One Schnook

By now, you may have seen the video that's showing up on business-related blogs, and of course, YouTube. The one where the earnest Bank of America employee sings an anguished, bastardized version of U2's "One" as a paean to the merger of Bank of America and MBNA:

One bank...one card...one name that's known all over the world.
One heart, filled with one spirit...and we've got to share it...

We'll live out our values, while the competition crawls...

A lot of the commenting that's attached to this video is along the lines of "is this for real?" You know what? I'm guessing it is for real, and painfully so. Which is why I'm not incorporating the video here. I am cringing for this guy, who I'm guessing is completely mortified and just trying to get beyond a situation in which he's now being subject to WORLD WIDE RIDICULE.

I'm no Mother Teresa, and I am so not above laughing at this video. In fact, I howled when I played it and immediately sent off a link to a couple of friends. But at that point, the nice parochial school girl clicked in and I started to worry about the guy in the video.

Okay, this might, in fact, be a put on. In which case, it's brilliant.

Or the guy might be BOA's biggest suck-up toady, in which case, maybe he deserves being outed in this way. (It's certainly hard to imagine that this guy's the biggest toady in an enterprise as large as BOA.)

But my guess is that's he's just an earnest middle manager kind of guy, who wants to be loyal and upbeat, positive about his company. In his heart of hearts, he's a company guy, while in his mind of minds, he knows that he's just a number on a badge, a box on an org chart, and that - like everyone else - he's expendable. And here we have BOA and MBNA merging, and we all know that merger math is not fuzzy at all. In order to get it to work - to make 2 + 2 = 5 - you always have to subtract. So let's be loyal and earnest and upbeat. This is positive. This is great. This is worthy of my singing my heart out in front of my colleagues. This is pro Bono. This is pro bono.

Here's one big downside of the always on, always there economy: there's no escaping from something like this, no getting away, no living it down. I remember after Elvis died, one of his buddies saying, "he will always remain a living legend." Well, the BOA video guy is going to remain a living legend for as long as he's living, that's for sure.

I hope he's OK (not Elvis, the BOA video guy). I hope he gets through this. I hope he has supportive family, friends, and colleagues. And I hope that whoever sent this one over the wire - no matter how innocently - has the grace and conscience to feel guilty about the damage he's done to one of his/her fellow workers.