, Versace… Old Navy. It’ll make us furious. We’ll start wearing even more expensive brands. Soon our wardrobe budget will need trimming.   
• Birds will stop flying.
• How, you ask?
• They’ll learn to drive.
• That’s right. They’ll learn to drive.
• Surely you agree, the last thing we need is more traffic.
• …
• You’ll call our bluff. 
• Because of your new sense of purpose, our profits will increase. The higher-ups will want to know why we did not give you a raise sooner. It will be rather embarrassing for us. 
• You’ll confuse us with someone who cares about your career. Speaking of confusion, remember when we couldn’t decide which Tesla to buy: the red one or the blue one? And we ended up buying both? Remember? 
• You’ll invest the additional 1.33% in an environmentally conscious start-up at a seed funding stage that would grow to become the biggest company on earth and you will become the richest person on earth – do you really want that burden? 
• You’ll get cable at home and start coming late to work because you’ll watch cable all night. 
• You’ll spend more time in the break room chatting about the TV shows you now watch. Other employees will admire your knowledge of all the storylines and you’ll make friends at work. They’ll come over to your place to watch cable, you’ll all have a great time and, who knows, maybe someone mentions forming a union. And then of course, we’ll fire all of you. 
• The payroll software will crash because the engineers who designed it didn’t understand the concept of a “pay-raise.”
• You’ll spend the money on the new iPhone, which you’ll take everywhere. One day you will drop it in the toilet in the office bathroom and clog the pipes. In less than two hours, the entire office will flood. We shall all die and it’s all your fault – you and your raise.
• You will start loving your job.
• We may feel like we did something right.

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