Admired or Punked?

When I was working for a designer, I was always put on the front line to deal with contractors, vendors, and millwork shops. When the work was delayed or the craftsmanship was not met, I was always the one confronted those people. I always wondered why everytime when bad news happened at the job site, my boss was always angry at the office but all over the sudden became a nice person at the job site, I asked "why were you so angry with the contractor at the office but when you saw him at the job site, you always acted so nice?" My boss said " because I want you to be in charge, you are the project manager, so I want to give you the full responsibility, and I don't want to step on your toes." Initially, I was thinking " wow! I must have done great work so my boss trusted me to handle things all by myself." Later on when I went out on my own and I bumped into the contractor I used to work with, I was asking how is business, he replied, great, then I was joking with him "any job for me?" he said " Na...no one dares to work with you.." I finally woke up. My boss made me piss off all of those contractors, vendors, millwork shops...etc to make me play the black cop in order to cut off my future referal opportunities from those people if I ever go out on my own. That is scary.

Selective Continuing Education Classes

Some interior design firms generously paid for their employees to attend CE classes, but usually those classes are selective, I remember my former employer told me to attend some classes, that classes came with 3 parts, but I was only notified on the 2nd and 3rd part of classes but not the 1st one, so I was wondering why, when I went to the 3rd part of class, the class provider mistakenly handed out the handouts for the 1st part of class, and I quickly read through the handouts and found the 1st class was about teaching interior designers how to run their own interior design firms, then I finally understood why my employer didn't want me to go to the 1st part of class.

Nature Selection in design field

I always thought this economy downturn will wipe out those companies that have bad reputation, well, what I see is many of those good companies are gone and bad ones still there, now I know why. There is a metal shop I used to work with, the owner was a very skilled metal smith who was extremely artistic and skilled, but the reality is that creative and artistic people usually are not business savvy, their artist mind just can't compete with their competitors who are more business minded but not skilled or artistic. So, now, those true craftsmen are all gone but those un-skilled, non creative businessmen all survived. That is freaking sad.