As a bureaucrat, I am constantly looking for other people to do my work. I say this only half facetiously. Once you get into an office with a name on the door, when you have a door, a huge part of the job is to scope out, interview, hire and train a cadre of good people who will allow you as a manager to make the only two things that count: decisions and money.

So it was with great anticipation that I looked forward to meeting this guy I’ll call Gutman. He had been touted to me as the answer to a problem that I have to solve in the next couple of months. About three weeks ago, the phone rang.

“Good news,” said Niela, the woman in HR who sets up such things. “Gutman is coming in on the 22nd. He’s working his schedule around to make sure he can get here. Lives in Atlanta, you know. But excited about coming up here to talk with you.”

Good, I thought. Guy’s got a nice resume. Seems very qualified. A grown up, too, which is not all-too common these days. You’d be amazed how many guys pop out of business school covered with afterbirth and expect a seven figure deal and a corner office. This fellow has some chops, I thought. Could be the answer. A week later, the phone rang.

“A little wrinkle,” said Niela. “Gutman wants us to pay for his airfare up here. And to put him up for a night, since he won’t be able to make the round trip in one day.”

“That’s reasonable,” I said. But a little tickle announced itself in the back of my stomach. I hate that tickle. It means a part of my perception mechanism that I can’t quite control has slipped into gear. I began to very slightly dread meeting this Gutman. But I said to myself, wait a minute, isn’t that assertiveness that exact kind of thing you’re looking for in a manager? That ability to articulate his needs and get the job done to his benefit? Isn’t that precisely the quality, as obnoxious as it may sometimes be, that differentiates a leader from those who are led?

A week ago or thereabouts, the phone rang again.

“What is it, Niela,” I said.

“Gutman says that since his interview is on a Friday, and he has other appointments in New York, it will be difficult for him to get back to Atlanta before Sunday night. So he’d like us to handle his hotel for the weekend, plus the airfare, you know…” She paused.

“And?” I said. This was beginning to be interesting.

“And he wants us to pay for his wife to accompany him on the trip.”

This was fairly astounding. Was it possible that I had stumbled on a potential CEO? Who wants such people around, even in prototype?

“Cancel Gutman,” I said to Niela. And that’s what we did. This Friday, my calendar looks blessedly clear, except for a couple of benign meetings with my gang.

I still have my little problem that needs to solved, of course. I just haven’t acquired any new ones.

This young fellow shows up in my office the other day, all bright-eyed and bushy-haired. Is about to graduate from a fine and sufficiently prestigious college and is in the full flush of panic that afflicts kids these days when they actually attain the freedom they have dreamed of for so long. I guess the days when guys honked around for a couple of years after graduation are gone. Everybody’s got to get on a career track right away. I suppose that’s okay. But I do find it a little disspiriting to look at the shiny, squeaky face of some 22-year-old aspirant as they tell me, “I want to go into Marketing!” 

The truth is, great careers don’t always result just because people have hit the rails from the get-go. Bill Gates started in a garage. Howard Hughes flew planes. Musicians and physicists start young at their chosen profession, but that’s because, frankly, they probably couldn’t do anything else.  I’d like to think that a person should have some time to figure out what they want to do in life, and while they do that they should endure a succession of demeaning jobs. But I could be wrong. I can’t say that I got much out of driving that cab in Boston for a year, except for a bunch of weird stories. 

Anyhow, there’s this hopeful individual sitting in front of me and he’s looking for career advice. He majored in one of the fine arts and plans to abandon that immediately and go into a career of some kind. The question is, what? And what the hell am I supposed to tell him? Let’s look at the options:

Wherever you go, the bottom crustacean on the food chain usually has to sit around getting the lobster immediately above him a cup of coffee. I see kids sitting at desks in the hope that one day they will get to be something that means something to them.  

Here’s my view. God created youth for people to do what they wanted to do. When you get a little bit older, life closes in on you and, caught in a variety of strictures produced by our ambitions, desires and needs, we each take on responsibilities that require us to do a bunch of stuff we don’t wanna. By so doing, we get cars and kids and spouses and computer hardware (AAPL). But if we don’t blow it out for the first five or six years of our tenure as adults, we never get those years back, we crave them later, and we end up stupid and crazy, trying to grab back the amorphous dreams and feeling of freedom that we possessed all too briefly when we were 22. Enter Stan O’Neal golfing while Rome burned. And of course there’s always Eliot Spitzer.

I told the kid to go into Internet content, particularly short-form video. I figure there’s enough crazy smoke around that discipline to keep him young for a good long time. Just ask the folks who work on this site! You guys are having a ton of fun, right? 

I have this theory. It’s pretty simple. I believe that, when it comes to our jobs, we’re all like a quart of milk or a pack of sausages. Each one of those objects, and so many more of varying compositions and ages, are stamped with a date by which they must be sold or consumed. It’s their shelf life. Everything has one. For fish, it’s a couple of days. A can of corned beef hash can live a decade in a cupboard. But eventually, everything reaches the point of expiration.

So it is with jobs. Some of us are lucky. The invisible stamp on our foreheads says 2014, maybe, or “good for 32 years if kept in a cool, dry place.” But the stamp is there. And there’s nothing any of us can do about it.

For the smartest guys I’ve known… as well as the dumbest… it hasn’t made a difference. Their boss changed, either in demeanor or, you know, they got a new one entirely. The management structure was reconfigured in some fundamental way. The whole operation moved to LA. Whatever. Their time came, and they were removed from the shelf. Sometimes they were as crisp as they day they entered the market! It didn’t matter. Their date had come.

This is what I thought when I read the following letter that appeared in my inbox a little while ago from a reader in California. “My story is kinda long but here it goes,” it began.

“I have worked at my company for ten years, and I am pretty damn good at what I do. However, last May I had to take a leave of absence. When I returned, the company had hired, like a week before my return, obviously to fill my responsibilities, a new staff member. I was told that my hours would be cut to some degree because this individual would be part time.

Well, that has not been the case. My hours have continued to decrease and this individual has gotten more training and a full time position. My boss who I once kind of considered a friend, told me that it was brought to his attention that I have been “complaining” about stuff (mainly my hours), though he admitted my performance in all aspects of my work is outstanding. The issue seems to be with my character.

I was told by another staff member I am just too friendly. Too friendly? My boss told me that either I am too gregarious or maybe too quiet. I know it is hard to understand. I had a hard time trying to understand myself. But I get the feeling I am be being pushed out, or to the side. When I made several comments about the new staff member, and my years in the office and my exemplary performance in the past, it just seems to irritate my boss. Nothing that I said to him about the new employee (not that it was all bad or bad at all) was getting through or mattered. In fact I left the meeting feeling I was at fault.

It seems of recent that no matter what I do, I just cannot please him or do what is right. I have never been late to work, I support my boss in all the aspects of the company and I am always available for extra work. I feel lost. Please help.”

I’m sorry, my friend. I don’t think I can. Your boss has gone “off” you. When you come in, he wants to be not there. When you speak, your voice grates on his nerves like fingernails on the chalkboard of his mind. Stick a fork in you. You are done.

There’s this guy who used to work for me. It started by him calling me too much. Then he started dropping by just to chat. All of a sudden, his hulking frame would be in my doorway. It would take me 10 minutes to get him out of there. I had always sort of liked the guy. But now, I wasn’t sure. I found that when there was work to do, I wanted to give it to somebody else, just so I wouldn’t have to deal with Mort. Then he started to do things that really annoyed me. Appeared at cocktail parties that he shouldn’t have. Attended meetings to which he wasn’t invited. Talked too much. Picked his ear.

In the end, I didn’t have to fire Mort. He sniffed the air and ascertained that it was time to move on to a different shelf, one that rendered him as fresh and new as the day he came out of the ground and into the store.

Oh, did I mention that? As time-dated as we all may be, we are all infinitely renewable as well. So when Mort came in and told me he was leaving for something else, something good, I shook his hand with real affection and wished him the best luck in the world. He won’t really need it. He’ll do fine.

You know, Scott Fitzgerald said there were no second acts in American lives, but in business, I think, we’ve all got enough karma to go around a whole bunch of times before we ascend to nirvana, which in my case, I think, may be Maui. Until then, I’ll see you around, huh? I’ll be the one in the cool, dry place.