Define "Team Player" for me

I've noticed something. A long, long time ago I used to work a regular W-2 job. My bosses would, regularly, say "Max. You are not a team player." Yet when members of my team were questioned, they always seemed to like me. Of course, there is always the potential for a mass-conspiracy but, about a year after this trend started, I came to a better conclusion.

Let's step back a bit before we go forward. It seems like vacuous people have some sort of mechanism for propagating invalid definitions. You might think "language," and, of course, you would be right, but I mean something more specific. The same way that flocks of birds seem to all turn at once, simple-minded individuals all adopt a piece of jargon at once.

A result of this epiphany was an effort on my part to start separating the English language out by dialect. You have "West Coast," "East Coast," "Midwest," "Southern," and "Idiot." Oddly, the last two are not very strongly correlated. I think the reason might be that the smartest person in the South is still several rungs on the evolutionary ladder below an ordinary idiot.

A few months after I started treating morons as though they spoke their own language, I discovered what they mean when they say "team player." It has nothing to do with your ability to work as part of a team. It's all about your ability to kiss their ass. When your manager says that you are not a "team player," he or she actually means that you are not "obsequious and blindly obedient to me."

In other words: they are saying "God damn it! Respect my authori-tay!"